Just a quick update on what I’m reading this week…

The Wish by Nicholas Sparks

Here’s a book I started over the pandemic but had to put down. It deals with a very sick person dying of cancer, and it was just too much for me at the time. I’m reading the physical and using the audiobook on and off. It’s on the weekends that I usually enjoy audiobooks during chores. So far the audio has been exceptional, but I always prefer the physical book. The story alternates between present day and past seamlessly. So far I’ve loved it, and I’m about half way through. Review coming up this week!

Blurb:

1996 was the year that changed everything for Maggie Dawes. Sent away at sixteen to live with an aunt she barely knew in Ocracoke, a remote village on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, she could think only of the friends and family she left behind . . . until she meets Bryce Trickett, one of the few teenagers on the island. Handsome, genuine, and newly admitted to West Point, Bryce gradually shows her how much there is to love about the wind-swept beach town—and introduces her to photography, a passion that will define the rest of her life.

By 2019, Maggie is a renowned travel photographer. She splits her time between running a successful gallery in New York and photographing remote locations around the world. But this year she is unexpectedly grounded over Christmas, struggling to come to terms with a sobering medical diagnosis. Increasingly dependent on a young assistant, she finds herself becoming close to him.

As they count down the last days of the season together, she begins to tell him the story of another Christmas, decades earlier—and the love that set her on a course she never could have imagined.

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The Scout of Wounded Knee by Michael A. McLellan

Here’s a long awaited book by one of my favorite authors, Michael A. McLellan. I’ve been looking forward to reading this for some time now and was ecstatic to learn that it was published! This is a followup to In the Shadow of the Hanging Tree, but it can be read as a standalone. I’ll be starting this in the next day or so after The Wish.

Blurb:

Half-starved and disillusioned, Everett Ward searches for a new life after four years of war. He drifts down to Texas where he finds work on a cattle ranch. An encounter with Rebecca, the ranch’s Lakota kitchen girl, leaves him enamored, but it also starts a chain of events that spans decades and leaves the couple embroiled in a bitter clash of cultures. 

The Scout of Wounded Knee lifts the veil of romance from the western genre, blending historical and fictional characters to paint an uncompromising and compelling picture of post-Civil War America.

Told through the memories of an aged frontier scout, this standalone follow-up to Michael A. McLellan’s In the Shadow of the Hanging Tree, is a story of friendship, love, remorse, and the end of a way of life in the American west. 

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The kids are finishing up Nancy Drew today, and my youngest should finish Of a Feather this week as well. I’ll share an update later on those.

So that’s it for us, friends. What are you reading this week? Let’s chat!

❤️ Mischenko