Thursday, March 24, 2011

Lolly's Yarn by Anna Laurene Arnett



Lolly’s Yarn is a delightful collection of stories from the life of author Anna Laurene Arnett. I thoroughly enjoyed reading about her childhood, her courtship with the handsome Charles Arnett, their wedding, her child birthing experiences, and their many moves across the US and even to Japan. Even before I read the last page, felt like part of the Arnett family.

I didn’t barrel through Lolly’s Yarn all in a few days as I usually do when reading a novel. True, Anna’s account of growing up and going back east to work, then meeting and falling love with Charles, played out like a romance novel and kept me reading. After that, I read a few of her stories each day and savored them—relating them to my own life. I loved that Anna enjoyed being a mother and wife--refreshing for today. I appreciated her willingness to accept the role of stay at home mom. You could feel her love and devotion to her seven children. And when they were all grown, Anna went to college and became a teacher.

Anna keeps you laughing, and in places she makes you cry. Lolly’s Yarn is a story about real people, real wars, and real happenings, Anna Laurene Arnett retells a life full of adventure with an honest voice that blesses all who will read.

Anna's son Mark made a documentary about Charles' service in WWII and named it after his father's fighter plane--"Baby Boomerang." This interesting hour interviews and real footage and photographs from the war puts you right in time period. Mark tells the story of his father’s World War II experience to the spoiled, pretentious, and ungrateful baby boomer generation that he belongs to. He succeeds in drawing us into a very personal story that explores faith, courage, love, and the inescapable fact that, in many ways, we all turn into our parents in the end.

Buy Lolly's Yarn here, and "Baby Boomerang" here.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks, Joan for this review. You have caught what I wanted most to portray, in Lolly's Yarn, namely that even we mundane people can be happy if we choose to be. It isn't what we own, where we are, who we know, our marital status, our talents, or even the state of our health or our age that makes us happy or sad. It's how we respond to each given situation, the thoughts we choose to keep, what we say when we are talking to ourselves that count. Even the Bible insists, "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he." (Don't ask for chapter and verse. If you want to know, look it up.)

    Thanks also for the plug for Baby Boomerang. It still makes me laugh and cry. Mark spliced military film so well that even when I knew better, it still felt like I was actually seeing my husband's B-24 crash when I watched it with a few hundred friends and family in the theater the evening of my husband's burial. The documentary has won many awards, but best of all, it's a fitting tribute to the man I fell in love with and married. I still do not consider him dead. He's just on another overseas assignment. Only this time, he doesn't write.

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