BOOKISH FRIDAY: “DIRT”

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 Freda’s Voice.

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 56D and excerpt anything on the page.

Then give us the title of the book, so others can add it to their lists! What a great way to spend a Friday!

Today’s feature is a recent acquisition: Dirt, by Mary Marantz

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Book Beginning:  His hands looked even dirtier than I’d remembered, resting against the crisp, white, sterile sheets of a bed tucked away in the far-flung outer reaches of the hospital corner.

I was standing in the same hospital I’d been born in some thirty-six years earlier in the spring of 1980, when Mom was already a wife of three years just two months shy of her twenty-first birthday, and he had yet to find his way to wanting to be a father.

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Friday 56:  Why is it that sometimes the things we need most can only get to us in the form of carrying heavy things?

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Synopsis:  Dirt is a story about the places where we start. From a single-wide trailer in the mountains of rural West Virginia to the halls of Yale Law School, Mary Marantz’s story is one of remembering our roots while turning our faces to the sky. From growing up in that trailer, where it rained just as hard inside as out and the smell of mildew hung thick in the air, Mary has known what it is to feel broken and disqualified because of the muddy scars leaving smudged fingerprints across our lives. Generations of her family lived and logged in those hauntingly treacherous woods, risking life and limb just to barely scrape by. And yet that very struggle became the redemption song God used to write a life she never dreamed of.

Mixed with warmth, wit, and the bittersweet, sometimes achingly heartbreaking places we go when we dig in instead of give up, Dirt is a story of healing. With gut-wrenching honesty and hard-won wisdom, Mary shares her story for anyone who has ever walked into the world and felt like their scars were still on display, showing that you are braver, better, and more empathetic for what you have survived. Because God does his best work in the muddy, messy, and broken–if we’ll only learn to dig in.

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Would you keep reading?  I am already hooked.

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