Rising From The Skye

Jessica Brockmole's debut novel Letters from Skye was a lot of fun to read! I was amazed that so much character and personality got fit into a novel (ISBN 9780345542601) that was essentially an exchange between four people, two each over a span of a quarter-century. And it's told entirely in the characters' letters to each other – David and Elspeth's from 1913 to 1916, a correspondence which began with the American David's appreciation of the poetry Elspeth who had never left her home on the Isle of Skye (in northern Scotland, check a map) had written. A relationship develops through this correspondence … they they meet … and in 1940, these letters become part of a quest for Margaret and her husband Paul in wartime Great Britain to reunite them, and that story is ALSO told in letters. The ten-dollar word for a story like this is an epistolary novel; that is, everything is an epistle (older Bibles refer to Paul's letters as epistles) so what you're reading may be colored by the writer's impressions.

Still a great story, though, I recommend it. I also got to finish the Sunday school play about David and Goliath that I was writing (I prefer to write the plays we perform myself) and my big sticking point was how to portray Goliath's death. For yes, it is the impact of the stone David hurls at him from his slingshot that kills Goliath (check 1 Samuel 17:49 for that little detail) but David also grabs Goliath's sword and cuts his head off. (And now I see I have to change the detail that Goliath fell forward – “he fell upon his face”, same verse.) I asked on Facebook how I should relate that, and a college friend of mine said he told – or he'd heard told – the sanitized version of the story and it was a three-year-old who brought up that David cut Goliath's head off! “And he's not only merely dead, he's really most sincerely dead!” Well, I stuck with “off with your head” and had David muse aloud whether Goliath qualified for severance pay ...

Prestige Will be 6 … That's how a text Martha sent me this morning came due to the d___ auto-correct function on her phone! It's Preston, a friend of Sarah and Jeffrey's who will be six and have his birthday party tomorrow after school. I stopped this morning to pick up some cards and other items for him, our niece Breanna who turns eighteen Sunday, and our sister Margaret (technically Martha's sister, and my sister-in-law, but why quibble?) who turns the big four-oh tomorrow. In fact, we already have a gag gift for HER that I received when I hit forty in December 2011, a toy hamster that sings “You Say It's Your Birthday”! So Margaret's next among the sisters … then Martha hits forty in February 2017 and will likely get it back … have to get a picture of that before tomorrow. And this year I hit forty-two, I wonder if my gift will have something to do with Douglas Adams? I pray by then I will have some more answers, even if they're not to the Ultimate Question!

David