#92 Shadow Baby

Shadow Baby by Alison McGhee is book number 92. It was a Today's Book Club choice. I used to watch the Today Show every morning, when M was a baby. It was really the only way I got any sort of news about the world around me when I was a new stay at home mom. I bought this book many years ago at the Greene Valley Book Fair. It is an awesome place to get all kinds of books for really cheap prices. I think I paid $3.50 for this one in particular.

An eleven year old girl makes friends with an elderly neighbor for a school project and ends up getting so much more out of the relationship. She is raised by her mother and desperately wants to know something about her father, grandfather, and the twin sister who did not survive child birth. In order to cope with all the missing information in her life, she spins her own tales of history. She has a great imagination and adds so much detail to those stories you'd think that it really happened that way. It could have, she says.

I seem to have fallen into a pattern where every book I pick up, without it even saying so on the back cover, is about a central character who is missing one or both parents. Or the parent is this scary, abusive figure. There has to be an exciting, moving story out there about a main character with both of her parents. Not all conflict has to be about parent child relationships, does it? I hope that a few of the 91 books that I have left to read will be examples of complicated, interesting characters who have loving parents.

This book was an okay read, don't feel the need to ever reread it like Little Women or Where the Red Fern Grows. It went by quick enough and held my attention on my treadmill. Next is Crow Lake by Mary Lawson - another Today's Book Club choice.