By Denise Turney
You may have heard the author of Love Matters DJing on the radio. After all, the woman who goes by the name “Delilah” is widely thought of as “America’s favorite nighttime radio host”. Her radio show airs on more than 250 stations across the United States and Canada and pulls in more than eight million listeners a night.
When I first picked Love Matters up I felt a tinge of de ja vu. It wasn’t until I got the book home and started to read it that I became aware of why something about the book felt “familiar” to me. All it took was for me to remember who “Delilah” was.
As it is on her radio show, the stories in Love Matters belong to the radio show’s listeners. It is a key element in the book’s success, in the book’s richness and the book’s unforgettable pull toward what many consider to be the great force around – love. I liked this book right from the start as I read the introduction about Delilah’s personal accounts and experiences with various forms of love – romantic and otherwise. Each section of the book begins with a short essay by Delilah, a woman who has adopted seven children as well as given birth to three more children of her own making her a single mother of ten children. There is a section in Love Matters that is dedicated to: love for family and friends, true love, lost and found love, second chance at love and letting love go.
If you think you know all the ins and outs of love, you’re in for an eye opener. Following the short essay by Delilah to kick off each new section of the book, there are a series of intimately personal letters written from listeners of Delilah’s popular radio show to the host.
One story on family love reads, “A few years before she left us, Grandma went with my grandpa to a local nursery to pick out rose bushes. Grandpa picked out two bushes. Grandma picked one—yellow roses, which were her favorites. When they got home, they planted the three rose bushes in a row, with Grandma’s in the middle. At time went by not one of the rose bushes bloomed. Grandma got very sick with cancer and there were still no roses. Then, on the day Grandma passed away, Grandpa was in the garden when he noticed something unusual. Grandma’s bush had a single bloom on it. . . .”
In the section on lost and found love, one letter is written by a woman who thought she’d lost a great love after high school only to meet up with him again. After the failure of her first marriage then finding her long lost love again years later she states, “I put my heart on a shelf when we parted, and finally I fee like a whole person again.”
Not only is Love Matters a book for those who appreciate the love of family, good friends and great life partners, Love Matters is a book for people who love good music. At the end of each story, as she does on her show after a caller connects into her show, Delilah dedicates a song to the people mentioned in the letters. Just reading the titles to some of the songs will tug on your heart strings and bring back the sweetest memories. If you believe in love and the power of the written word scribed in deeply personal letters, some of them recapturing events from as far back as the 1940s, Love Matters is a story that will not disappoint. I loved this book and all that it stood for.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
Visit Denise online at
www.chistell.com. Read excerpts from Denise’s two new books online FREE by e-mailing soulfar@aol.com with “Request New Free Excerpts” in the subject line.
