GOOD AND BAD NEWS AND BOOK REVIEW

The good news is that Mark said it was raining at his house, and the weatherman says rain is moving our way tonight. The bad news is that the biopsy was positive for melanoma on the back of my head. It is a shallow one and I have contacted a surgeon in FW to operated so that I can have Kathy Rodenberger take care of me. She is a great nurse according to her mother who has had several operations recently. I am waiting for the biopsy results to be read by Dr. Maberry to schedule the surgery.

I finally tonight finished a great novel HEART OF STONES by Lanna Richards. For some reason I had never thought of Irishmen owning plantations in Mississippi. I always thought of English or Scotch owning ranches and plantations. This novel is about an Irish family who fled Ireland due to the potato famine and operating a cotton plantation. And I never thought of Mississippi having drought problems but thinking about the last few years of drought in the South, that is reasonable. Tension exists all the way through the book and you keep expecting the worse. I won't spill the beans but it was a satisfying read about a complex family and their relationships on the plantation, the social part of a small town and university scenes. Lanna is like Preston Lewis, the book publisher went out of business after publishing her first novel so she is looking for another publisher to reprint and look at other manuscripts she has. I suggested she republish it with a different name like Grace because the main character is named Grace and it should sell in Christian bookstores for the faith seen in the story. She lives in Plano and we met at Macaroni Grill in FW for lunch that I mentioned earlier.