Just in time for Mother’s Day I finally picked up Her by Harriet Lane, about an exhausted mom of a newborn and a toddler who’s befriended by a chic artist who seems to save the day over and over again. Of course this lady (a perfectly normal seeming woman with a high school age daughter) has an ulterior motive that comes to light in a suspenseful way. It reminded me a lot of Notes on a Scandal. I’m also continuing my Courtney Summers love fest.…
I had a great week in reads, after a miserable stretch of books that weren’t worth my time at all. And then I read All The Rage and the world is a better place because Courtney Summers is writing books. My love for Laurie Halse Anderson‘s Speak is epic and legendary, and Summers mines a similar vein (rape victim turned outcast) and makes it completely her own. So of course I completely freaked when I saw that they were interviewed together. YA authors can be…
Oh, I have had so many disappointments lately when trying to read Important Books by Important Authors that I needed to spend my spring break immersed in good genre. And even though not every book I read was entirely successful, my plan worked–consider my palate cleansed and my love for reading restored. The best of them was Hush Hush by Laura Lippman. It’s “A Tess Monaghan Novel” which should put me off, because I generally do not like series fiction with a recurring character. For…
I keep getting fed up with books and not finishing them. What is wrong with me? Two recent give-ups were The Buried Giant and The Book of Strange New Things. The former I dropped because it just go so boring, and the latter I dropped because the Christian missionary main characters didn’t ring true for me and my brain got tired from arguing with the book. I didn’t quite finish Wild by Cheryl Strayed, which was this month’s pick for book club. I meant to…
Synopsis: When Seraphina, the half-dragon musician, discovers that there are others like her, she tries to unify them to live in freedom from persecution, but another half-dragon with greater powers has plans of her own. Review: First of all, I want to applaud Shadow Scale for its deft handling of exposition in refreshing readers’ memories of the events of the first book, Seraphina. It managed to get me back up to speed without forcing characters to tell each other things they already know, or spending…
One of my favorite books growing up is now one of my 7 year old’s obsessions. We just finished reading The Book of Three out loud, and have already begun book two, The Black Cauldron. Reading the books aloud has me appreciating Lloyd Alexander’s gift for dialogue. The characters are so much fun to voice, especially Gurgi and Eilonwy. His prose is simple and elegant and never descends into trite cliché or tired imagery. I’m teaching the book with our 4th/5th graders in our homeschool…
Synopsis: In a community in Yorkshire, a disparate group of individuals are brought together when two women go missing and a third seems to be under threat from Arab sex traffickers. Review: I had a really mixed reaction to The Disappeared. On the one hand, I found a certain satisfying level of suspense and intricacy in the plotting. But on the other hand, I couldn’t forgive the numerous plot contrivances that made the overall story implausible and a bit frustrating. Knowing that Scruton is a…
This week I finished a unit on The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill, a classic that my 4th/5th graders found as fresh as I did when I was their age. It’s a small class in a homeschool coop, so to end the book I had them each take 6 chapters and make their own graphic novel adaptation. The results were simply wonderful, showcasing their engagement with the book along with letting them use their own creative gifts. They were so nervous to present them in…
Synopsis: A midwife derailed by grief struggles to repair her relationship with her troubled daughter, and a pregnant homeless girl seeks shelter as Hurricane Irene relentlessly approaches. Review: T. Greenwood is one of my all-time favorite authors, and her books are notoriously hard to synopsize and review. The Forever Bridge is perhaps her most conventionally plotted book, with a strong sense of narrative suspense, but it’s still a novel that takes its time in the nuances of character and relationships. There are so many moments…
America’s Test Kitchen Radio has this great feature where they test kitchen gadgets and tell you one that’s hot and one that’s not. So I’ve got two Gone Girl knockoffs, one that’s hot and one that I read anyway. You: A Novel has an irresistible premise, in which a stalker narrates his growing obsession with a troubled young woman. He addresses her using the 2nd person, but within the context of a first person narrative. Author Caroline Kepnes had to use a teeny bit of…