Books Read in February 2020

Picture Books

Dancing Hands: How Teresa Carreño Played Piano for President Lincoln
Margarita Engle Rafael Lopez
Read for Librarian Book Group

Lovely illustrations capture the 1860s. This picture book has a lot of words in it which felt like a lot when I read it aloud to the cats, who were indifferent and gave me no feedback if it was too long. I would have liked a picture in the back matter.

The Bell Rang
James E. Ransome
Read for Librarian Book Group

A week in the life of a enslave family where each day starts with the bell ringing. As depictions of enslaved families are rare, this is a pretty cool book.

What is Given From the Heart
Patricia McKissack & April Harrison
Read for Librarian Book Group

Calm and quiet pictures illustrate a story of giving when one has very little.

Sulwe
Lupita Nyong’o
Read for Librarian Book Group

Sulwe’s skin is darker than her family and she is troubled by this. I’m glad to see more of this topic lately (I also enjoyed the middle grade novel Genesis Begins Again) and I loved the illustrations.

Double Bass Blues
Andrea J. Loney & Rudy Guiterrez
Read for Librarian Book Group

A lot of really great sounds paired with illustrations that are both abstract and representational. Really great faces!

Hey Water
Antoinette Portis
Read for Librarian Book Group

It’s the water cycle, but with each form having its own page. Both the illustrations and text draw the eye from page to page.

Bear Came Along
Richard T. Morris & LeUyen Pham
Read for Librarian Book Group

A book that builds on itself and has a lot of dramatic tension.

I was unclear about why the river didn’t know it was a river. Are rivers having some sort of identity crisis I don’t know about?

A Friend for Henry
Jenn Bailey, Mika Song
Read for Librarian Book Group

Henry likes very specific things. He also doesn’t like very specific things. It’s hard for him to make a friend.

Between the words of the text and the excellent illustrations, I felt for Henry. Especially with the carpet squares.

Across the Bay
Carlos Aponte
Read for Librarian Book Group

Carlos lives with his mother and grandmother, but misses his father who, his mother tells him, lives across the bay. One day Carlos travels across the bay by ferry to look for his father.

The illustrations were sunny and tropical, a nice break from gray winter skies.

Bowwow Powwow
Brenda Child, Jonathan Thunder
Read for Librarian Book Group

Windy Girl and her dog Itchy Boy remember about the powwows in the summer.

Stop Bot!
James Young
Read for Librarian Book Group

A vertical story of a bot that floats up the face of a tall building. As it floats, people try to stop it. There are many details to follow from page to page.

Gittel’s Journey
Lesléa Newman & Amy June Bates (sp)
Read for Librarian Book Group

Gittel is sad to leave her home to sail to America with her mother. She is even sadder when her mother has to send her on alone. The illustrations feel period-appropriate.

Middle Grade

Each Tiny Spark
Pablo Cartaya
Read for Librarian Book Group

Emilia Torres is making strides becoming her own person, learning to manage her style of learning and is navigating changing friendships and her dad’s return from a tour of duty. There were many good character acts.

Lety Out Loud
Angela Cervantes
Read for Librarian Book Group

Letty is learning English (her second language) and her time at a camp at the animal shelter—the kind of camp we used to call a day camp, rather than a sleepaway camp—has her writing and making plans. This book has well-rounded characters and a suitable middle-grade level of tension/subject matter.

The Distance Between Me and the Cherry Tree
Paola Peretti
Read for Librarian Book Group

A slim book about a girl losing her sight written by a woman who was a girl losing her sight. It was a slow, repetitive build, but I was completely emotionally invested by the end.

The Other Half of Happy
Rebecca Balcáreal
Read for Librarian Book Group

Quijana struggles with not knowing more Spanish, especially when her cousins move to her Texas town. She also has a big crush on Jayden and doesn’t want to visit Guatemala with her family.

This book hit all the middle-grade notes, and I appreciated the full-on exploration of feelings around her crush. It was also one of those books that took me forever to get through. That’s usually a sign that something hasn’t quite clicked for me.

Young Adult

The Stars and the Blackness Between Them
Junauda Petrus
Read for Librarian Book Group

The story of Audre, a girl banished from Trinidad for loving another girl. She lands in Minneapolis where she reconnects with Mabel, a childhood acquaintance.

This book includes tons of good friendship and love stuff. I loved how individual Audre and Mabel’s voices were. There was a bunch of dream stuff that I felt like meandered and I’m too linear of a person for the ending, but otherwise this was an enjoyable read.

