Saturday, July 15, 2017

What is Jean E. Pendziwol reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Jean E. Pendziwol, author of The Lightkeeper's Daughters.

Her entry begins:
Like many other writers, I get very picky about what I read when I’m writing and avoid novels in my own genre when I’m actively drafting. Right now, I’m in the research stage of my next project, which means I’ve been able to expand my reading and get “caught up” on my to-be-read list.

As a Canadian, I have read several of Margaret Atwood’s books over the years, but somehow her dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale slipped through the cracks. Because the story has recently been adapted for TV and broadcast on Hulu, and the themes echo the current political dynamic in the United States, it has experienced a renewed popularity and I felt it was time to dig up a copy. I’m glad I did. Set in a near-future New England when the United States government has been overthrown by a totalitarian Christian theocracy, it explores themes of...[read on]
About The Lightkeeper's Daughters, from the publisher:
Though her mind is still sharp, Elizabeth's eyes have failed. No longer able to linger over her beloved books or gaze at the paintings that move her spirit, she fills the void with music and memories of her family—a past that suddenly becomes all too present when her late father's journals are found amid the ruins of an old shipwreck.

With the help of Morgan, a delinquent teenage performing community service, Elizabeth goes through the diaries, a journey through time that brings the two women closer together. Entry by entry, these unlikely friends are drawn deep into a world far removed from their own—to Porphyry Island on Lake Superior, where Elizabeth’s father manned the lighthouse seventy years before.

As the words on these musty pages come alive, Elizabeth and Morgan begin to realize that their fates are connected to the isolated island in ways they never dreamed. While the discovery of Morgan's connection sheds light onto her own family mysteries, the faded pages of the journals hold more questions than answers for Elizabeth, and threaten the very core of who she is.
Visit Jean E. Pendziwol's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Lightkeeper's Daughters.

Writers Read: Jean E. Pendziwol.

--Marshal Zeringue