Sharing Too Much

Bestselling, popular author Richard Paul Evans delivers a collection of inspiring essays, sharing insights and sage advice culled from his life experiences. 

Richard Paul Evans is an author, father, and husband. In Sharing Too Much, he unpacks memorable personal stories and life lessons experienced over half a century. This broad-ranging collection of entertaining, concisely short essays offers thought-provoking insights and sage advice.

Over seven sections, Evans is incredibly open in sharing details about his life. He was a "lonely little boy" and "a poor kid from a large family" who suffered "years of teasing and torment" because of Tourette's syndrome, which was only diagnosed when he was 41 years old. Because his mother endured serious depression that manifested into suicidal tendencies, the family was forced to move from Arcadia, California to a rather dilapidated, inherited house in Salt Lake City, Utah. This move only exacerbated Evan's feelings of displacement. 

Evans mines the past and the foundations that led him to become a writer. Several essays probe his immensely popular first novel, The Christmas Box—how it was conceived via real-life experiences, the ingenious back-door path it traveled to publication, and how that novel paved the way for Evans’s extraordinary success. Other sections offer inventive moral-themed remembrances and fables, stories that delve into Evans’s enduring marriage, parenthood, the unexpected teachers of life, and even otherworldly, spiritual experiences.

 

Evans (A Christmas Memory) is a remarkably relentless optimist whose moving, hopeful--easy to absorb--essays will offer great appeal and inspiration to a wide-range of readers.

Sharing Too Much: Musings from an Unlikely Life by Richard Paul Evans

Gallery Books, $22.99 hardcover, 978198177461, 272 pages

Publishing Date: February 27, 2024

 
NOTE: This review is a reprint and is being posted with the permission of Shelf Awareness. To read this review as originally published on Shelf Awareness (March 8, 2024), link HERE 

 

A Christmas Memory

A profoundly tender, multi-generational story about a friendship that liberates a grief-stricken eight-year-old during Christmas 1967. 

In A Christmas Memory, Richard Paul Evans--author of more than 40 novels--delivers an emotionally moving fictionalized story that pays homage to a man who made a profound impact on the author’s early life.

 

The story begins in 1967, in Pasadena, Calif., and centers on Rick, a sensitive and bright--yet socially awkward--eight-year-old with Tourette’s syndrome. When Rick’s brother, Mark--ten years older--dies in the Vietnam war, his death drives a wedge between his parents. The loss is compounded by the fact that Mark “didn’t believe in war and didn’t want to go.” As the family struggles to deal with grief and guilt, Rick’s father loses his job. This forces a move to Salt Lake City, Utah, where Rick’s mother was born and raised. Shortly after the family settles into Rick’s deceased grandmother’s house, Rick’s parents separate. While his mother sinks into a severe depression, Rick is bullied by peers and badgered by an ogre teacher. Respite is found when Rick befriends a neighbor’s dog and ultimately the dog’s elderly owner, Mr. Foster. This African American man of integrity--a contemporary of Rick’s grandmother, separated from his own family--opens his house and heart to the young boy. He offers companionship and wisdom that shepherds Rick through sad uncertainty that ultimately coalesces into a touching and most memorable Christmas.

 

Themes of friendship and forgiveness infuse Evans’s (Michael Vey 8; The Road Home) beautifully tender story that delivers a heartfelt message about remembrance, love and hope.

 

A Christmas Memory: A Novel by Richard Paul Evans

Gallery Books (Simon and Schuster), $17.99 hardcover, 9781982177447, 192 pages

Publication Date: November 22, 2022

To order this book on INDIEBOUND, link HERE