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Infinite Country by Patricia Engel | Thoughts

   Published : 2021   ||    Format : print   ||    Location : Colombia ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆   What was it about the country that kept everyone hostage to its fantasy? The previous month, on its own soil, an American man went to his job at a plant and gunned down fourteen coworkers, and last spring alone there were four different school shootings. A nation at war with itself, yet people still spoke of it as some kind of paradise.. Thoughts : Infinite Country follows two characters - young Talia, who at the beginning of this book, escapes a girl’s reform school in North Colombia so that she can make her previously booked flight to the US. Before she can do that, she needs to travel many miles to reach her father and get her ticket to the rest of her family. As we follow Talia’s treacherous journey south, we learn about how she ended up in the reform school in the first place and why half her family resides in the US. Infinite Country tells the story of her family through the other protagonist, El

It's the Island Life | Weekly Snapshot

By the time this post is published, we will all be back home, but right this moment, as I type this up, we are enjoying our last day at Daufuskie, a secluded island near Hilton Head, SC and Savannah, GA. We were lucky to score a cottage (without having to break the bank) with front-row access to the beach, something that has always been on my bucket list and that I was thrilled to cross off. 

This week has been very refreshing and just what I needed - a getaway, a break from it all, a retreat with family with no thoughts of work, to-do lists, and chores getting in the way. The island sure runs on its own time. The streetlights aren't turned ON at night to avoid attracting turtles too far from their ideal nesting place. There's the alligator crossing time at night when they go from pond to pond visiting friends (and hence tourists are advised to stay home when it's dark). There are very few cars - instead the preferred mode of transportation is via golf carts, which can go only so fast, and so this adds to the air of the place feeling slower than the rest of the world. Everything is within a few minutes of each other.


Our view from the front door


After a week of fun and relaxation, I'm feeling fully recharged, pumped up, and ready to dive back into the "normal" world. 

I've been more absent than not from the blog for the past few weeks. It's been a series of one thing after another - mostly life but also some work. We had friends over during the week of the Memorial Day holiday, and then had tons to do before we left for our vacation. The weeks leading to the end of the school year were just as busy with something coming up each day. In addition, I had a ton of unrelated paperwork all come through at around the same time. Plus work was busy every day for most of those weeks. It was rough. Extremely. I'm not expecting things to be any different once we are back but it helps that we got some much-needed and much-appreciated break.



Reading

After not reading much of anything for weeks, I read two books while on vacation and started a third. I found Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri on the National Book Award winner list and all I can say is that it definitely deserved the award. Nothing really happens in the book - it's a series of flashbacks into the past and observations of passersby - but this slim book still manages to say a lot.

Elizabeth Acevedo has been on my list for a while so I'm glad to have finally gotten to one of her books - Clap When You Land. Written in verse, it tells the story of two girls who lose their father in a plane accident. So much heartbreak and so much beauty as they try to find themselves and each other. 

Right now, I am reading Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi, another book I have been meaning to read for a while.


I'll hopefully be back next week with more updates and book reviews but in the meantime - How are you doing? What have I missed over the last month?


Linking with The Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz and The Sunday Post at Caffeinated Reviewer

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