What I’m Reading: We are all Shipwrecks

I have told you that I’ve been in a bit of a funk as far as reading goes.  I’ve tired of WWII books.  Mystery books haven’t been cutting it.  Everything I’ve read has seemed a little far-fetched.  I was looking for something different.  I stumbled upon this book, We are all Shipwrecks by Kelli Grey Carlisle.  It was a memoir.  I thought maybe a different genre of book might launch me out of my funk.

So what did I think?  I very much enjoyed it.  It’s really much of a coming-of-age story.  I had great sympathy for the author/main character.  She is an excellent author skipping from past to present and from being a young child to a tween.  The transitions are seamless and I loved that.

The story grabbed me from the beginning and I was very eager to listen.  The book was exactly what I needed to get me out of my funk.  My hope now is to find another equally as good book.

Here is what Amazon had to say:
“Kelly always knew her family was different. She knew that most children didn’t live with their grandparents and that their grandparents didn’t own porn stores. Her classmates didn’t sleep on a boat in the L.A. harbor, and she knew their next-door neighbors probably weren’t drug addicts and johns. She knew that most of her classmates knew more about their moms than their cause of death. What Kelly didn’t know was if she would become part of the dysfunction that surrounded her. Would she end up selling adult videos and sinking into the depths of harbor life, or would she escape to live her own story somewhere else?

As an adult, Kelly decides to discover how the place where she came from defined the person she ultimately became. To do this, she goes back to the beginning―to a mother she never knew, a thirty-year-old cold case, and two of Los Angeles’s most notorious murderers.

We Are All Shipwrecks is Kelly’s story of redemption from tragedy, told with a tenderness toward her family that makes it as much about preserving the strings that anchor her as it is about breaking free.”

Amazon readers give the book 4.3 stars.  I would give the book 4.7 stars.  I would have given it more but the story just ended.  It wasn’t a “bad” ending but it wasn’t an amazing wrap-up ending.  I still really liked it.

You can find the book HERE if you are interested.  When I wrote this post, the book was reasonably priced at around $7 no matter what format you purchased it in.