Authors: Shauna Niequist
ISBN-13: 9780310329305, ISBN-10: 0310329302
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Zondervan
Date Published: August 2010
Edition: (Non-applicable)
Shauna Niequist lives in Illinois with her husband Aaron, who is a worship leader, and their son Henry. She grew up at Willow Creek, then studied English and French literature at Westmont College, in Santa Barbara, California. She worked in Student Ministry at Willow Creek for five years and as the Creative Director at Mars Hill for three years. Shauna’s first book, Cold Tangerines, is a collection of essays about the extraordinary moments in our everyday lives.
Cold Tangerines---now available in softcover---is a collection of stories and ideas about the life of celebration that God gives you. This book offers a vision of life as a collection of bright and varied glimpses of hope and redemption and celebration, in and among the heartbreak and boredom and broken glass.
Niequist, a 30-year-old mother and first-time author, wants readers to look around their ordinary lives and celebrate all their manifold, quotidian blessings. To that end, she offers 40 short essays, each an exploration of something mundane and wonderful: getting pregnant, throwing parties, collecting champagne flutes. She recalls a breakup that deepened her relationship with God, and explains why moving into a fixer-upper helped her learn that God loves us as we are. A lovely, honest and wistful tone characterizes the title piece, an ode to living a life of gratitude and joy. Essays on a friend's health scare, the power of art and experiencing Christmas with a newborn are especially powerful. Yet Niequist's relentlessly first-person reflections would have been leavened by more fully developing some of the other characters, the relatives and friends who pop up. Sometimes her prose is annoyingly abstract ("if we cultivate a true attention, a deep ability to see what has been there all along, we will find worlds within and between us"), and there are clichéd observations. Still, with a bit of seasoning (and more vigorous editing), Niequist could be a writer to watch. (Oct.)
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