Cold Tangerines
Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life
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4.6 • 62 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Shauna Niequist calls us to see the beauty, hope, and dimension in our ordinary days through the life-giving practice of celebration.
Cold Tangerines is beautiful narration of Shauna's journey as a young writer, wife, and mom making peace with herself and crafting a life that celebrates the extraordinary moments hidden in the everyday. Throughout each story echoes the heartbeat message that the normal, daily life ticking by on our streets and sidewalks, at our dinner tables and in our late-night talks--is the most precious thing any of us will ever experience.
With her signature warmth and vulnerable storytelling, Shauna offers a feast of thoughtful reflections on the small moments that make up the human experience, the spiritual life, and things that seem ordinary but just might be sacred after all. She invites us into a new way of living with the awareness of God's movement gracing every part of our day.
Both a voice of challenge and song of comfort, this gallery of celebration encourages us to turn our attention to the marvelous life happening right under our noses. Join Shauna in this heartfelt and hopeful call upward to a new way of being, where there's room to breathe, to rest, to break down, and break through to the best possible life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Niequist, a 30-year-old mother and first-time author, wants readers to look around their ordinary lives and celebrate all their manifold, quotidian blessings. To that end, she offers 40 short essays, each an exploration of something mundane and wonderful: getting pregnant, throwing parties, collecting champagne flutes. She recalls a breakup that deepened her relationship with God, and explains why moving into a fixer-upper helped her learn that God loves us as we are. A lovely, honest and wistful tone characterizes the title piece, an ode to living a life of gratitude and joy. Essays on a friend's health scare, the power of art and experiencing Christmas with a newborn are especially powerful. Yet Niequist's relentlessly first-person reflections would have been leavened by more fully developing some of the other characters, the relatives and friends who pop up. Sometimes her prose is annoyingly abstract ("if we cultivate a true attention, a deep ability to see what has been there all along, we will find worlds within and between us"), and there are clich d observations. Still, with a bit of seasoning (and more vigorous editing), Niequist could be a writer to watch.
Customer Reviews
Life-changing
This is the 3rd book I've read by this author and each one has touched me so deeply. Her raw honesty and perspective of life is beautiful and has been life-changing for me. I look at this world in a different way now and I'm forever grateful. This is a must-read.