Sunday 14 April 2019

An Empty Nest: A Summer of Stories by Sandy Day + #Giveaway


An Empty Nest: A Summer of Stories by Sandy Day
Self published in Canada on the 8th April 2019.

One of my 2019 New Release Challenge reads

How I got this book:
Received a review copy from the author

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Her kids are gone.

Her husband is gone.

She is slammed by an unexpected grief after her daughter moves out. This is why, relocating from her small messy apartment in the city sounds like a reasonable thing to do. 

But can living with her sisters at the cottage be a good idea?

You’ll love this poignant short read as it fearlessly portrays life beyond the empty nest. 

I am so thrilled that Sandy Day offered me a copy of An Empty Nest to read and review because I absolutely loved this short story collection. At just under a hundred pages, I had assumed the book would be a swift read, but actually found myself lingering over certain stories and rereading others so I came away from the collection almost with the sense of having read a whole novel, and an emotionally charged one at that. This sense might also be because of how each story fits so beautifully into the whole work.

Set across the course of a single summer, An Empty Nest depicts one woman's coming to terms with herself when there are suddenly no family members or pets to demand her time. At first angry and bereft at her abandonment, she gains perspective both from looking back into her past, and out into her present. I felt this book to be a coming-of-age story for women at a point in our lives when we are often overlooked. I loved the progression from our narrator's fraught emotional state at the beginning, to a serene tranquillity at its close. In fact reading An Empty Nest, for me, had a lot in common with a meditation. I could feel myself calming and focusing in step with our narrator. I'm not sure I have ever experienced this physical reaction in quite the same way from a book before.

Day has a sensitive and evocative turn of phrase and I felt as though every word was here for a reason. Her writing is rich with observations and memory, but never feels bloated or padded out. Yet stories of less than half a page in length are just as satisfyingly complete as those of several pages. I admit to being envious of not only the summer cabin around which many of the stories take place, but also of Day's ability to evoke this location! I think An Empty Nest is a stunning achievement. I would highly recommend it to introspective readers and women who, like me, are rapidly yet nervously heading towards that Certain Age.


And now it's time for the Giveaway!

The prize is an ebook copy of An Empty Nest which will be gifted to the winner via Smashwords.
Open Internationally until the 28th April.

(Entry is by way of the Gleam widget below. You will be asked for your email address which I will need in order to contact the winner. I will then need to tell Smashwords the winner's email address in order to send out their prize.)

An Empty Nest by Sandy Day ebook giveaway



Search Lit Flits for more:
Books by Sandy Day / Short stories / Books from Canada

Saturday 6 April 2019

Life + Love + Death by Hezron Henry #FreeBook


Life + Love + Death by Hezron Henry
Published by Tower Of Babel in June 2015.

One of my 2019 Mount TBR Challenge reads

How I got this book:
Downloaded the ebook from Smashwords

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


A compilation of 115 pages of poetry from the pen of Caribbean poet Hezron Henry. With poems laced with realism, honesty and reflection, he invites the reader into his mind as his poems depict experiences and perspectives of life intricately presented and unveiled in three acts. Act I: “The Interlude” speaks to a generation, inspiring liberation and a new perspective calling readers to be intellectually stimulated and seeks to inspire a movement of independent thinkers. Act II:“Rib Caged In/Paper Clouds” speaks of, to and through the emotion of the heart. Act III:“Conversations with my soul” is a depiction of the depth of the writer. He allows readers to explore his deepest thoughts, and navigate his inner being. He is bold, vulnerable, rational. This anthology caters to a wide variety of poetry lovers in a thought provoking expression of the cycle of life. Each segment speaks to a real audience. Poems are candidly written, yet subtly evoke sensitivity.

Life + Love + Death is the fourth of a group of poetry ebooks I downloaded via Smashwords last year. Each by a different global poet, the collections have depicted a wide range of views but frequently centring around universal themes of love, loss, and personal identity. Hezron Henry lives on the Turks and Caicos islands in the Caribbean and is also a talented visual artist (you can admire his art here).

I appreciated that Life + Love + Death is divided into three themed sections. The poems in each have been thoughtfully chosen to create a strong atmosphere together. Those of the first 'act' are powerfully motivational; the second act portrays romance and sexuality and feels the most personal; the third act takes in philosophy and perhaps most clearly shows us Henry's thoughts on life.

There are a number of references to the interchangeable terms of poet and rapper across this collection and I would have loved to experience several of the poems as an audio stream rather than through reading printed text. The work has a wonderful energy and I felt the poems had been composed to be spoken and performed. (I tried searching YouTube, but couldn't find any performance videos. Let me know if you spot any?)


Search Lit Flits for more:
Books by Hezron Henry / Poetry / Books from Turks and Caicos Islands