#Strut by Bruce & Carole Hart (#Favorite #Book #Spotlight)

She's not going to stop till she's rocks to the top.
Ignored by her police chief father and feeling betrayed by her older brother, Bryan, seventeen-year-old Holly Hanna devotes all her energy to realizing her dream of becoming a rock star.

****

"Ladies and Gentlemen...Holly and the Heartbreakers!"

The kid, riding the tiger, grabs the microphone, pumping it up, taking it higher, making it hotter, rounding the bend and racing for home.

They say I'm bad,
But you know better.

Arranging her hair with a shake of her head, so that it falls about her shoulders, the kid spins around, spreads her legs wide, props her fists on her hips, beaming a knowing smile and sings—

And baby, baby, baby
I'm your hearts desire.

The spotlight snaps off.

The stage is black.

The crowd sits a moment, as if they were stunned and catching their breath. And then they go totally wild!

****

From the same husband and wife team that gifted me with Sooner or Later, Waiting Games, Now or Never and Cross Your Heart (I never got to read Breaking Up is Hard to Do), Bruce and Carole Hart's Strut rocked my world as a young adult.

Holly Hanna is 17 years old and all she wants is to be a rock 'n' roll star. And then she meets Jasper Rollins, a young and sexy rock star from the 60s who just happens to be a ghost. Holly soon discovers that the women in her family sometimes have the psychic ability to see ghosts and about how unfinished business sometimes keeps souls from moving on.

Jasper is certain his unfinished business has to do with becoming a famous rock star, so he sets out to help Holly and her band win the Cobblestone Inn's Amateur Nights Playoffs and the Showdown for a record deal. If he helps rocket her to the top, he will be able to reach the great beyond.

The thing I love most about this, is not just that the main character's name is Holly (my IRL name) but she was also a redhead (like me) but also because of the poignant definition Holly's aunt gives her about Jasper's "unfinished business," though neither Holly nor Jasper take heed to it in the pursuit of her rock star career aspirations. Her aunt's explanation that our "life's destiny" is this- that

"...in each lifetime, every soul needs to love and be loved, to know the sorrow of a love that isn't meant to be and the joy of a love that's returned in kind."

I cry every time I read this book. It doesn't sugar-coat coming-of-age. Bruce and Carole Hart handled adolescence in their novels with realism and heart. Their stories always amazed me with how easy it is to love the characters and cherish them as though they were real people you might know in your daily life.

This novel is young adult fiction and does have mild to mature language and situations. I think it is a wonderfully fantastical story that young adults, even now could relate to and would enjoy tremendously. If you can find it, I highly recommend it.

In Country by Bobbie Ann Mason (Favorite Book Spotlight)

Today's book holds special meaning for me, in several ways that may be hard to express, but I will try to put it down without rambling on and on.

IN COUNTRY
by Bobbie Ann Mason

"In the summer of 1984, the war in Vietnam came home to Sam Hughes, whose father died in Vietnam just before she was born. The first children born to American GIs who went to Vietnam were coming of age, and they were starting to ask what happened."

In 1989 I lost my grandfather to suicide. He suffered with manic depression, though I wasn't aware of it at that age, and well, sometimes bad things happen to good people. He was a churchgoing man, he and my grandmother had gone to South America in the mid-70's for missionary work. He built houses, she taught in a school. Suicide was the last thing I ever expected.

He died in February, not long after my 14th birthday. I was in the 8th grade and it was the first truly traumatic life experience I had. I don't think I really took time to mourn his death. I still had trouble coming to grips with the fact that he was gone when we would go over to visit my grandmother at their house. It felt like he was still there and for me, the very idea was too surreal. He would come in out of the garage at some point, he would be there and things would be fine. My 14 year-old mind just couldn't make sense of it. It happened so quickly that there was no goodbyes, there was just an emptiness I didn't know how to deal with.

