Worth Somewhere In Between Five Hundred and A Thousand Words

Whenever I poke into a resale shop, I find lots of stuff that costs literally pennies. Pennies are my favorite type of money to hand over to sales clerks. So I pick up a DVD here, a candle there, a wall hanging for a few dollars more but still very nice price, and CDs for a few per dollar. It’s mostly old stuff, of course, but I’ve never exactly courted high fashion so that doesn’t bother me at all. 😊 While sorting through lots of things that are old and look it, I stumble sometimes on something that faintly brings back memories and one of those is Point of Grace. This Christian quartet recorded CDs for about 25 years, becoming a trio towards the end. I remember people often complained about their sticky sound and feel-goody message, but I didn’t listen to them much because they seemed to be for middle-aged women.
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However, with just a few cents per CD I took a chance on some of their albums. Maybe because I actually AM a middle-aged woman now or maybe because it’s time to give the group a reevaluation, I found I actually enjoyed some of their music. There are lots of frontrunner tracks that live up to their sugary reputation, like “Day by Day” and “Circle of Friends,” but tucked behind them I was surprised to find a few good tracks in the corners. I looked up the albums I didn’t have on YouTube and put 1 track per album I’d listened to into a YouTube playlist. It’s nice to listen to while I’m dealing with my books because I correlated the songs to go with a particular book in my mind. They appear in the playlist in the order books appear on the website (Track 4 “Love Like No Other” goes with my Scotland book which I will put at the top of the General Fiction category when it’s written) and at the end there are a couple of POG Christmas songs that I simply put in because I liked these 2 songs.

When our cars had lots and lots of trouble this week, I had the adventure of driving my sister to work in an unfamiliar area of town which has been tormented by massive construction around the interstate highway for 3 years. It wasn’t easy to figure out how to get there and back when she wasn’t directing me because the GPS was not working and I ended up having a near wreck at one point. But while I hung around the store waiting for her to close up, I got this lovely framed picture and at home I placed it near the portrait of our special friend, our Pomeranian dog, who passed away in June. The framed pic is a little hard to see from this angle, but it’s a painting of an enchanted-looking house just visible at the end of a moonlit lane surrounded by mysterious woods. I just liked it so much.

Review copies for next 2 weeks are A Year with the Harrisons and Bellevere House. If you complete a 5-star review and put it on 3 or more retailers, you can email me with your mailing address and links to the reviews and I will mail you a complimentary signed paperback copy of the book you reviewed. This isn’t an “incentive” just a thank you, and should not encourage you to put up a favorable review unless it is your real opinion. (Don't be fooled: I've listed Bellevere as Young Adult and Literary Fiction on the hosting site, but the review download page calls it "Chapter Books and Middle-Grade" for some reason. This is not a chapter book or MG fiction title, so you should be aware of that.)

A Year with the Harrisons Review Copy
Bellevere House Review Copy

​And there will be more updates.