It is a few months since I read a book from end to end. My latest read, 'Plain Truth' by Jodi Picoult has broken that particular drought for me. The prose is light and easy to read, given the complexity of the subject matter, a legal case involving a woung woman not becoming a mother for all the best of reasons she could muster, and with the aid of a lawyer having to explain to a court what happened to her and the child she did not keep. To compound matters the book is set in an Amish community.
What clinched the grip of the book for me was the following quote where the lawyer defending the young girl is dsecribed thus on pages 237 and 238.....
'With her eyes closed , she believed him. She could imagine the music of the Grateful Dead crackling across the courtyard, wafting through the open window of her dorm room, where she and Coop lay tangled up in the narrow bed. She could still see the curtain of beads that hung in the doorway of the closet, a crystalline rainbow, and the beady eyes of the squirrel who perched on the windowsill watching them.'
I have been a deadhead and a reader of books for just under fifty years. Never in popular literature have I read a scene in a book where the immersive music of The Grateful Dead became a synonym for carefree middle aged sex, as this particular scene turned out to be....
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