Thanksgiving

   I just finished a book I can't stop recommending.  But the problem is it's published by a company that only publishes e-books.  While that's good on one hand it's bad for handing it off to people I want to share it with.  And this is the first time this has happened to me!  Usually we have a choice, don't we?  We can buy the book or buy the e-book and sometimes I do either and sometimes I do both.
     I love the Thanksgiving holiday.  I love the historical story of Thanksgiving.  I put Plimouth Plantation in Plymouth, Massachusetts as one of my favorite top of the list places I've been.  I love the food, the weather, the feeling, the smells, the traditions, and that we don't have to buy any presents to enjoy the day and our people.                                     
   So, when the invite to read this book popped into my email box one day I immediately downloaded it and read it.  It didn't sit in the que like so many other books are doing.  It didn't sit on my shelf like so many books pile up.  I took to this one immediately just because of the title.  And I wasn't sorry from the first paragraph.  I can't say that very often.


    This was the most unconventional, original treatment of how to hold a story together and how to make it flow that I've read in awhile. 
      Three hundred and fifty years,  the same family, the same house, the same time of year. Unconventional because though each chapter is named for an element of a Thanksgiving meal as we would know it,  turkey,  squash, veggies, silver, plates, etc.,  these elements of the dinner are only props.  First chapter includes a turkey, but at first only incidentally.  We are with the Morley family through those years. In this house, at this table, always that table, sharing their lives.  Sometimes the ingredient for the meal is only incidentally mentioned.  But that turkey is a story carried through the family like all family stories are.  Told and retold and retold and demanded by the children we see not only how time changes customs in a family, how a family changes in dynamic, how a house is passed along through that family, how the women carry the family and each other, we see how the story of the turkey changes, as all stories do. 
    You can buy this book very inexpensively ($4.99) through any e-book source and I hope you will.  It's just a shame I can't put a copy on my real book shelf and pull it down every year with my other favorites and run my hand over the cover, smell it, and re-read it again and again...holding it as a book.  But at least it was published and I could enjoy it at all!
    Have I gushed enough?  No.  Not enough.