Category: Books

A story of a teenager, two pivotal moments, and the food item that connects them.

Holy schnikies, Batman, I read books in every category this month! That’s unusual, especially the three grownup nonfiction books. Though two of them I had been reading for a while and just happened to finish them in September.

Picture books: Best Frients in the Whole Universe
Middle grade: Full of Beans
Young adult: First & Then (even though was a re-read)
Young nonfiction: Tiny Stitches
Adult fiction: Leave Me
Adult nonfiction: Maud Hart Lovelace’s Deep Valley (admittedly, a niche book)
Smart smut: Say it Louder

Best Frients in the Whole Universe
Antoniette Portis
Read for Librarian Book Group
I giggled through this book and enjoyed its general exuberance.

Coyote Moon
Gianferrari/Ibatoulline
Read for Librarian Book Group
Travel with a mother coyote as she searches for food for her family.

The Sound of Silence
Katrina Goldsaito
Read for Librarian Book Group
Yoshio looks for the sound of silence in Tokyo, Japan.

The Storyteller
Evan Turk
Read for Librarian Book Group
Fantastically illustrated tale about the importance of listening to the storytellers.

Lucy
Randy Cecil
Read for Librarian Book Group
I remember liking this, but I can’t remember why.

Full of Beans
Jennifer Holm
Read for Librarian Book Group
Probably my favorite character voice of the year.  It was fun to be transported back to 1930’s Key West, Florida.

The Inn Between
Marina Cohen
Read for Librarian Book Group
Clever book that is slightly too obvious about showing its hand.

First & Then
Emma Mills
Read Aloud with Matt.
I really enjoyed hearing this the second time; the first time through I was enjoying it so much I skimmed.  Matt liked it too.

Jackaby
William Ritter
Good historical fiction/fantasy where the young Miss Abigail Rook, having fled her family’s Victorian expectations, arrives in New Fiddleham, New England. There she encounters R.F. Jackaby, a sort of Sherlockian character. Gaining work as his assistant, she helps investigate a serial killer in this fantastical mystery.

Tiny Stitches: The Life of Medical Pioneer Vivian Thomas
Hooks/Bootman
Read for Librarian Book Group
Illuminating nonfiction about the man who developed a procedure to help blue babies survive.  It does not shy away from the racism Thomas faced in his quest to be a doctor.

My Brilliant Friend
Elena Ferrante
When friends on Goodreads give books five stars, I notice.  So I was very interested to read this book, the first in the Neapolitan Novels  I found it rough going.  Though I had been warned to power through until the main characters hit 13, I found I had to power through the entire book.

I found the fierce, stark, angry prose too confessional for me. The plot was meandering.  This is a good read for those interested in the frenemy relationships between girls, or those who would like to be transported to a poor neighborhood in 1950s Italy.  Be warned though, that this book ends abruptly.  Almost as if someone needed to make a very long book into two very long books.

Leave Me
Gayle Forman
Can a woman who is a mother leave her children to save her own health?  My observations of the current climate say the answer is no.  And thus, I’m guessing Gayle Forman will get a lot of aggro about her main character, Maribeth, who suffers a heart attack in her early forties and flees her young twins and husband so she can mend.

I happen to think women have completely overextended themselves trying to fulfill today’s version of “mother” and so I was interested in Maribeth’s journey which involved the city of Pittsburgh, a rouge heart doctor, a search for her birth mother and (my favorite) healing through swimming.

As I have with Forman’s other books I  devoured this and enjoyed the way she plays with alternate paths that lead to greater understanding.

Lafayette in the Somewhat United States
Sarah Vowell
I enjoy Sarah Vowell books with a lot of Sarah Vowell in them.  When she weaves herself into the story while telling us about the history she’s interested in.  This book had a lot of history and not as much Sarah Vowell.  Thus, it was slow going.

The Tiredness Cure
Sohere Roked
I was feeling tired and this book offered a range of potential fixes, all from an English naturopath’s perspective.

Maud Hart Lovelace’s Deep Valley
Schrader
For those who want to know the inspirations of Mankato people and locations from Lovelace’s many Deep Valley books.  This well-researched book includes photos, biographies and clippings of Mankato/Deep Valley’s people and places.  It’s good to read before taking a Betsy/Tacy visit.

