Good Grief - #TeaserTuesday and First Chapter / First Paragraph / Tuesday Intros

Author Lolly Winston does a great job of taking readers through a grieving widow's mourning. I enjoyed this touching and realistic novel. The writer's style and humor appealed to me too.

Opening:

How can I be a widow? Widows wear horn-rimmed glasses and cardigan sweaters that smell like mothballs and have crepe-paper skin and names like Gladys or Midge and meet with their other widow friends once a week to play pinochle. I'm only thirty-six. I just got used to the idea of being married, only test-drove the words my husband for three years: My husband and I, my husband and I... after all that time being single!

Teasers:
Page 118 in Trade Paperback (LOVE this description):
We creak past the living room, which is crowded with antiques that remind me of old ladies. Wingback chairs with tea party posture. Pedestal tables with demure padded feet.

Page 151:
You think, This is it: I'm at the bottom now. It's all uphill from here! Then you discover the escalator goes down one more floor to another level of bargain-basement junk.


Genre:  Women's Contemporary Fiction
Amazon Link: Good Grief
Book Length: 355 Pages (including reading group guide)
Copyright 2004

Synopsis:
The brilliantly funny and heartwarming New York Times bestseller about a young woman who stumbles, then fights to build a new life after the death of her husband. Thirty-six-year-old Sophie Stanton loses her young husband to cancer. In an age where women are expected to be high-achievers, Sophie desperately wants to be a good widow - a graceful, composed Jackie Kennedy kind of widow. Alas, Sophie is more of a Jack Daniels kind. Downing cartons of ice-cream for breakfast, breaking down in the produce section of supermarkets, showing up to work in her bathrobe and bunny slippers--soon she's not only lost her husband, but her job and her waistline as well. In a desperate attempt to reinvent her life, Sophie moves to Ashland, Oregon. But instead of the way it's depicted in the movies, with a rugged Sam Shepherd kind of guy finding her, Sophie finds herself in the middle of Lucy-and-Ethel madcap adventures with a darkly comic edge. Still, Sophie proves that with enough humor and chutzpah, it is possible to have life after loss.

Teaser Tuesday is hosted by The PurpleBooker. Post two sentences from somewhere in a book you're reading. No spoilers, please! List the author and book title too.
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First Chapter/First Paragraph/Tuesday Intros is hosted by I'd Rather Be At The Beach. To participate, share the first paragraph (or a few) from a book you're reading or thinking about reading soon.

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A Quilt for Christmas - Book Beginnings on Friday and The Friday 56

A Quilt for Christmas is the story of a woman whose husband enlists in the Union army to fight in the Civil War, leaving her to cope with running the family farm. It's also about friendship, courage, hardship, forgiveness, and family (and quilting, too). This is an engrossing 5-star book that paints a vivid picture of rural Kansas in the 1860s and shows the effects of war on the wives and children back home.
     Seems like I've been reading books lately that have Christmas in their titles. This one was a birthday gift from Sandra Allen, my friend (and I.O.U. Sex co-author). She knows I enjoy quilting and reading a good story, and she sent along some beautiful fabric (for quilting) too. 
Thank you, Sandra!

Book Beginning:
Prologue - November 20, 1864
     It was a fine fall evening. The wind carried the smell of rotting apples and wood smoke and a hint of frost that would likely come after midnight. The setting sun made the stubble in the fields shimmer like flakes of mica and sent rays of light through the clouds as if the Almighty Himself were casting down the fiery shafts. Far off were the night sounds of cattle lowing, and nearer, of chickens clucking. The wind swirled papery dead leaves across the porch.

Friday 56 (from Page 56):
Eliza put her hands over her eyes, then shook her head. Will wasn't dead, she thought. He couldn't be.

Genre: Women's Fiction / Historical Fiction
Length: 242 Pages (hardback)
Amazon Link: A Quilt for Christmas
Author Info: Sandra Dallas Website

Synopsis from the author's website:
The Civil War, 1864: Eliza Spooner’s husband, Will, has joined the Kansas Volunteers to fight for the Union. Confident that he will return home, Eliza helps pass the time by making a special quilt to keep Will warm during his winter months. When the unthinkable happens, she takes in a woman and child who have been left alone and made vulnerable by the war, and she finds solace and camaraderie among the women of her quilting group. And when she is asked to help hide an escaped slave, she must decide for herself what is right and whom she can count on to help her.

                         

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