Phyllis Schieber

Occasionally, a book comes across my apple green leather reclining chair that merits a beautiful, professionally tempered cover and a hard back that will draw in lots of readers swayed by that glitz. I'm one of those who buy by cover art, so I know the pull it has. "The Manicurist" would be on the best seller list today, and in every one of your hands if it had a cover like "The Lantern." It is a quality novel with a fantastic story!

Phyllis Schieber isn't your typical author in her 20-30's with an awesome story to tell in this genre. She's a seasoned writer with a gripping story. Her writing has been compared to Alice Hoffman and Sue Miller...I would add that she writes like herself. I'm a fan. I'm anxious to read the book she's now writing.

Here's an excerpt of her short story being featured in "The Firefly Dance Anthology" published by Bell Bridge Books:

"I was seventeen the last time I went with my mother to the Stocking Store. I have more important concerns now than the simple errands of childhood. I am busy protesting the war in Vietnam and listening to rock music. Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy have both been murdered within a few months of each other. I am devastated by these losses, but I am also in love for the very first time. When I tie my hair back with a scarf, he says I look like a gypsy. Still, I say yes when my mother asks me to accompany her to the Stocking Store. I think she is even more surprised than I am.

I still call it the Stocking Store because I do not know it by any other name. We call the store where we buy our buttons the Button Store, and the small cave-like shop that both repairs and sells umbrellas the Umbrella Store. I still long for the red umbrella with the pink ruffle and the appliqued poodle with it's rhinestone collar. I often dream about that umbrella. I can see myself twirling it before a crowd of admirers.

These small shops are part of our daily lives. The Cheese Shop, the Pocketbook Store, the Hat Store, and the Toy Store are places that need no other identification. But it is the Stocking Store that I love best. It is in the Stocking Store that I first come to know exactly what it is that makes me different from others.

"The Manicurist" deals with the complexities of being a "good" mother,
daughter and wife who loves the other more than she loves herself. It draws one in with a realistic peppering of the paranormal. Tessa and her mother's abilities to divine the future and cast spells are realistically a part of them. For better or for worse, the use of these gifts mark their lives in extraordinary ways, causing them to question themselves, to cloud their choices, and to mark those they love.

I identified with Tessa very much. Her losses and her abilities to see the future collide in her life, repeatedly leaving her in isolation from real friendships and intimacy. Tessa's with her husband, Walter, leaves her insecure; she wonders if it was her spell on him that made him choose to love her, or his actual love for her that is the bond. I felt for her...it felt like that old question some women used to (maybe still do) have: Did he marry me because I got pregnant? Or because he really wants me and loves me? It's a merry-go-round that Tessa lives with. And, while the tension between Tessa and Walter is rife with this dilemma, she balances it with the relationship she forges with their daughter, Regina, a teenager who wants her larger/estranged family desperately, and is anxious to bring everyone together.

I would love to put this book on your reading table. It will be such a pleasant surprise for you. You may want to rush to Amazon or B&N to get a copy for yourself, instead. You'll love it.

5 stars for a very unexpected read!

Deborah/TheBookishDame… (plus d'informations)

Full review:

http://readingthroughlife.ca/the-sinners-guide-to-confession-review/

Short excerpt:

The Sinner’s Guide to Confession is definitely not a challenging read in the typical sense of the word. It was quick and engaging on a basic level, such that I was able to keep reading and following the narrative even at 4am in the middle of a deserted airport terminal. For the most part, it was light and funny, as the characters interacted with each other and tried to decide what to do about their secrets. In the end, one of them is thrown into a situation that forces them all to re-visit their secrets and test the bonds of their relationships.… (plus d'informations)

I want mothers to read Willing Spirits because there’s a readiness to forfeit everything about yourself that only a mother can know.

I want daughters to read Willing Spirits because they have a mother that they know nothing of.

I want women to read Willing Spirits because there’s a perceptive sisterhood that only woman understand.

Willing Spirits is what I’d label an intuitive novel. Not the sort of novel that comes from the heart so much as from the gut.

Jane & Gwen have been friends for many years, sharing the joys and sorrows of life. We enter their story at one given moment in a long line of moments. Jane’s husband has finally proven to be the cad he’s always threatened to be; Gwen’s lonely single motherhood has been altered by an affair. Both women have children on the brink of adulthood, a phase much more trying than nose-wiping days past. A simple story of two women friends.

Yet, Phyllis Schieber’s pen makes this simple story glow. Her understanding of the complexities of human emotion illuminates the everyday life of her characters. Affairs, divorces, unplanned pregnancy, death, birth, love, sex …. Keep naming it; it’s all in there. Schieber paints her characters with a watercolor brush of sin and virtue, blurring the line between good guy and bad guy, a canvas of two women’s lives. In the end, you’ll know someone with a friendship exactly like Jane and Gwen: quirky, accepting, honest and true. And I hope that someone is you.

Recommended for book groups galore!

