Cold Tangerines: Celebrating the Extraordinary Nature of Everyday Life [Hardcover]

Shauna Niequist (Author)

Book Description

Release date: October 9, 2007

Cold Tangerines is a collection of stories that celebrate the extraordinary moments hidden in our everyday lives. It is about God, and about life, and about the thousands of daily ways in which an awareness of God changes and infuses everything. It is about spiritual life, and about all the things that we have called nonspiritual life that might be spiritual after all. It is the snapshots of a young woman making peace with herself and her life, and trying to craft a life that captures the energy and exuberance we long for in the midst of the fear and regret and envy we all carry with us. It is both a voice of challenge and song of comfort, calling us upward to the best possible life, and giving us room to breathe, to rest, to break down and break through. Cold Tangerines offers bright and varied glimpses of hope and redemption, in and among the heartbreak And boredom and broken glass.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Niequist, a 30-year-old mother and first-time author, wants readers to look around their ordinary lives and celebrate all their manifold, quotidian blessings. To that end, she offers 40 short essays, each an exploration of something mundane and wonderful: getting pregnant, throwing parties, collecting champagne flutes. She recalls a breakup that deepened her relationship with God, and explains why moving into a fixer-upper helped her learn that God loves us as we are. A lovely, honest and wistful tone characterizes the title piece, an ode to living a life of gratitude and joy. Essays on a friend's health scare, the power of art and experiencing Christmas with a newborn are especially powerful. Yet Niequist's relentlessly first-person reflections would have been leavened by more fully developing some of the other characters, the relatives and friends who pop up. Sometimes her prose is annoyingly abstract (if we cultivate a true attention, a deep ability to see what has been there all along, we will find worlds within and between us), and there are clichéd observations. Still, with a bit of seasoning (and more vigorous editing), Niequist could be a writer to watch. (Oct.)
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Review

Niequist, a 30-year-old mother and first-time author, wants readers to look around their ordinary lives and celebrate all their manifold, quotidian blessings. To that end, she offers 40 short essays, each an exploration of something mundane and wonderful: getting pregnant, throwing parties, collecting champagne flutes. She recalls a breakup that deepened her relationship with God, and explains why moving into a fixer-upper helped her learn that God loves us as we are. A lovely, honest and wistful tone characterizes the title piece, an ode to living a life of gratitude and joy. Essays on a friend's health scare, the power of art and experiencing Christmas with a newborn are especially powerful. Yet Niequist's relentlessly first-person reflections would have been leavened by more fully developing some of the other characters, the relatives and friends who pop up. Sometimes her prose is annoyingly abstract ('if we cultivate a true attention, a deep ability to see what has been there all along, we will find worlds within and between us'), and there are cliched observations. Still, with a bit of seasoning (and more vigorous editing), Niequist could be a writer to watch. (Oct.) -- Publisher's Weekly <br><br>

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 238 pages
• Publisher: Zondervan (October 9, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0310273609
• ISBN-13: 978-0310273608
• Product Dimensions: 5.7 x 0.9 x 8.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (87 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #63,568 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Shauna Niequist is the author of Cold Tangerines, Bittersweet, and Bread & Wine. Shauna grew up in Barrington, Illinois, and then studied English and French Literature at Westmont College in Santa Barbara. She is married to Aaron Niequist, who is a pianist and songwriter. Aaron is a worship leader at Willow Creek Community Church and is recording a project called A New Liturgy. Aaron & Shauna live outside Chicago with their sons, Henry and Mac. Shauna writes about the beautiful and broken moments of everyday life--friendship, family, faith, food, marriage, love, babies, books, celebration, heartache, and all the other things that shape us, delight us, and reveal to us the heart of God. You can find out more about Shauna and read her blog at www.shaunaniequist.com.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

52 of 55 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Why Five Stars? March 7, 2008

By K. B. Noonan

Format:Hardcover

For me, several criteria must be met before I'll consider the highest review rating for a book, movie, or piece of music. For instance, if reading a collection of words causes me to put a book down, get up from where I'm seated and wander around the room because I don't know what to do with the emotions that have slipped past all the safe guards and invaded my soul, then there is something significant about the one who penned those words.

I did not want to read this book. It seemed to have all the promise of a superficial, feel-good, new-agey amassing of words that guarantee a happiness equal in value to the suggested retail price. And the brief author-bio on the back cover should have clenched the deal: a Christian from Willow Creek -- certainly her words could be nothing more than a focus-group confirmed, market-driven strategy for a thinly veiled excuse to proselytize. However, the subtitle expressed a subject of deep interest to me: finding the sacred in the mundane, so I opened the book and read a random paragraph.

What I read startled me. The paragraph was an admonition to the reader about the great risk of being someone who cares and the author's words had very little to do with a superficial happiness. She writes:

"...I whisper to them, 'be careful.' You will be haunted by what you find there, and you won't be able to wash away what you've seen and heard. You will see things and hear things, and then you will be responsible for them, for telling the truth about who you are and who you discover you are not..." (pg. 141)

Filleted by these words, I checked the book out from my library and began to page through the short chapters in no intentional order. Contrary to all my unfortunate biases, I was quite humbled to discover a human being. I wasn't reading, in some circumfrential manner, about a person, about their life history, about their successes and failures, about their concepts or their opinions about life. I was, instead, invited past the writer's fleshy parts to the cellular level of existence. (This, by the way, is another high-rating criterion).

Niequest does something with words. And her words are, at first glance, what I assumed the whole book would be -- superficial. But then she surprised me. In the midst of mundane story-telling she manages an alchemical shift (one almost imperceptible), weaving experience into digestible pieces of very raw wisdom. Inexplicably, after almost every chapter, I found myself faced...with myself (more criterion). Absolutely magical.

In my view, the author achieves her stated goal: encouraging a life of celebration. But she accomplishes this by taking the reader on a journey through the unsafe and dark terrain of her own soul (leading the way in her pajamas, no less). The landscape is, at times, scandalous with its honesty, and almost always emotionally and spiritually raw. In other words, she brings the reader to the place of being human...and about that, there's nothing superficial.

There are other things that I feel should be present in a work worthy of five stars. Some of the criteria are subject or genre specific. Niequist's work certainly deserves this rating. This is an excellent book.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An Afternoon Well Spent October 2, 2007

By A. Wiersma

Format:Hardcover

I got Cold Tangerines in the mail from a friend two days ago and sat down to read for twenty minutes. Six hours later--and after migrations from my favorite comfy chair to the kitchen table to the car (not the safest way to read, admittedly) to my bed--I closed the book and felt just as embraced and understood and satisfied with the ride as I was terrifically annoyed that it was over.

Shauna's entries made me grin that knowing grin I grin when I read my own past journals. The sordid and the splendid kind of collide, and although some of the memories and realities are hard to face, they remain my memories, my realities. Her style has that quality--the "resonance" thing that will frustrate you by what you see in the mirrors she holds up as much as it delights you. I hope it's the first of many more books from Shauna.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Am Eating it Up! November 26, 2007

By A. Mury

Format:Hardcover

Cold Tangerines celebrates the rawness and reality of life amidst the amazing wonders God provides daily, if we just look (taste, feel, see, touch). Thanks for helping me contemplate my soul more and feel encouraged that even when life is hard (as it will be), there is so much authenticity, intimacy and joy offered. I loved "basement," and laughed as I'm your "other" kind of friend but NOT my basement (i'm like YOU and felt so known) but i'd like to say it's because I'm married to a creative person like you so I don't get my neat cleaned-up shelves. it's probably better i don't. GET THIS BOOK--YOU WILL BE FILLED.