Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life

For me, several criteria must be met before I'll consider the highest review rating for a book, movie, or piece of music. For instance, if reading a collection of words causes me to put a book down, get up from where I'm seated and wander around the room because I don't know what to do with the emotions that have slipped past all the safe guards and invaded my soul, then there is something significant about the one who penned those words. I did not want to read this book. It seemed to have all the promise of a superficial, feel-good, new-agey amassing of words that guarantee a happiness equal in value to the suggested retail price. And the brief author-bio on the back cover should have clenched the deal: a Christian from Willow Creek -- certainly her words could be nothing more than a focus-group confirmed, market-driven strategy for a thinly veiled excuse to proselytize. However, the subtitle expressed a subject of deep interest to me: finding the sacred in the mundane, so I opened the book and read a random paragraph. What I read startled me. The paragraph was an admonition to the reader about the great risk of being someone who cares and the author's words had very little to do with a superficial happiness. She writes: "...I whisper to them, 'be careful.' You will be haunted by what you find there, and you won't be able to wash away what you've seen and heard. You will see things and hear things, and then you will be responsible for them, for telling the truth about who you are and who you discover you are not..." (pg. 141) Filleted by these words, I checked the book out from my library and began to page through the short chapters in no intentional order. Contrary to all my unfortunate biases, I was quite humbled to discover a human being. I wasn't reading, in some circumfrential manner, about a person, about their life history, about their successes and failures, about their concepts or their opinions about life. I was, instead, invited past the writer's fleshy parts to the cellular level of existence. (This, by the way, is another high-rating criterion). Niequest does something with words. And her words are, at first glance, what I assumed the whole book would be -- superficial. But then she surprised me. In the midst of mundane story-telling she manages an alchemical shift (one almost imperceptible), weaving experience into digestible pieces of very raw wisdom. Inexplicably, after almost every chapter, I found myself faced...with myself (more criterion). Absolutely magical. In my view, the author achieves her stated goal: encouraging a life of celebration. But she accomplishes this by taking the reader on a journey through the unsafe and dark terrain of her own soul (leading the way in her pajamas, no less). The landscape is, at times, scandalous with its honesty, and almost always emotionally and spiritually raw. In other words, she brings the reader to the place of being human...and about that, there's not

Cold Tangerines celebrates the rawness and reality of life amidst the amazing wonders God provides daily, if we just look (taste, feel, see, touch). Thanks for helping me contemplate my soul more and feel encouraged that even when life is hard (as it will be), there is so much authenticity, intimacy and joy offered. I loved "basement," and laughed as I'm your "other" kind of friend but NOT my basement (i'm like YOU and felt so known) but i'd like to say it's because I'm married to a creative person like you so I don't get my neat cleaned-up shelves. it's probably better i don't. GET THIS BOOK--YOU WILL BE FILLED.

I got Cold Tangerines in the mail from a friend two days ago and sat down to read for twenty minutes. Six hours later--and after migrations from my favorite comfy chair to the kitchen table to the car (not the safest way to read, admittedly) to my bed--I closed the book and felt just as embraced and understood and satisfied with the ride as I was terrifically annoyed that it was over. Shauna's entries made me grin that knowing grin I grin when I read my own past journals. The sordid and the splendid kind of collide, and although some of the memories and realities are hard to face, they remain my memories, my realities. Her style has that quality--the "resonance" thing that will frustrate you by what you see in the mirrors she holds up as much as it delights you. I hope it's the first of many more books from Shauna.

I am in awe of people who are brave enough to be gut-level honest with complete strangers by writing down the truth about themselves for all to read. Sometimes the details are too stark and too raw; after a while you just can't read any more. But then there are people like Shauna, who can weave truth, be it beautiful or ugly, with heart-breaking prose that is lovely, simple, clean, and, well, lovely. Yes, it deserves to be said twice. It made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me wonder and dream and think, which is more than I can say for a lot of the books I've read lately. Every minute spent with it was a gift and a joy, and I would recommend it to anyone.