More on the Coffee Party:
“We’re not the opposite of the Tea Party,” Ms. Park, 41, said. “We’re a different model of civic participation, but in the end we may want some of the same things.”
The Tea Party argues for stripping the federal government of many of its roles, and that if government has to be involved, it should be mostly state governments.
“The way I see it,” Ms. Park said, “our government is diseased, but you don’t abandon it because it’s ill. It’s the only body we have to address collective problems. You can’t bound government according to state borders when companies don’t do that, air doesn’t. It just doesn’t fit with the world.”
Still, she said, “we’ve got to send a message to people in Washington that you have to learn how to work together, you have to learn how to talk about these issues without acting like you’re in an ultimate fighting session.”
Candles on Bay Street by K. C. McKinnon concerns a small town vet who finds out his first love (who now makes candles) is dying of cancer. The first part (a life up to the narrator's 30s and how she affected it in miniature) is the best. Somewhere near the halfway mark, it becomes a somewhat drawn out road to the inevitable, the poetic musings getting a bit thick. It isn't a long book, but it comes off as too long.
I first found out about it because it was made into a Hallmark movie, though I never saw the whole thing, which in fact complicates a few things. The need for padding underlines the thinness of the novel's plot at times. As with Legally Blonde and a few other books, this is one of the times when the film version actually comes off as somewhat better. One of these days, I will see how the movie version ends up. It was well acted at any rate with the main roles fitting the characters, including Alicia Silverstone in the lead.