Traveling with Pomegranates
Summary
In this intimate dual memoir, Sue Monk Kidd and her daughter, Ann, offer distinct perspectives as a 50-something and a 20-something, each on a quest to redefine herself and to rediscover each other. Between 1998 and 2000, Sue and Ann travel throughout Greece and France. Sue, coming to grips with aging, caught in a creative vacuum, longing to reconnect with her grown daughter, struggles to enlarge a vision of swarming bees into a novel. Ann, just graduated from college, heartbroken and benumbed by the classic question about what to do with her life, grapples with a painful depression. As this modern-day Demeter and Persephone chronicle the richly symbolic and personal meaning of an array of inspiring figures and sites, they also each give voice to that most protean of connections: the bond of mother and daughter. A wise and involving book about feminine thresholds, spiritual growth, and renewal, Traveling with Pomegranates is both a revealing self-portrait by a beloved author and her daughter, a writer in the making, and a momentous story that will resonate with women everywhere.
©2009 Sue Monk Kidd (P)2009 Penguin
The Shark Club
Summary
A novel about love, loss, and sharks by the New York Times best-selling coauthor of the memoir Traveling with Pomegranates. On a summer day on the Gulf of Mexico in 1988, two extraordinary things happen to 12-year-old Maeve Donnelly. First she is kissed by Daniel, the boy of her dreams. Then she is attacked by a blacktip shark. Eighteen years later Maeve is a world-traveling marine biologist studying and swimming with the very animals that once threatened her life. Known among her peers as the "shark whisperer", Maeve is fearless in the water. On land, however, Maeve is dogged by unresolved wounds and indecisive about the path her life will take. When she returns to the small island off Florida's coast where she grew up and to her childhood home - the legendarily charming and eccentric Hotel of the Muses, where she was raised by her grandmother - she finds that her twin brother may be about to make it big as novelist, using her love life as his jumping-off point. Will she confront her feelings about her brother's betrayal - and forgive her childhood sweetheart, Daniel, the missteps of their youth? Or will she dive headlong back into her research and open her heart to Nicholas, her handsome colleague who shares her passion for the ocean? Set against the gorgeous backdrop of the Gulf of Mexico, in a picturesque and quaint beach town, The Shark Club is a bittersweet story about the power of forgiveness and the promise of true love.
©2017 Ann Kidd Taylor (P)2017 Penguin Audio