Booking Through Thursday: Influences

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On Thursday, May 13th, Booking through Thursday asked:

Are your book choices influenced by friends and family? Do their recommendations carry weight for you? Or do you choose your books solely by what you want to read?

While I’d like to think I make all my own decisions, the reality is that everything I use, from anti wrinkle cream to books to hair styling products is at least partly influenced by my friends – we talk about it all, you know?

True confession: I’m nearly 40 and my mother still has the power to destroy me if she doesn’t like my hair, clothes, or home decor.

Books however, are the area where I’m least influenced. Partly this is because I tend to read very quickly, when I’m in a reading mood, and partly it’s because I usually know what I want, but sometimes, my friend Deb will get a book to review, and hand it off to me when she’s done, and I’ll often do the same. I tend to hand off more books than I receive, but that, again, is because I read quickly.

And because I’m an addict, and I like to BUY my books, because the ones from the library smell like old people, and not the kind of old people I want my books to smell like.

Sorry for the rambling answer.

But there you have it.

Review: Lost & Found

Lost and Found
Lost & Found
by Jacqueline Sheehan
Avon, 304 pages
Get it at Amazon >>

Because I’m a sucker for a cute face – especially when the face belongs to a dog with a number like ls4278 instead of a name, there was no way I could pass by the trade paperback edition of Jacqueline Sheehan’s novel Lost & Found. After all, there’s a cute dog on the cover.
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This dog, however, does not have a number instead of a name. When protagonist Rocky loses her veterinarian husband in the opening chapter, she decides to leave her job as a psychiatric counselor attached to a local university, and moves to a remote island in Maine to become the animal control warden. Once there, she meets Isaiah, the local vet, Tess, the local therapist, and Melissa, a young girl struggling with anorexia. She also meets Lloyd, after rescuing him from behind a dumpster, where he’s nursing the infected wound caused by an arrow.

Lloyd is the dog on the cover, a black lab who eventually serves as the catalyst for healing and change among all the women in the story.

This is a gentle novel, and I’m reading it on vacation, so even though I’m enjoying the story, it’s making me miss my dogs, more.

Goes well with an animal to cuddle.