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Llama Drama

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Llama Drama: A Piper the Cairn Story I am turning out to be a very bad blogger. In my defense all I can say is that I often bite off more than I can chew and in this case setting up the expectation of blogging weekly choked the proverbial horse. As always, I promise to do better- to provide more regular book reviews and musings..  maybe even a list of 'what I read this week' would be better than nothing. I am all about making amends and so, in keeping with the original intent of this blog to be not just about books, but also about the life of a bookseller, I'm going to share with you the story of Piper and her Llama. Piper at the end of a long hard day   as a bookstore dog In early December, on a trip to the mountains, I purchased a fluffy, adorable stuffed animal at Mast General Store in Valle Crucis. It was a beautiful white llama with a multicolored and tasseled halter; a perfect gift for the upcoming grandchild of a dear, dear friend. Several weeks later, I tuc
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Inheritance  by Dani Shapiro You know those $99 DNA kits where you spit in something, pop it in a mailer and then wait for the results to find out if your grandfather was telling the truth when he always said he was 1/16 Cherokee which would make your mother 1/32 so you should be 1/64? Which is going to be about the most exciting thing you could learn since your family trees go back several hundred years and what else could there be to know other than that you have a lot of the basic European migratory countries in your system? Dani Shapiro had one of those kits and followed the instructions as outlined; waited for her results and then found out her uber observant Jewish father who had lovingly raised her but died tragically in a car accident when she was but 23 wasn't actually her biological father. Which makes her half-sister not her half-sister and also makes a lot of sense about why Shapiro, with her blonde hair and blue eyes, has felt all these years as an 'other'
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I ate it up...

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The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls   by Anissa Gray  So on my four day whirlwind trip to PA I listened to the audio version of the above title, having recently downloaded it through our co-branded site- libro.fm (link below).  Thankfully I had fourteen hours to while away in the car because this was one of those books that would have had me inventing errands just to get back in the car and listen. Yea, that good.  The book has a variety of narrators, most are related. It begins with the voice of Althea, a forty'ish woman born and raised in Michigan. Althea's mother died when she was twelve leaving her to do a lot of her own raising, along with that of her three younger siblings, while their preacher daddy was off spreading the word. Her baby sister is Lillian, an interior decorator recently returned to town from New York City with her ex-husband's Chinese grandmother, Nai Nai, in tow. (for what it's worth, I LOVE Nai Nai. Remember the grandmother i
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Sitting in the snow..

welcome to Outer Banks Reader.. the blog of a book lover, bookseller, book buyer, book clubber and any other word that pairs with or starts with my favorite four letter word. No, it didn't snow on the Outer Banks this winter, and as it is already March it probably won't, but I made a quick weekend trip up across the Mason-Dixon to see my favorite niece and nephew (okay, my only niece and nephew) perform in their high school musical and am now looking out over 3-4" new fallen snow. I've been working on a new website design for the bookstores I run this winter and as part of that have finally decided to include a blog. A blog about books.. and reading.. and the life of a bookstore.. and maybe sometimes just life. Namaste. 
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