Also for readers interested in understated, exceptionally insightful, stories about our everyday life.… (plus d'informations)

Kaye, Barbara, and Ellen are women whose friendships came together came together as adults and has remained and solidified as they grew older. Kaye and Barbara have grown children they love. Ellen, who married later in adulthood, tried unsuccessfully to conceive with her husband, Bill. Her attempts at motherhood ultimately failed, as did her marriage after Bill began an affair with a woman half his age. As much as these women love and care for either other through thick and thin, through sarcasm and brutal honesty, they each are keeping secrets from each other. This novel is as much about learning to let go of the weight deep secrets that weigh and keep us down as it is about the meaning of friendship as women begin to mature beyond middle age. I found their stories delightful, life-affirming, and heartwarming.

Kaye, a psychologist, has what most would call a good, decent husband. Although he has to be asked to do the little things that Kaye longs for, he loves her, is a wonderful father, and respects her. This was fine until Frank entered her life and reignited the passion within her. He always said and did all the right things and before long, she was in love. She did not confide in her friends until she was on the verge of leaving George. As much as she didn’t want to hurt husband or her children, she had been putting others before herself for too long. Wasn’t now the time to discover all the passions of life she had been missing since her marriage?

Barbara, widowed just two years prior, has a wild secret. She used her talent for writing and her imagination years earlier to establish a successful career as a romance writer. She did so out of necessity because of the shady business deals her husband continued to make, putting the family in more than one precarious financial situation. He was a devoted father and she chose not to leave him after she grew confident that she could if required. Romances were her bread and butter, but after Roger’s death she opened herself up to a new genre of writing – erotica. When writing about women taking control of their sexuality, she was in many ways living out her own fantasies. The more successful her Delilah novels became, the harder it became to keep this secret. She let herself go in her fiction, but would she ever be able to open herself up to her children, her best friends, and her public?

Ellen, the ever classy interior designer, always made sure that she dressed and looked impeccable, right down to her beloved false eyelashes. The beauty she was and the beauty she created for other’s spaces held the painful secret of a teenage pregnancy and a coerced adoption. Her family, and most especially her mother, held the family’s appearances more important than her feelings. The lack of comfort and security she suffered at home prompted her to leave her small hometown and make her own way in the world. She never planned to marry, but after Bill knocked her defenses down, she told him about the daughter she lost. She gave in to love and hoped to start a family. Bill’s ultimate betrayal hurt her, but nothing hurt worse than knowing that the only child she would ever bring into life was callously taken away from her. Kaye and Barbara knew about her infertility, but she never opened up her deepest wound to them. Being stoic is how she learned to overcome the life’s unpleasantness.

When asked to participate in this book tour, I was immediately intrigued by the title. As a Catholic, I am familiar with confession and the release that comes from admitting your faults. Still, knowing what can await on the other side of the confessional does nothing make me eager to verbalize the secrets to which I hold on so tightly. You don’t have to be Catholic to understand this. Just a couple of years ago I remember what a phenomenon Post Secret became. My husband received one of the books as a gift and I remember reading every last one of those secrets. All at once I was looking for someone who might share the same secrets I have and thanking God I don’t have secrets nearly as horrible as others do. I know what a release it must feel for those who send those postcards. Reading this novel had a similar sharp effect on me.

The Sinner’s Guide to Confession is well written and it was not feel-good, predictable, brain candy chick lit for the middle aged woman I had imagined it would be. Although the holding and ultimate telling of secrets is a story as old as time and I left this novel glad to be alive, the author wrote these characters’ strengths and flaws so honestly and lovingly. Several times I felt I knew what was going to happen next only to find out I was wrong. The dialog was natural and at times I could see myself having a Diet Coke with them (I don’t drink tea, coffee or wine), thankful that they were letting me in on their private and not so private jokes. Kaye’s mother Gertie is one of my favorite characters in a long time. As much as I hope that I find someone like her in my life when I need her, I hope that I will be as wise and considerate when my predecessors need me. I was drawn into each characters’ secret, most especially Ellen’s. As an adoptive mother, her story hit home to me. The way that she calls her daughter Faith 32 years later touches my heart. Her hopes and fears gave me insight into Emma’s birth mother and I’m all the more thankful that we are all apart of each others lives. Although I’ve never doubted it, I know that there is nothing more important that Emma’s two mothers could do for her than create a relationship with each other.

I cannot encourage others enough to read this novel. Phyllis Schieber has written about women in their fifties, but this book is not just for older women. How glorious to read a novel about aging that isn’t all about losing youthful looks and figures, losing husbands, and being vengeful and bitter? While this can be the source of much comedy and catharsis, women making their own choices and continuing to grow and learn about themselves and the world around them is so much more appealing. I wish that Bette Midler, Diane Keaton, and Goldie Hawn played Kaye, Barbara, and Ellen instead of members of the First Wives’ Club. The stories here would make a move worth watching, enjoying, and remembering. As someone approaching middle age more quickly every day, I appreciated reading about women who change themselves when their lives and their marriages don’t live up to their fantasies instead of spending their time lashing out and getting even with people and situations outside of their control. My choice will always be to hold hope that faith held over a lifetime will ultimately lead to the purest joy.… (plus d'informations)