Crystal Ward

didn’t feel like slowly revealing backstory, but like I’d missed the first book in a trilogy and was trying to start with the second. I read like half of Love Warrior (her previous book) before my library ebook expired and it was good but not life-changingly good or anything. This is a sort of half-travel memoir that flashes between the author’s trip to India where she hoped to spot a tiger in the wild and the life-altering accident that she suffered a few years before the trip. : I requested this book from NetGalley like, last winter but kept postponing reading it in favor of other things

If you saw my post about Shipwrecked Treasure Museum in Branson, MO last week, you’re probably considering checking it out the next time you’re in town. The first one is to win the Family Pass to the museum, the second is for the pirate-era shipwreck coin. You are totally welcome to enter both giveaways, I just want to make sure the museum pass goes to someone who can actually use it! In the highly unlikely event that the same winner is drawn at random for both giveaways, they will get to choose one prize and a new winner will be drawn for the other.

I loved learning the stories behind each exhibit, and it’s crazy to look at artifacts like a piece of pottery that was literally underwater for thousands of years! The bottle wall holds almost 100 bottles recovered from the SS Republic shipwreck, and there’s a cool interactive touch screen set up in the same order as the display so that if you see a bottle that looks interesting, you can tap the image and learn more about what was inside. After learning about how shipwrecks are found and artifacts are recovered, you can check out some really interesting artifacts arranged beneath a replica of one of the SS Republic’s paddle wheels, which would be 3 stories tall if stood on end! I think it’s super cool that buy can buy artifacts just like the ones in the museum!

As always tends to happen when you finally read the book that a movie is based on, this gives a lot more depth to the story and characters that I never knew. Where the movie has the grandfather telling Fred Savage the story, the book is set up as the author abridging this old text that he found, so you still get the interludes. People often mistake numbness for nothingness, but numbness isn’t the absence of feelings; it’s a response to being overwhelmed by too many feelings. I couldn’t remember anything, so I got on the waiting list and finally got to listen again.