Daily Book Excerpt: YA fiction:
Next book on the shelf is Sanctuary Tree 
More Sterling family drama. More of Tish Sterling’s over-dramatization of things. I related to it and admired it as a teenager myself – now I find it annoying. Tish’s beloved Grandfather dies. Tish, who is only 15, is so devastated she won’t go to the funeral. She grieves “in her own way”. Her family won’t forgive her for this. In my mind, a 15 year old doesn’t get to grieve “in her own way”. You go to the funeral with your family!! Then the Sterlings decide to sell the Grandfather’s farm in Pennsylvania – where they had spend every summer. Again, Tish throws a fit. They auction off Gramps’ furniture. Another fit from poor Tish, who thinks she loved Gramps more than anyone else. Tish: get a grip or I might have to bitch-slap you! Meanwhile, Tish’s sweetheart Ken is having major issues. His older brother Doug got a girl in trouble (Tish’s classmate) and the family is so disgraced that they are going to move. This means Tish and Ken will have to say goodbye. Let’s see what else. Oh yeah, another school play. This time it’s Doll’s House with Tish’s good friend Stella as Nora. Sanctuary Tree takes place in 1901, 1902 – and Stella is all fired up with suffragette fever … but of course the play will not let her get on a soapbox – and so she has a hard time playing the part. Uhm … there’s more, but I can’t remember. Oh yeah – Bron (Tish’s older sister) is married now, and pregnant with her first child.
Here’s an excerpt from after the auction of Gramps’ furniture. Tish had been fighting it every step of the way, flinging herself in front of various pieces of furniture, shouting, “No! You can’t sell this!” Finally, she was sent away for the day because she couldn’t behave herself. She returns home.
From Sanctuary Tree
Presently people started drifting off, murmuring things about having to be out in the fields early in the morning. Ben and Marnie and Peter and the twins went to see if they could strip another barrel of apples off the trees. Mama and Aunt Annie settled on the side lawn with Mr. and Mrs. Beeson, who were talking about the modernizations they had in mind. Indoor plumbing and hot water would be a definite improvement, but something very special and unique would be gone.
No, was already gone. Something that had made the farm a sanctuary to me had long since vanished. I would have that, from now on, only in my heart. It had been folly for me to think a geographical entity had anything to do with it. Oh, Mama had known that, hadn’t she, all along? That was why she had been able to look with stony equanimity on those wagons driving off with all the bits and pieces of what once had been a home. What had been stripped in the auction today was nothing but the shell.
And it came to me that, drat it all, maybe Mr. Stanyon had been right, that to hold onto a husk, to delude oneself that the breath of life could still be in it, was a blasphemy and an idolatry. The only constant in life was change. No, there was more. There were also memories. And love.
I had not found sanctuary here, because sanctuary was not a geographical location. I had to find it – and wasn’t that what Gramps had always been trying to teach me – in myself. And in kindred people, like Gramps himself. And Ken.
How odd, that Ken and I had both thought we had to get away from a neighborhood, get to a place. We should have remembered that when we just knocked down the walls of our own self-consciousness, we were always able to be wells to one another.
It was easy to say, I thought wryly, once it had been faced. But I was all too human, as I well knew. I didn’t have Gramps’s seventy-odd years of experience to fall back on for reassurance. I needed tangible talismans, whatever folly it might be to believe that they could give me strength or comfort.
The sky was darkening. From the orchard came the sound of laughter and gay voices, and Aunt Annie strode over there purposefully to propel her two to bed. The Beesons left. I went down to the river and sat on a tree branch extending out over the quiet water. I had not been there long before a weird figure came toward me from the house. It was Mama, carrying Gramps’s old rocker. She plunked it down on the ground, near to me but not intruding on my private space.
“Might as well have it. Nobody’d like to’ve bought it anyhow, seeing’s the paint’s most gone from his hanging wet dishcloths across the back to dry.” She turned and stomped back to the house. My mother, whom Gramps had once likened to a prickly pear, the harsh exterior only a defense for the softness hidden deep inside.
The stars came out, and a breeze blew from the river, and all alone I sat down in the old chair and cried.
