Welcome to another Bookish Friday, in which we share excerpts from books…and connect with other bloggers who do the same.
Let’s begin the celebration by sharing Book Beginnings, hosted by Rose City Reader; and let’s showcase The Friday 56 with My Head Is Full of Books.
To join in, just grab a book and share the opening lines…along with any thoughts you wish to give us; then turn to page 56 and excerpt anything on the page.
Today’s feature is a book I just finished reading: The Stolen Child, by Ann Hood.
Book Beginning:
(1935) Enzo Piccolo, master craftsman of presepe, hurried along the streets of Naples with a box of glass tubes. It was April, and in April Enzo and his brother, Massimo, were working day and night to complete the figures for the Nativities.
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Friday 56:
Nick started to get out of the bed. “I’ve got to go home,” he said, reaching for his shirt, which was neatly folded, along with his pants, on a mustard-yellow vinyl chair.
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Synopsis:An unlikely duo ventures through France and Italy to solve the mystery of a child’s fate in this moving, page-turning novel from “a gifted storyteller” (People).
For decades, Nick Burns has been haunted by a decision he made as a young soldier in World War I, when a French artist he’d befriended thrust both her paintings and her baby into his hands—and disappeared. In 1974, with only months left to live, Nick enlists Jenny, a college dropout desperate for adventure, to help him unravel the mystery. The journey leads them from Paris galleries and provincial towns to a surprising place: the Museum of Tears, the life’s work of a lonely Italian craftsman. Determined to find the baby and the artist, hopeless romantic Jenny and curmudgeonly Nick must reckon with regret, betrayal, and the lives they’ve left behind.
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Would you keep reading? I finished this book today, and while there were a number of twists and somewhat confusing aspects, I loved how it wrapped up in the end.
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