TUESDAY MEMES — MARCH 8

Welcome to Tuesday, and the memes that spotlight bookish excerpts.  Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by Should Be Reading.

Here’s how it works.

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers.

I’m focusing on excerpts from two books:  one for Teaser Tuesdays, and the other for Tuesday Teasers (passages from my own creations).

The Easter Parade, by Richard Yates, is my first presentation.

In The Easter Parade, first published in 1976, we meet sisters Sarah and Emily Grimes when they are still the children of divorced parents. We observe the sisters over four decades, watching them grow into two very different women. Sarah is stable and stalwart, settling into an unhappy marriage. Emily is precocious and independent, struggling with one unsatisfactory love affair after another. Richard Yates’s classic novel is about how both women struggle to overcome their tarnished family’s past, and how both finally reach for some semblance of renewal.

Teaser Tuesdays:  He was staying in a rundown hotel in Hell’s Kitchen—she soon came to know everything about that hotel, from the smells of piss and disinfectant in the lobby to the slow cage of the elevator to the raddled green carpet in his room—and his ship was undergoing extensive repairs in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, which meant he would be in New York all summer.  His name was Lars Ericson.  p. 63

***

My Tuesday Teaser is from Web of Tyranny (Kindle), by Laurel-Rain Snow. (That’s me, of course!)

In equal parts funny and serious, Web of Tyranny by Laurel-Rain Snow is a proud, if poignant tale of Margaret Elaine Graham, a woman entangled in the trenches that epitomized her abusive childhood home only to flee into a stultifying marriage with Bob Williams. Seduced by the hope of achieving her goal of a college education and a life free from domination, she is blinded to Bob’s true qualities—and in a very real sense jumps from the pan into the fire. Oppression begets oppression and as Meg walks a thin line of human betrayal, she learns to stake her own claim to happiness—no matter how high the cost. Her fight leads to politicking during the radical antiwar movement of the 60s and 70s, which manifests as a near-compulsion, which will turn her world on end. Enticed by the possibilities open to her and chafing at the strictures of the marital ties, Meg bolts from the marriage with her toddler son in tow where a whole myriad of troubles await her.

Excerpt: And in the true mode of people everywhere who are steeped in denial, those three, Lainey, Rainbow and Natasha, all sought ways to explain and justify and even whitewash their behaviors and motives for the oldest reason in the book.  So that they could, somehow, find a way to live with their choices, made impulsively, or perhaps even with forethought.

They limped along, hoping to somehow make it through the night.

What are you showcasing today?  I hope you’ll stop by and share.