Teaser Tuesdays: Heavy Reading

Teaser Tuesdays is hosted by mizB17 at Should Be Reading. If you'd like to read more teasers, or participate yourself, head on over to her blog. And these are the rules: Grab your current read; Let the book fall open to a random page. Share with us two (2) "teaser" sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12. You also need to share the title of the book that you're getting your "teaser" from … that way people can have some great book recommendations if they like the teaser you've given! Please avoid spoilers!

This week I'm trying to finish up my reading for the Book Awards II Challenge which ends June 1. This first quote is from Terry Kay's To Dance with the White Dog:

The death of their son was a grief that she could not release, and she had obsessively tended the grave, pushing him away with her sobs and her bitterness. It was the one thing they had never been able to resolve: she blamed him for their son's death. [p. 58]

And since that's a really dark, depressing excerpt, I thought I might lighten things up with some teasers from the other challenge book I'm starting this week – Vanessa and Virginia, by Susan Sellers:

It is too cold to paint outside so we have taken our easels upstairs, where we can look out across the pond. The bare branches of the willows cast strange reflections on the glassy surface, like witches' hair. [p. 142]

Well, I'm not sure I'd really call that lighter, but at least no one is tending a grave there. Not literally anyway, but since the substance of the book is Vanessa Bell remembering her dead sister Virginia Woolf, I guess graves do figure prominently in this one as well. What I really need right now is some Garrison Keillor or P.G. Wodehouse or something to chase away all this gloom.