The Sun Flower... Richard Paul Evans

"Seek not your destiny, for it is seeking you."
"The surest way to minimize your own burdens is to carry someone else's."
"Absence is to love what wind is to fire-it extinguishes the small and inflames the great."

Looking for an uplifting, interesting, moving, simply good spring/summer read? This is it. We used it several years ago at my high school for a reading campaign called One Book, One School. Designed to promote reading, our faculty and entire student body read the book. It has become one of my favorites and has one of the sweetest endings ever.

"In the wake of personal tragedy, two people meet on a humanitarian mission in Peru. Christine is a shy, unadventurous woman whose fiancé broke off the engagement only a week before the wedding, and Paul is a former emergency room doctor whose glamorous lifestyle, stellar reputation, and beautiful fiancé are cruelly snatched from him one fateful, snowy Christmas Eve. Deep in the Amazon jungle, against a backdrop of poverty and heartbreak, they must confront their deepest fears and, together, learn to trust and love again."

That's from the book jacket. Sounds good already, doesn't it? A good bit of the story surrounds an orphanage in Peru, El Girasol (Spanish for the word "sunflower"). Guess what? It's a real place.

Source: krystinasandeanadventure.wordpress.com

Ok. I'm stopping there. I don't want to give too much away! If you must have it right away, order it from Amazon here.

Speaking of my high school, one of the neat things our upper level art students do is paint book covers on ceiling tiles for the hallway of our English department. The English teachers choose the covers to be painted. We have some really talented kids at our school! The first cover I chose was The Sunflower. Madison, one of my daughter's best buddies, is an incredibly talented art student and is attending college on an art scholarship. She painted my chosen cover.

She did an outstanding job! I'm so proud of it.

Are you reading anything right now? Do you have a suggestion for me?

Kathryn