Where the World Ends
Gearldine McCaughren
Read for Librarian Book Group

This was a book that I read to find out what happened to strand twelve people on a crag of rock more so than for a love of the story itself. There’s also a lot of bird killing in this book, which could be off-putting for some.

I didn’t love this novel, but I enjoyed how McCaughren could find a lot of plot in a tiny space where each day was the same, plus her descriptions were excellent. I also was really looking forward to the author’s note at the end and it did not disappoint. What a tale has been woven from just a few sentences in the historical record!

The Hand on the Wall
Maureen Johnson

This was a very satisfying conclusion to the Truly Devious trilogy. Aside from wrapping things up, it was good at evoking New England during a blizzard.

Cursed
Karol Ruth Silverstein
Read for Librarian Book Group

An overly long book about a fourteen-year-old girl dealing with the sudden onset of a chronic and painful disease written by a woman with the same disease. It includes a prickly male teacher I could root for. I’m always up for a teacher who is a stickler and also loves their students. Also includes a principal and a doctor who might as well have been twirling their villainous mustaches.

There were weird gaps in the plot. Sure, she lives with her dad, but why does she never see her mom?

This book wasn’t the most polished I’ve read, but a lot of people deal with chronic illness and I don’t come across depictions of the day-to-day struggles. I welcomed this portrayal.

Someday We Will Fly
Rachel DeWaskin
Read for Librarian Book Group

Did you know that Shanghai was a place for Jewish people to flee to during World War II? Me neither! This book imagines the life of a teenager from Poland living in Shanghai with her father and much younger sister. It was full of interesting details about a segment of WWII history I knew nothing about.

It’s also a WWII book set outside of Europe, something I regularly comment that we need more of. It was a World War, not a European War.

Sick Kids in Love
Hannah Moskowitz
Read for Librarian Book Group

“They don’t die in this one.” That’s what the text on the front cover says. It took me a bit to notice it because the library’s bar code was partially blocking the words, but it cracked me up when I did finally see it.

There are all kinds of illnesses, many of them not fatal, and this is the second rheumatoid arthritis book I’ve read this month.

Aside from being a great love story, it also does a deep dive into life as a sick person and how things work differently. It’s also a good “finding your family” book.

This is one of those books that was pleasurable from start to finish. It’s not changing the world, or upending literature as we know it, but it’s a good story that I put off reading the newspaper for. Nicely done, Hannah Moskowitz.

Surviving the City
Tasha Soillett & Natasha Donvan
Read for Librarian Book Group

Much of this book was unclear to me. Partially because I’m not familiar with the traditions of the culture and also because it took me a bit to catch on to the ghost things.

Young Nonfiction

The Great Nijinsky: God of Dance
Lynn Curlee
Read for Librarian Book Group

A brief history of the famous that dancer that includes just the right amount of detail and which also normalizes same-sex relationships in a way I find to be very good.

Growing up, in the 80s and 90s, we didn’t talk about gay people, except the ample use of the word “faggot.” I remember seeing a poster in the late 80s titled something like, “Famous gay people throughout history” and my first reaction was “No, all of those people can’t be gay!”

I didn’t hate gay people, I just didn’t ever see them, except as flamboyant caricatures in a very few movies, or as sick and dying men on TV. I was not overly told that being gay was a “wrong” thing, but I had absorbed the message that something was wrong with it.

I’m all better now, so no worries there, but I know there are kids who are still raised the way I was. They have more messages countering the stealthy and overt “gay is bad.” The more varieties of media that can say matter-of-factly, “these two men were lovers” the better off we all are.

Post Office Site Broadway Corridor

As mentioned before, the main USPS processing facility in Portland has moved from downtown Portland to a location by the airport. That leaves the massive space to be redeveloped. My walk over the Broadway Bridge gave me the opportunity to grab some photos before everything is dissasembled.

Here’s the official notice.

Here’s a view of the back half of the 14-acre site. This part is hemmed in by two approaches to the Broadway Bridge. I’m standing on Broadway Street and you can see NW Lovejoy on the left side of the picture.

This part of the site is mostly open, as it was where semi trucks pulled in and out. The back part of the picture shows many building built in the Pearl District over the past twenty years. Before that happened, the post office fit right in. The space was filled with warehouses, rail yards, and the like.

And here’s the view of the back half of the massive building. While the post linked to above showed the public facing part of the building, most of the space was filled with mail sorting machines.

I got to tour that space once, while being a chaparone for a class studying mail. It was so fun to see all the machines.

