What Falls From the Sky - Book 24

I think I've got my reading mojo back!

What Falls From the Sky is a lovely, profound book about a year of healing.  Esther Emery's marriage was falling apart, her career was in ruins, she'd been running from her crazy, dysfunctional childhood bent on making a name for herself in the world.  But it was all toppling around her.  Almost on a whim, but also because she had some intuitive sense that she needed to pull back from the world and regroup, she decides to give up the internet for a year.  The internet has wound its way into every crook and nanny of our lives now.  Emery did this back in 2007 or 2009 (not remembering at the moment).  I think it is even worse now!

The year was a year of despair and isolation at first.  She had to find things to do and alternative ways to connect to people.  She had abruptly moved from Southern California to Quincy MA, just outside Boston.  Her husband worked erratic hours and often late.  She had two small children.  Her neighbors were strange and unfriendly.  Luckily, she was reconnecting with her brother who I think is a professor at Harvard?   If not Harvard some other college or university in Boston.  She'd been close to him as a child but had spent more than a decade apart and not really keeping in touch.  So that friendship proved profoundly comforting and valuable.  She also had a couple of friends and a former work colleague who kept in touch with her the old fashion way through letters and phone calls.  Letter writing became a new thing in her life.  Emails, texts are different in quality.  She also began to try to teach herself to cook.  Her husband, Nick, was the cook of the house.  But now she took up the adventure of making food from scratch.  She also read voraciously.  There was a Good Will store nearby and on Tuesdays she packed up the kids and they went shopping there for books, toys, clothes, a little at a time.  She read Walden and fell in love with the idea of living in the country and living a more deeply authentic life.  She read the Bible and fell in love with God even though in the past she'd rejected her childhood Christianity and her husband was an atheist.

Her husband had cheated in a stupid fling with her best friend.  She had left him for three weeks, but then gone back.  The truth was she herself had fallen in love with other men but had never acted on it.  Their marriage needed work.  Lots of it.  How to get back to their initial love for each other was the seemingly unsolvable problem. How to forgive? They needed healing desperately.  So during this year of isolation and slowing way, way down, she was also walking on eggshells in terms of her marriage.  She started to go to church.  She randomly walked into a pretty Presbyterian church one Sunday morning.  She came back the next week.  Slowly she began to befriend people in the congregation.  She joined a Bible study group.  She began to read for the liturgy.  Eventually she winds up going to Nicaragua on a 10 day mission trip which was an amazing spiritual and eye opening event for her.

Her renewed faith in God brought healing and courage.  She began to discern what love really is.  Her marriage began to flower.  Her sense of self began to heal. The world opened up to her.  She began to face the demons that had so hurt her in her childhood.  She began to make peace with her now deceased mother.

 This book is so beautiful and so beautifully written.  I highly, highly recommend it.

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