Two Quick Weekend Reads

My last few books have been quite dense so for the weekend I thought I'd take on two easy reads.  The first was Those We Love Most by Lee Woodruff.  It's sad in part but mostly the story of family relationships and how they deal with tragedy and can be ultimately strengthened by it.  The main characters are 65 year old Roger and his wife of many years, Margaret, and their eldest daughter, Maura, and her husband, Pete.  Both couples are restless, Roger is a long time philanderer, and Maura, who has always been most like her father, seems destined to follow in his shoes.  But tragedy hits one of Maura's children and though grief threatens to tear her further apart from her husband (it doesn't help that he turns to drinking to dull the pain) eventually guilt and the memory of why she got married in the first place brings her back to him.  The tragedy also causes Roger to reconsider his choices, though not before an ill-timed health problem brings his secrets crashing down around him.  Not a fantastic book but a reasonably interesting look at relationships.

The second book was How I Came to Sparkle Again by Kaya McLaren.  This is pretty standard chick lit.  Sparkle is a small ski town in Colorado.  Jill Anthony grew up there with her eccentric Uncle Howard who rescued her from her sermonizing Mormon parents.  When her marriage blows up in her face she returns there to heal - and of course finds love, with both a widowed man and his daughter - the child she thought she'd never have.  While there she reconnects with her best friend, Lisa, who has treated her body like the "Holiday Inn" and wakes up disgusted one morning and decides she wants more.  She of course finds it with the unlikely ski bum who lives next door and has been interested in her since high school though seems to have slept with every other girl in town first.  Again, not a fantastic book but it's a fast read so not a big time investment - and it's nice to have a happy (though predictable) ending every now and then.