Space made for drivers walking but not for walkers walking

Sometimes I get off the MAX train early and walk across the Broadway Bridge to get to work. In the last few years, this situation has evolved. There used to be parking spaces that weren’t very well signaged, then the bike lane, then the car lane. Things have been rearranged into bike lane, then a space for walking, then the parking spaces, then the lane for cars. You can even see the bit of crosswalk that has been added.

So why does this bug me? Because that place for walking was made for the people who have driven their cars and parked. It is not for people walking who want to continue to the Broadway Bridge. You can see what happens here:

At the last parking space, the bike lane takes over where the walking space was. As a pedestrian, I am forced to either walk in the bike lane until I hit that crosswalk you can barely see in the distance or cross the bike line and walk in the grass.

While there are probably not a ton of people walking on this street, I think it’s important to include all modes of transportation, not just some.

The Nerve of Concordia

Eight days ago, Concordia, a private college located in northeast Portland, announced that the school was closing. Everyone in the middle of their programs—preservice teachers, nursing students, students with one or two semesters left—would need to find a new college to attend. Not two years from now, not after a year, but after the completion of this semester.

The board knew this was coming, but they said nothing. Billboard space continued to be bought, prospective students still toured the school. Tuition payments were still expected.

The school is run by the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. By withholding important information from tuition paying students, they stole their students’ money.

Concordia built a beautiful campus in Northeast Portland. But I’ve always had trouble with the organization that runs the school. With this move, they’ve showed their true colors and they aren’t looking very Christian.

Postcard from Texas

This postcard comes from that other city that advertises itself as weird. (To be fair, they did it first. The “Keep Portland Weird” bumper stickers were copied from already existing bumper stickers in Austin.)

Rachel writes: “I’m going to make a bold statement. Austin is not as weird as Portland. I took the bus into and back from downtown…and people queued up to get on, the buses were clean and silent, and everyone just read or were on their phones. No one farted aggressively at me, told me about hospice work, or tried to convert me.”

So there we have it. Rachel assigns the weirdness crown to Portland.

SKS Postcards from Humboldt County and Beyond

I love these old fashioned map postcards. It would be fun to walk around Eureka and see how many of these buildings are still standing.


Sara reports that Shawn visited an actual coffee farm when he went to Costa Rica. This postcard comes with their coffee club shipment.


This byway cuts across Northern California. In these series of postcards, Sara reports that it’s been a busy weekend.

She expresses a desire for an additional weekend day, which is a feeling I am familiar with.

I’m not sure if all four of these postcards arrived on the same day. My guess is that they didn’t but that they did arrive in quick succession.

The Oscars. On the tiny screen.

I realized the day of the ceremony that my antenna doesn’t pull in the television station that was broadcasting the ceremony, but I figured I would use one of the streaming options. My friends were watching it at the Kennedy School and I could have gone to that, but I had planned for the ceremony to coincide with a block of time for cooking. If I skipped the cooking, I would have no food for the week.

It turned out all the ways I could stream the ceremony involved paying $50 for “live TV” in conjunction with YouTube, Hulu and other services. We had already blown through our free trials.

There were a few hours where I wished I could listen to a radio broadcast. But that was not an option either. Eventually I realized that while Matt had used his LiveTV free trail on YouTube, that I had not. So I signed up and watched the ceremony on my phone in the kitchen.

It was a tough nut to crack, but I did it.

SKS Postcards from California

1/2 and 2/2 arrived on the same day!

This first postcard comes from, you guessed it, the town of Ferndale, the Victorian City, where Sara and Shawn spent the day with Shawn’s parents. They enjoyed strolling in the quaint downtown.

Apparently also Ferndale is the home of Guy Fieri, American restaurateur, author, and an Emmy Award winning television presenter. He went to high school in the town and had his first restaurant job here.

We missed out on Ferdale, opting instead for the county fair. But I look forward to catching up with her charms.

Fire at the Oregon Motel

I was awake and reading in bed when I heard a hubbub at the Oregon Motel. Such hubbubs aren’t unusual for that property, so I didn’t investigate. But then I smelled something. Looking out my window told me what was burning.

I woke up Matt and had him make sure the fire trucks were coming while I grabbed the cats’ carriers.

Then we watched from my bedroom window as the firefighters arrived and went to work.

Using their powerful flashlights and a chainsaw, they cut a few holes in the roof.

It was interesting to see how they used the ladder to move around on the roof. They also popped all the covers off the vents.

After that it was time to pack up and drive away.

It was early, but not so early the MAX wasn’t running.

Everyone made it safely out of their motel rooms. Two units caught fire, but the fire did not spread past those units.

I feel lucky that this was as close as we came to fire and I’m glad that no one was harmed.