These Is My Words: A Book Review

I haven’t written a solid book review in a while.

But this book is so memorable that I just have to.

Last year I signed up for my friend Ruth’s email book list, virtual sort of book club thing. (I sold that really well, didn’t I?)

Each month she sends us a list of books to read – usually she’s developed the choice along a topic or a theme.  And I think there is a Facebook page for sharing your thoughts, although honestly I never use it.

Mainly, I just value that she is so well read and so intelligent herself that I love taking her advice and picking up books that would never have been on my radar otherwise.

Books like Surprised by Oxford and The Light Between Oceans and Under a Painted Sky. I truly can never keep up to her reading pace, but I keep the emails to go back and use for book ideas when I finish one.

(In fact, more often than not, these days I just offer super short opinions of books that I read on my Instagram stories. It’s fast and I can see them all stack up in my highlights section and that is satisfying to me.)

If you want to find yourself on Ruth’s amazing little email tribe, you can do that right here.

I picked up my book from the library. (Paid those fines to be under $10 so I can keep trucking along.)  

These is my Words: The Diary of Sarah Agnes Prine. 1881-1901. Arizona Territories.

Longest title ever – right?

This novel is written in the form of a series of journal entries during all those years written by, obviously, Sarah. She’s a teenager when the book begins and one of the fun things about the format of the novel is that as Sarah ages and becomes more educated, her writing shifts and her journal entries and spelling and vocabulary grow too.  It’s subtle and it’s lovely and I think it’s just another layer of how smart and engaging of a character Nancy Turner created in Sarah.

She’s self-aware, but not as aware of herself as the reader becomes after following her life and her trials and her joys and her sorrows for so long.

The book is full of adventure and harrowing hardships and details that make you cringe and make your heart hurt. I bet Ms. Turner could write for This is Us if she wants to add to her resume.

There are so many scenes written into this novel that literally made me ache.  Some scenes for their stark sadness and all too relatable sorrow. And some for their tender display of faithful and honest and true affection between people who have lived and loved and lost together.

The relationships between siblings and parents, between spouses and friends, is vivid and honest and painful and beautiful.

It’s a sweeping sort of saga, covering years of change and history and growth and setback.

This is the kind of novel where I’d stay up too late at night, lying in my quiet,  dimly lit bedroom, just reading one more journal entry. Just two more.  Just one.  (And because the novel is not broken down into chapters, you can read a tiny entry or eighteen entries as you have time.  I appreciate that in my current life.)

This is also the kind of novel where the next morning at breakfast I would tell the kids so many details about Sarah and her family that they might as well have read it themselves.

It’s good story, told by a wonderful storyteller.  The back cover tells me it’s her first novel.  If only all first novels could be so lovely.

___________________________________