Michele Wolfe's Debut Novel

Michele Wolfe’s lovely debut novel, The Three Graces, takes readers on a wonderful  journey with the three protagonists to understanding and wholeness.

Jessie, Isabel and Sara meet in a class during their senior year of college in Colorado, and quickly discover they share strange and frightening out-of-reality experiences. When the three decide to travel to California’s Central Coast and visit Hearst Castle on break, they have an extraordinary experience with a statue on the grounds – the Three Graces. These three deities – Brilliance, Joy and Bloom – guide Jessie, Isabel and Sara as they come into their own and discover their unique gifts.

The Three Graces is sure to become a great book club read. For any young woman who has struggled to understand her path, The Three Graces will show the way.

A little Lust for after Valentine's Day

My friend Diana Raab’s latest poetry collection, Lust, is a veritable cornucopia of luscious, lusty, “whoa baby!” poems that give erotica a good name. Tantalizing and sexy, this collection oozes with sensuality, love, desire, fear and regret – all the emotions that come with loving someone, figuratively and literally.

Raab has never wavered from sharing herself in her poetry and her nonfiction, but this book goes deeper, expressing in words what many of us only feel physically.

Warning: Do not leave Lust around for the cleaning folks – or your children – to find. Keep it tucked in a sacred spot in the boudoir, where you can share it with an appreciative lover.

Here's one of my favorites from the collection:

The First Time

The moment after we met

and seconds after your smile,

beside me on the old cross-country jet,

I knew that inside a dream, our bodies

would one day twist around each other.

And I would lose track of where

yours began and mine ended

and so many other things in my life,

such as my beliefs

or even what happened between us.

I would not recount anything,

not a feeling, a touch or a visual

or the voice you used

to toss me on the bed

and remove my over-the-knee boots

worn during our loving act --

All I will remember is a deep sense

of euphoria transcending every part

of my essence, every hair follicle,

missing breast and scar which makes

me what I am and the idea

and how I will never

walk down the same path again.

Review - The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

In John Green’s lovely and poignant 2012 novel, The Fault in Our Stars, (soon to be a major motion picture) two teens with cancer meet at a cancer support group. Hazel Grace Lancaster, 16, has been battling a particularly nasty thyroid and lung cancer for several years, but has been kept alive by an experimental drug. Augustus Waters, 17, is a former basketball player who is in remission after losing one of his legs to an osteosarcoma. They are introduced by mutual friend Isaac, who has already lost one eye to cancer and is about to lose his other.

Hazel and Augustus fall in love, and end up going to Amsterdam under the auspices of a Make a Wish Foundation-type organization to meet the reclusive author of a book the two of them love. The only problem is Augustus’ cancer has roared back with a vengeance, and Hazel, who thought she would be the first to die, is confronted with her feelings for Augustus in light of the fact that he will soon leave her.

Green captures all the angst of being a teenager and expertly layers on the sadness, anger and fear that accompany fighting a life-threatening disease. Hazel, Augustus and Isaac are as real as your next-door neighbor’s son or daughter, or your niece or nephew, and the reader is drawn into the heart-rending struggle all three kids experience with cancer and with death.

This is not an easy read, but it is ultimately a life-affirming one, full of all the emotions – love, sorrow, disappointment, anger – attendant to life itself. I highly recommend this book, even for those who typically would not be drawn to a young adult novel. It is well worth the read.