Fire and Ice is thrilled to be today’s stop on the Love Water Memory Blog Tour hosted by Literati Author Services. We have Jennie Shortridge, the author here to tell us her top ten favorite books and there’s a giveaway for our readers!

Title: Love Water Memory
Author: Jennie Shortridge
Genre: Women’s Fiction
Publication Date: January 14, 2014
Publisher: Gallery Books
Event organized by: Literati Author Services, Inc.

Summary

If you could do it all over again, would you still choose him?

At age thirty-nine, Lucie Walker has no choice but to start her life over when she comes to, up to her knees in the chilly San Francisco Bay, with no idea how she got there or who she is. Her memory loss is caused by an emotional trauma she knows nothing about, and only when handsome, quiet Grady Goodall arrives at the hospital does she learn she has a home, a career, and a wedding just two months away. What went wrong? Grady seems to care for her, but Lucie is no more sure of him than she is of anything. As she collects the clues of her past self, she unlocks the mystery of what happened to her. The painful secrets she uncovers could hold the key to her future—if she trusts her heart enough to guide her.

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Author Guest Post

Guestpost: Jennie Shortridge, Love Water Memory

The Books That Made Me Want to Become a Writer, AKA Great writers who influenced my own writing, sometimes without me even knowing it.

1. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee.

I know, I know, everyone says it! But we love it because it was probably the first book we read as kids that actually felt achingly true. We felt everything Scout felt, from confused to ornery to hopping mad at the injustice she discovered in the world.

2. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. I loved the adventure and the adventurer. I loved the real voice of a boy in that era. I was incensed by the racial injustice (are you sensing a pattern here?) I felt that I’d learned something important when I was done.

3. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, by Anne Tyler. My first out and out dysfunctional family story, and I couldn’t get enough. I immediately read all of the books she’d written. I wanted more and more.

4. Six of One, Rita Mae Brown. It was the same with this one, but this time there was humor as well as dysfunction. I read everything she wrote until she started writing cat mysteries. I love cats, to be sure, but not books about them.

5. The Bean Trees, by Barbara Kingsolver. This story evoked so much more of the world than I knew when I read it, and so much that I wanted to know and do and feel. It felt important in an unassuming way, and I guess I would like to think I might be able to achieve that in my own work some day.

6. The World According to Garp, by John Irving. I loved this broadly funny and heartbreaking story. Just when I thought I was safely in the land of absurdity, I was crying my eyes out over a character’s loss. I read everything he wrote for the longest time.

7. Another Roadside Attraction, by Tom Robbins. Again, I was delighted at the absurdity, and felt I must be kin to this strange writer because he thought of things so oddly, so outside the norm. I always felt that way, that I was not quite on the same page as everyone else around me. Now I know everyone feels this way!

8. Yellow Raft on Blue Water, by Michael Dorris. This excruciating story told in three viewpoints (daughter, mother, grandmother) floored me in its execution, how each narrator was able to fill in the story for the reader as the other narrators couldn’t. Masterful, and an emotional read.

9. The Liar’s Club, by Mary Karr. A true story of childhood trauma, something I’d experienced but didn’t acknowledge for a very long time. I let Mary do some of the heavy lifting for me in my process, writing this harrowing and beautiful book.

10. And most recently, The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green. Rarely do books feel so real and painful, and yet so hopeful and true, in the best sense of the word. It is true that we can transcend our misfortunes. Read John Green if you don’t believe me. This is the way I aspire to write.

About The Author

Jennie Shortridge has published five novels: Love Water Memory,When She Flew, Love and Biology at the Center of the Universe,Eating Heaven, and Riding with the Queen. When not writing, teaching writing workshops, or volunteering with kids, Jennie stays busy as a founding member of Seattle7Writers.org, a collective of Northwest authors devoted both to raising funds for community literacy projects and to raising awareness of Northwest literature.

Connect with Jennie: Facebook | Twitter | Website | Goodreads

Giveaway

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