One for Michelle and Mary...6 Degrees of Booking

Two Weeks With My Brother by Nicholas Sparks relates his life story and how experiences both planned and unplanned shape our lives and ourselves.

Like the men of Alpha Company in Vietnam – who Tim O’Brien writes of their burden in The Things They Carried and the “silent awe for the terrible power of the things they carried.”

An awe experienced by Jing-Mei when her mother Suyuan Mei in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club reveals her secret – she left her twin daughters on a roadside hoping to create a better future for them and save them from the certain fate of death.

Yet, Shakespeare's Othello determines his own fate because he betrayed Desdemona and “like a base Indian, threw a pearl away richer than all his tribe.”

Realizations come at death like Mrs. Mallard’s discovery of freedom in Kate Chopin’s “A Story of an Hour.” Mrs. Mallard relishes her freedom upon her husband’s death after suffering silently in an unhappy marriage.

Similarly, Offred, in A Handmaid’s Tale, suffers in a pseudo marriage and gains freedom when she escapes from the dystopia, Gilead after enduring sexual violence. Margaret Atwood’s warning to all women not to become complacent for our choices shape who we become.