Friday Finds -- Mar 12, 2010

This meme is hosted by MizB at Should be reading. What great books did you hear about/discover this past week?

This has been one of my slower weeks. I found a few interesting books, but not too many as is usual with me.

My finds

The Prisoner's Wife by Asha Bandele

I read a wonderful review of this book over at Marce's Tea Time with Marce. She writes a much better review of this book than the synopsis will explain. So if you haven't heard of this book, or would like to check it out, head over there, and you'll find yourself adding this one to your shelf too. :)

The intensely moving story of a young black poet who marries a prisoner convicted of murder, this lyrical memoir attests to the redemptive power of love, even when it is found behind barbed wire and gun towers.

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Someday This Pain will be Useful to you by Peter Cameron

Stephanie @ StephTheBookworm writes how she has a class in which the students read certain books and meet the author in class to ask questions. Now how cool is that! I wish I had a class like that one. Her review of this book has interested me enough to want to read it right away!

Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is the story of James Sveck, a sophisticated, vulnerable young man with a deep appreciation for the world and no idea how to live in it. James is eighteen, the child of divorced parents living in Manhattan. Articulate, sensitive, and cynical, he rejects all of the assumptions that govern the adult world around him--including the expectation that he will go to college in the fall. he would prefer to move to an old house in a small town somewhere in the Midwest. Someday This Pain Will BE Useful to You takes place over a few broiling days in the summer of 2003 as James confides in his sympathetic grandmother, stymies his canny therapist, deplores his pretentious sister, and devises a fake online identity in order to pursue his crush on a much older coworker. Nothing turns out how he'd expected.

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The Writing on my Forehead by Nafisa Haji

This was a re-find for me. I had this one buried somewhere deep in my TBR, and noticed it again after reading Diane's review @ Bibliophile by the Sea.

From childhood, willful, intelligent Saira Qader broke the boundaries between her family's traditions and her desire for independence. A free-spirited and rebellious Muslim-American of Indo-Pakistani descent, she rejected the constricting notions of family, duty, obligation, and fate, choosing instead to become a journalist, the world her home.

Five years later, tragedy strikes, throwing Saira's life into turmoil. Now the woman who chased the world to uncover the details of other lives must confront the truths of her own. In need of understanding, she looks to the stories of those who came before—her grandparents, a beloved aunt, her mother and father. As Saira discovers the hope, pain, joy, and passion that defined their lives, she begins to face what she never wanted to admit—that choice is not always our own, and that faith is not just an intellectual preference.

Check out what others discovered here!