Sisterchicks

Sisterchicks on the Loose

By Robin Jones Gunn

325 pages

Multnomah Press

$12.99

Description:

In “Sisterchicks on the Loose”, Robin Jones Gunn wrote a book that illustrates the true meaning of friendships. Sisterchicks stay together through thick and thin

Sharon has lived calmly in Chinook Springs , Washington , her entire life. All that changes when her best friend of twenty years, Penny, takes an impulsive trip to seek out her only living relatives in Finland -- and brings Sharon with her. The land of reindeer and saunas holds infinite varieties of zaniness for these two unlikely friends -- Sharon is a quiet mother of four and Penny was a motorcycle mama before she came to Christ -- who return home with a new view of God, a new zest for life, and a big impact on those around them for decades to come.

Review:

This is the best fiction title I’ve read in a long time. I really don’t spend much time reading fiction (I’m more of a “give-me-the-facts” kind of gal), but I’m sure glad I picked up this book. It was a great read, and it left me feeling good about being a woman and encouraged to strengthen the ties I have with other women. I loved the characters, whom are three dimensional and have things happen to them that could, and probably would, happen to any of us.

If you are looking for some light reading that will leave you feeling positive about life, pick up a copy of this book.

You can purchase it For $12.99 with FREE shipping in the U.S. using our special order form: https://www.pcpublications.org/hw/specialbookorder.html

EXCERPT...

Prologue

Kittos Cottage
Maple Leaf Lake, Washington:

When my husband tells this story, he says it started the day I dyed my hair green. Jeff likes to tell how he found me crying my eyes out on the bathroom floor with an airline ticket in one hand and a can of root beer in the other.

I prefer to start this story where it actually began more than a decade before the green hair incident. It was a hot August night back in the early eighties. My dearest friend of all time, Penny and I were on duty in the church nursery. Seven of the sweaty children in the nursery that Sunday evening belonged to the two of us.

I was rocking my wailing daughter when Penny, in the middle of a diaper change, turned to me and said, "Let's make a deal, Sharon. When they graduate, let's go somewhere. Just the two of us."

"Where would we go?" I asked.

"Finland!" she spouted.

I stopped and stared to see if she was serious. She was.

I suppose I should back this story up to when Penny and I first met. It was 1979. Penny and Dave were married and expecting their first child. That's when they started attending our conservative little church in Chinook Springs, Washington. They joined our home Bible study and pulled up that first night on a motorcycle, wearing matching suede jackets with fringe on the arms. Penny left her muddy boots by the front door and settled on my tattered couch as still as a tiger concealed in the brush. I'd never had such a potentially wild person in my house before.

The next week, Penny showed up with a burlap sack stuffed with freshly dug up iris bulbs. She asked if I had a Bible she could borrow and our friendship was off to a tender, unconventional start. That was 21 years ago.

Penny and I were in each other's every day life while raising our children. Our husbands swapped tools and went fishing on Saturday mornings. Penny and I never had a fight.

Then Dave got the job he'd always wanted at a big computer company and the Lane family packed up and moved to San Francisco.

I was lost.

For a month I cried when no one was looking. Our phone bill went into the triple digits. Penny kept saying we'd get together, just the two of us, but nothing ever worked out. My separation anxiety lasted for two embarrassing years.

This is where my husband picks up the story. Jeff says that out of the blue Penny decided to go to Finland. He doesn't remember the part about the church nursery where the idea was hatched a decade before Penny put wings to her plan. Jeff says he found me curled up against the bathroom wall, staring at the ticket and guzzling root beer.

I wasn't guzzling root beer. I'm pretty sure I wasn't drinking anything.

Jeff says I was sobbing because I was in shock.

I wasn't sobbing. I was sighing really loud. There is a difference.

Jeff likes to add a punch line here about how I dramatically pulled the towel off my head and ta da! My hair was green!

That part, unfortunately, is true.

For many years I've listened to my dear husband's account of the once in a lifetime trip Penny and I took to Finland in February of 1992. He loves to embellish and every time he tells it, the story morphs into something that only vaguely resembles our real adventure.

Last Friday Jeff had our new daughter in law in a state of stunned silence while going on about the night Penny and I accompanied two seventy-year old women into a Finnish sauna. Jeff said we got all steamed up and then jumped in a frozen lake.

It wasn't a lake. It was just the snow.

The snow and a single star. Jeff never includes the part about the star.

I got so mad at him. As soon as everyone left I said, "I don't want you to tell stories about Finland anymore. You get it all wrong and it's not even your story. It's my story. Mine and Penny's."

Jeff got a sly grin on his face and I immediately knew what he was thinking. He was thinking he had finally succeeded in pushing me into the corner where a pad of paper and a pen had been waiting for me for years.

And he was right. He had succeeded.

So here I sit, in my corner of the world ready to tell the story the way it really happened when Penny and I jumped over the moon.

To purchase this book for $12.99 with free shipping use our special order form at:

https://www.pcpublications.org/hw/specialbookorder.html