That fall, I started my Freshman year of high school. The culmination of several events that year- my grandfather's death, humiliating myself over some boy(who I'd have to face daily on the bus) and then the general stress of high school did something to me. I don't know if my coping mechanism broke or what. Normally an A & B student, I was struggling to keep Bs & Cs, if I was lucky as the school year got underway. Only a couple of months in I grew depressed and started having problems with my stomach. Whether they were real pains or psychosomatic, I might never know for sure, but I thought I was broken.

I saw my regular doctor, who ran tests for stomach ulcers. Nothing. We saw another doctor, who thought it was just my nerves and prescribed pills. I saw a psychologist, but she simply made me meet her at the high school and forced me to walk up and down the hallways in front of my peers while I cried in embarrassment, still uncertain WHY I was having so much trouble. She thought putting me in the environment I was struggling with would make it more comfortable for me. Yeah...well, that didn't work.

Then came the psychiatrist who prescribed that icky pill that starts with an X. One of the pills I was taking gave me nightmares so my mom flushed them. I was getting sick and tired of all these people shrinking my brain, my family and friends thinking I was crazy and heaven only knows what my classmates thought about me. I heard the rumors—

I had stomach cancer and was going through treatment.
I'd gotten knocked up and moved away to Virginia to have the baby.
I think some even thought I'd died.

I don't blame anyone for thinking it. My situation was confusing to me for a very long time, as it was.

When it became clear that the psychiatrist deemed me capable of returning to school the weekend after my 15th birthday in February and I was still refusing to go to school out of irrational fears, my parents had to find an alternative. It had been almost a year since my grandfather's death, I'd seen more doctors than I ever cared to see in my entire life, I'd been publicly humiliated by the psychologist(who I thought was a crackpot anyway), and we had gone through every plausible reason for my emotional and physical turmoil. I ended up dropping out and took home school shortly thereafter and I stopped all visits and treatment with the headcases.

It took years for me to self-diagnose where it began and ironically, it seems that it was the one thing my shrinky-dinks didn't even mull over for very long. A traumatic sudden death in the family that was never truly dealt with at that age will definitely pack an emotional toll. At least, that's my take on it.

It was around the time I dropped out of school, that 15th birthday, that my dad gave me a belated Christmas gift. A signed copy of In Country by Bobbie Ann Mason-

See, the construction company that my dad works for was building her house in my hometown. He meant for it to be a Christmas present, but hadn't gotten the opportunity to get it signed by her until after the holidays were over, so it ended up becoming a belated gift/Birthday present that year.

It was my first foray into reading more grown-up realistic fiction. It was down to earth and honest. It felt real and it was a gift that I'll always treasure because my father knew I aspired to be a writer, even though he warned me and warned me about how hard it was to break into the business...that it was a tough industry and not everyone who wants to write CAN write, especially when you have to support yourself financially and the business can be so fickle. I guess in some ways it wasn't any different than the advice he would have given me if I'd wanted to be a rock star or an artist. Being a writer is a lofty dream.

And yet, every time I took up that book, and saw her signature inside it, knowing she was a writer and she was from Kentucky and she lived in my hometown- it inspired me to believe that I could be a writer. That my circumstances didn't have to define who I was, as a person, or as a writer. The trauma of that loss and change in my life didn't have to turn me into a thing that cowered in the corner, that feared living life. This book will always inspire me, not just for the story Bobbie Ann Mason told, but because of the way in which I came to know it.

If you want to know more, you can click the book cover or her name at the top of the blog to go to the In Country Amazon page or her website.

Thanks for stopping by.

Sooner or Later (Favorite Book Spotlight)

It all started with years ago, with a little known TV-movie from 1979 starring Rex Smith and Denise Miller called—It also starred some, I would assume, pretty big names at the time- Judd Hirsch, Barbara Feldon, Morey Amsterdam, Lynn Redgrave.

I didn't discover this movie until I was probably 15 or 16, well into the late 80s, early 90s. I had a weakness for old B-movies and used to stay up and watch them on USA's Up All Night with Rhonda Shear or Gilbert Gottfried on Friday and Saturday nights. Sometimes I could even find a hidden gems on WGN at that time of night, as well. There were so many cheesy movies I discovered, like Getting Lucky, The Girl I Want, and Summer Job to name a few. The one that stuck out- Sooner or Later.

