Mama Day and Girl on the Train

Yes, folks; I did it again.  Two books in two days.  Hooray for me.

Girl on the Train was a good, compelling page-turner.  I liked it for the multiple perspectives and the tension and suspense created by several unreliable narrators.  However, I figured out who killed Megan fairly early on.  Always look for the least likely suspect.  And I don't even read that many mysteries.

Mama Day is another thing entirely.

I am teaching this book tomorrow night, and I feel humbled at the task, as well as by the fact that my 21-year-old self would just die of joy if she knew that I was teaching this book in a women's prison.  So, okay, maybe I have made a few good choices in life after all.  But seriously -- this book is everything.  Everything.  And I can see now why it has taken me (Jesus) 17 years to re-read it.  The end hits way too close to home.  And to think that I read this book probably 2 years before I was to experience this.

"And it was the oddest feeling, as if we'd just left that morning.  My bathrobe was still in a pile on the floor, a few hairs in the sink from when you had shaved, there was even a sprinkling of coffee grounds on the kitchen counter.  Straightening it all up, I knew you had to be coming back in the evening. "

Yes.  That is exactly how it is.  My heart breaks for the girl who read this in 1999, having no idea that just 2 years later, her whole world and her whole self would break forever.  The girl who lived in their home for a year, not even moving the crumpled tissue by the now-empty left side of the bed.  The girl who is still waiting for someone to come home, 17 years later, who is buried in Burlington, Vermont.

Not sure how to teach this book.  And with all the pain and the excruciating details of my students' lives they have shared with me, I might just owe it to them to share with them what this book means to me.  But this book also tells me to just let the spirit guide me.  So if I need to do that, I will.