May 2017 Book of the Month | In a Nutshell: A heart-warming story about first loves, friendship and the power of kindness
What’s important in life? Money, success, popularity are all words that float to the top of the list yet friendship, empathy, kindness and love are possibly where happiness really resides. This warm, heart lifting novel from Jennifer E. Smith encourages us to question what is really important in life.
Alice buys best friend Teddy a lottery ticket for his birthday as a joke. She doesn’t believe in luck and the last thing she expects is for Teddy to win and win big. Suddenly the comfortable life she has come to know is thrown in to disarray and things begin to change and the Teddy she thought she knew so well and who she’s secretly been in love with for years, begins to change. As she sees his popularity rise along with his bank balance and their hopes and dreams change, she begins to feel that she is losing him. But soon Teddy discovers that using his new found wealth committing random acts of kindness is the way forward and Alice joins him on helping to change the lives of random strangers. This thoughtful, inspiring story follows them on their adventure as they grow, sometimes together and sometimes apart, but both discovering a little more about each other and themselves along the way.
For me Alice and Teddy’s story highlights the changes we can all make within our own world and the knock on effect that can have. It’s a wonderful message about love, hope and friendship, and ultimately about acceptance; acceptance that we can’t always control what happens in our lives but that our own actions have the power to change, maybe not the whole world, but certainly the world for at least one person through the kindness we can share. And that is a wonderful power to have indeed. ~ Shelley Fallows
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