The Spare Villa (Day 22, Year 3)

Sometimes I find the winter weekends to be very mundane with with repetition of children's activities and domestic duties. However, I needed mundane this weekend and I needed to focus on things like: how quickly can I fold that basket of laundry so I can get back to my very messed up, addictive book. 

I am not talking about Prince Harry's (not his real name?!) book Spare. I did finish reading that just in time to receive the news of my own sibling and family dysfunction via a Jacksonville, Florida funeral home. While I finished reading Spare, I am not actually finished with it yet. I cannot fully process all of it, given the situation I find myself in with the maybe dead/maybe faking death/maybe dead having her death used as a con sister. 

I know I am talking about all this a lot. It is a very conscious effort of mine to stir up some appropriate emotion other than blinding rage or complete detachment. To be clear: I am not feeling better or worse or anything other than fierce, insane, angry energy that I quickly squash down because it drains me. 

But enough on that for now, let's get back to books. 

I often love to go back to my books after I've processed them to reread bits. I also take notes on random scraps of paper and in my notebooks that I like to refer to when thinking one thing or another. All of this makes me the WORST human being to borrow a book from; so if you are waiting in the queue for Spare, just know that the wait time has not been updated and it could be one day to 17 years before you get it, depending on who is ahead of you. I'll try my best, but I am a writer. I am filled with twists and turns and unrealistic plots. 

Which brings me to the book I read today and finished today: The Villa by Rachel Hawkins. 

I turned to a psychological thriller because I was feeling quite like a psychological thriller and needed something to make me feel less alone. What I got wasn't just a psychological thriller, but a parallel tale of two stepsisters and two sister-like friends, the men they loved and were wounded by, murder and a gorgeous villa outside of Rome. Everything about this book was messed up. In the beginning you think you are reading some sort of knock-off of Eat, Pray, Love while one woman tries to finish her "cozy" murder book series and get over her ex-husband and another copes with her unlikely fame as a self-help Rachel Hollis type writer. It feels a little like a  series based on "Girl Wash Your Face," and then it becomes "Girl, wash the BLOOD off your face, lest you be charged with the murder you may have just committed."

It's a delight, if you like that sort of thing and also don't mind justifiable (fictional, of course!) homicide. 

Next on my list is last year's Rachel Hawkins book which I somehow missed: Reckless Girls. I also discovered that Hawkins writes paranormal romantic comedies (for when I feel like laughing at the dead and their romantic issues) under the name Erin Sterling. So maybe when I feeling less despondent and dysfunctional and paranormal romantic comedies can put me in more of a Valentine's Day spirit!

Get it spirit?

Anyway, if you want to read The Villa, you cannot borrow it from me (I've got it on my Kindle). I guess you could steal my Kindle, but then I'd have to kill you. 

I am JOKING! I love you! See? I am already telling paranormal romantic jokes.