Some Soul to Keep by J. California Cooper

Some Soul to Keep by J. California Cooper reflects life in several long short stories that are realistic enough to feel voyeuristic while simultaneously feeling symbolic of something larger. Cooper captures the essence of life in a way that pulls the reader into the hearts and minds of her characters with unrelenting tenacity and compassion. She never shies away from the pain people can inflict on one another even as she offers a sense of hope that people can survive and grow and overcome the obstacles they face. Some Soul to Keep presents multi-dimensional characters who grab hold of one's beliefs, flips them over, and turns them inside out leaving one questioning life yet somehow feeling like one understands the world just a smidgen better than before one started reading.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Snitch in Time by Sunny Frazier

Image
Sunny Frazier always delights, and A Snitch in Time is no exception. She writes the Christy Bristol series in a way that feels lighthearted even in its darkest moments. When Bristol goes on vacation to visit her friend, Lennie, she never expects to get drafted into working for a different department doing her job. Bristol is intrigued enough by the crime at hand that her protestations seem half-hearted at times though her annoyance is very real. When she and Lennie get into a fight, she's left with nothing but the work the department expects her to do. Frazier drops the reader in the Sierra Nevada Foothills creating a sense of isolation that makes the reader cheer for Bristol to stand up to her superiors and get out of there while simultaneously wanting to her to solve the crime. When a witness contacts Bristol via phone she doesn't take her seriously at first only to discover she might have vital information. With suspicion cast in multiple directions, Bristol isn't sur
Read more

Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself by Kristin Neff, Ph.D.

Image
Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself by Kristin Neff, Ph.D. pushed my buttons... mostly in the best way. Neff offers her research, her own experiences, and her observations mixed with information from myriad disciplines ranging from spiritual to neuroscience. I had read quite a bit of what Neff offers in other places, but she pulls it together in a way that makes it easy to understand and that makes self-compassion feel accessible and attainable. Her arguments for shifting from self-esteem to self-compassion and self-appreciation were better than I expected. She includes exercises along the way to help the reader access self-compassion. Self-Compassion feels like an introductory course and left me curious about what the research has shown since its publication. Neff supports and explains her premise of the life-changing benefits of self-compassion so well that I began to re-examine my own self-compassion journey with a bit more compassion... Check back soon for
Read more

Creative Knowing: 50 Self-Reflection Questions for Women by Christina Katz

Image
I finally decided to work through Creative Knowing: 50 Self-Reflection Questions for Women by Christina Katz recently. I thought it would make for a nice daily writing exercise, since I'm editing a book right now. I didn't think of it much in terms of "self-reflection" when I started. As I worked through the questions, I had a variety of reactions. You can read about my reaction to the initial set of questions in my blog post, Favorites... Shmavorites . Some questions were easy to answer, others provoked an emotional reaction, still others made me think. Some of the questions made me smile. Others irritated me. Still others inspired me. And then there were those that felt mundane. I felt a resistance rise from time to time as I pondered answering a question. Sometimes that resistance came from my own reluctance to explore the topic. Other times it was because I found the question presumptive when I didn't see how it applied to me. Initially, I was reluctant to
Read more