The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey

The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Elisabeth Tova Bailey

208 pages

★★★★★

This memoir is a collection of essays that follows Bailey as she falls ill and becomes bedridden and has nothing to do besides watch the daily activities of a snail on her bedside table. She begins to discover more about herself and her own world as she learns more about the snail and its small world.

This book gave me a better appreciation for life and the things we are capable of, as well as more understanding about the science and nature of snails. It also just made me really want a pet snail!

The First Love by Beverly Lewis

The First Love by Beverly Lewis - 304 pages

It's the summer of 1951, and Maggie Esh is in need of some hope. Sweet-spirited and uncommonly pretty despite struggling with chronic illness, she is used to being treated kindly by the young men of her Old Order Amish church district. Yet Maggie wishes she were more like other courting-age girls so she could live a normal, healthy life.

To make matters more complicated, Dat has recently remarried, less than a year after her mother died. And while her stepmother is kind, Rachel is much younger than Mamm, and she simply doesn't understand Maggie or her illness the way Mamm did.

When tent revival meetings come to the area, Maggie is curious, and the words of the Mennonite preacher challenge her to reconsider what she knows about faith. Can she learn to trust God even when hope seems a distant dream?