Sample Saturday is when I wade through the eleventy billion samples I have downloaded on my Kindle. I’m slowly chipping away and deciding whether it’s buy or bye.
Did I Ever Tell You? by Genevieve Kingston
Why I have it: one my list of books I was looking forward to last year.
Summary: Kingston’s mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer when Genevieve was three years old. Defying the odds, she lived another eight years, during which time she wrote letters to her children, marking every major milestone and birthday through age thirty. Now in her thirties three unopened letters remain: engagement, marriage, and first baby. Two decades after her passing, her mother’s efforts have created a lifelong conversation beyond the grave.
I’m thinking: Yes.
Australian Gospel by Lech Blaine
Why I have it: Saw it advertised on a billboard!
Summary: Michael and Mary Shelley are Christian fanatics who loathe their fellow Australians – especially their ‘foul language, reckless indulgence of alcohol and obsession with idiotic ball sports’. Lenore and Tom Blaine are working-class Queensland publicans raising a large family in a raucous, loving, rugby-league-obsessed home. There’s just one problem. The Blaines are foster parents to three of the Shelleys’ children, who were removed from Michael and Mary as infants. And the Shelleys are prepared to do anything to get them back. Anything.
I’m thinking: Yes.
Fi: A Memoir of My Son by Alexandra Fuller
Why I have it: Appeared on one of the 2024 ‘best of’ lists.
Summary: Summer in Wyoming and Alexandra is barely hanging on. Grieving her father and pining for her home country of Zimbabwe, reeling from a midlife breakup, freshly sober and piecing her way uncertainly through a volatile new relationship, Alexandra vows to get herself back on even keel. And then – suddenly and incomprehensibly – her son Fi, at 21 years old, dies in his sleep. Alexandra recounts the wild medicine of painstakingly grieving a child in a culture that has no instructions for it.
I’m thinking: Yes.