Our book club selection for January is Sisters First by Jenna Bush Hager and Barbara Pierce Bush. I ordered this book through Amazon instead of borrowing it because I like to keep copies of the books we read. This book came over a month ago and I started reading it right after I got it. In the first chapter, my thought was “I’ll never make it through this book, it is too boring”. I don’t even remember now what made me think that.
It is now a week before book club, so I thought I’d try again and brought the book to work with me. What I found now, sixty pages in, is a story filled with warmth and love and I find myself jealous of the closeness that was the life of these two young women.
I dogeared a page (something I NEVER do) when Barbara is telling of how she and her mother watched a motherless baby seal crying out for its mother. I cried in the next chapter as Barbara describes losing her high school boyfriend to suicide and how in his catholic funeral service she was told he would never go to heaven because he had taken his own life. Barbara tells of how for seventeen years, her every wish, on a star or blowing out birthday candles; is that her Kyle would go to heaven. She writes that only after a friend of her father’s committed suicide and she attended his funeral, that her life was changed. The minister said that depression is an illness and that God loves everyone; that means he loved “Rusty”, her father’s friend, and that Rusty was in heaven. She was freed from her years of torment.