Thirteen-year-old Jessie falls for seventeen-year-old Michael after she sees him and his band performing at the mall in Lodi, New Jersey, the same day she had a beauty make-over while out with her best friend Caroline. She never expects to see him again, but when she decides to take guitar lessons---he turns out to be the instructor assigned to her. When Michael doesn't recognize her, she realizes it must have something to do with the fact that she wasn't wearing make-up to her guitar lessons like she was the day they made eye contact while he was performing, so she starts sneaking around and wearing it and Michael starts noticing.

Of course, Jessie loves the attention, but when Michael's interest grows, she lies and tells him she's 16 and soon the lies pile high as she creates more convoluted explanations for why he's never seen her at school, etc. Of course, things become more & more complicated and her best friend advises her that "Older boys aren't like younger boys, they're like men, only younger."

In the process of guitar lessons, she also goes with Michael to band practice one afternoon and discovers he's written a song called "Simply Jessie" just for her, and it's made up partly of the chords he's been teaching her.



Afterward, she agrees to a date at the drive-in on a night she knows her parents are going out of town to a wedding and will be gone late. The heartache erupts when Michael tries to put the moves on her and she bursts into tears, the truth comes out and he takes her home. Of course, the matter remained, could Michael forgive her for lying to him? Does love conquer all, even age?

As cheesy as it is, I bawled and bawled through that movie every time I watch it, so glad that there was a happy ending but then, I wanted to own the movie. It was one of those rare wonderful guilty-pleasure films that made me want to come back over and over again. It didn't hurt that I thought Rex Smith was just a dream and the fact that the majority of the soundtrack was sung by HIM, just made me love it even more.

We had a VCR, but I didn't record it that night and it wasn't like we had a home computer where I could go look it up and find out more, but I kept thinking about it a LOT though and then it happened~

It wasn't but a few days after I watched that movie on WGN that I went to Rite-Aid to look at magazines and they had one of those swivel wire book rack, so I thought I'd just check out what kind of books they had to offer. Usually they had very little, other than when a new V.C. Andrews book came out and I would purchase it there. I consider it Kismet, fate, what-have-you— but this is what I found-

On that rack I noticed first one- Sooner or Later and then I realized, wait, the same/similar girl on the cover of these other two books, so I pick them up and read the blurbs and already my heart was pounding and I was nearly ready to squeal right there in the middle of aisle. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks- I didn't have enough money to buy all three, and those were the ONLY copies.

Old as I was, I went home and begged my dad to advance me my allowance so I could purchase them before they were gone. And so I did. I cried when I opened the first book, content that I could not only read the story, almost just like it played out in the movie, but Waiting Games and Now or Never chronicled MORE of Jessie and Michael's story. Still, I longed for the movie.

My parents tried to get it at a video store, but when asked, it turned out they had one copy, but the owner wouldn't take less than $75 for it because it was such a rare movie. (I've had that kind of bad luck a lot over favorite old movies.) He offered to order my dad a brand new copy for upwards of $90, but that wasn't happening. My mom found out when it was on and recorded it for me one year and gave it to me as a Christmas present. Several years later, I was dating this guy and we went to that same video store and they still had that copy of it. I ask the girl at the counter about it and she called the owner, who agreed over the phone to sell it to me for $10. I was utterly blown away.

Of course, a couple of years ago, when all the VCRs in our house started to eat tapes and die of magnetic poisoning, I ordered a copy on DVD for just under $20. I haven't watched it in a while, but, just like my copies of the books are there to read, it's there to watch whenever I want to.

*a side note- Bruce Hart, along with his wife Carole, wrote these books together. Bruce is also most famous for having composed the lyrics to Sesame Street.

So, what are some of your favorite books that came to you in an unusual way?

Have you ever discovered a great book simply by accident?
Or is it possible that all the pieces fell in place at just the right time for you to stumble upon it?

Please come share your favorites!