Say it Louder

Heidi Joy Trethaway
Finally we have Book Four in the Tattoo Thief Series.  I’ve waited a long time to see what happens with drummer Dave, who has just discovered how terrible his longtime girlfriend is.  In kicking her to the curb (a kick that was quite well-deserved) he finds himself interested in Willa, a scruffy tattoo artist by day and graffiti artist by night.  Can Dave, with his not-quite-professional drumming skills–keep himself in the band and convince Willa to trust him?  Many complexities ensue, and the path is laid for a fifth book (hooray!) in the Tattoo Thief series.  Bring on the babysitter drummer!

 

I really enjoyed this story about kids on a choir trip.  It stuck with me.

Why hello, Middle Grade Month of August.  I’ve been prepping for the 6/7 grade Family Book Group I will be running in the autumn.  Thus, a lot of middle-grade reading.

Picture books:  none read this month.
Middle grade:  A lot of good choices, but I’ll go with Save Me a Seat
Young Adult: I am Princess X
Young Nonfiction: none read this month
Adult Nonfiction: no recommendation
Smart Smut: no recommendation
Adult Fiction: none read this month

The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle
Fox
Read for Librarian Book Group
Delightfully creepy in that safe, middle-grade way. It was good enough  I didn’t even mind so much that it was yet another book that took place in Europe during WWII.  Children are sent away to a castle in Scotland so they can remain safe for the duration.  Unfortunately, Rookskill Castle seems to not be the safe place they were hoping for.

Ms. Bixby’s Last Day
John David Anderson
Read for Librarian Book Group
Follow three boys as they attempt to give their favorite teacher a party.  This book is funny, with true emotion and deeply felt relationships between the boys themselves and the boys and the teacher.

There are a couple of iffy teacher moments here–things that I think really good teachers would not do.  However, the various scenes are so vivid (it turns out you can pick your friend’s nose) I’m going to let them slide.

Save Me A Seat
Weeks/Varadarajan
Read for Librarian Book Group
The alternating perspectives of two fifth grade boys: Joe, suddenly solitary after his friends move; Ravi, newly arrived with his family from India. Ravi was quite popular in India, partially because of how smart he is.  He assumes that he will be just as popular in his new school.

Ravi is wrong.  Sarah Weeks and Gita Varadarajan get so much right:  the difficulties of not being able to learn like everyone else does; the difficulties of making new friends; the problems with pre-judging people; supportive families and how they both help and harm; parents not getting it.

This was a well-written book, but it left me with a bad taste in my mouth as to what we value in U.S. culture.

Maybe a Fox
Appelt/McGhee
Read for Librarian Book Group
This is the second book I’ve read this year from the perspective of a fox.  Like Sara Pennypacker’s Pax, this was engrossing, heartfelt reading.  I could have done with a little more development of fox culture (what is is this Kennan thing?) but overall, it’s a good meditation on grief and people’s roles in others lives.

Full Cicada Moon
Marilyn Hilton
Yet another story told through poems.  I did not find the poems particularly powerful as poems, but they did a good job of telling Mimi’s story of moving to a small Vermont town in 1969.  She’s half black and half Japanese.  Also she wants to be an astronaut.  You can see how there might be problems.

My Lady Jane
Hand/Ashton/Meadows
Let’s first discuss what I didn’t like about this book:

The cover.  In the acknowledgments section the authors write of their delight at the cover and I’m glad they are happy.  But it does nothing to depict what is on the inside of this book.  In fact, the two people I asked, both said they thought it had something to with the 1960s. Something about the center part and freckles says flower children, not pseudo-pre-Elizabethan England.

Moving past our cover judgement, my other dislike is that this book doggedly follows the classic chaste romance plot arc, so much so that I knew what was going to happen before it did.

Now that we’ve gotten past those things, I must say that this book was weird in such a wonderful way.  It begins on the acknowledgements page, where the three authors (again: weird) dedicate the book to everyone who knows there was room for Leonardo DiCaprio on that door. Inside Titanic reference!  They also dedicate it to the people of England and apologize for ruining their history.

The authors create a historic fictional fantasy world in which Lady Jane Grey (she of the nine days rule and subsequent execution by Queen Mary) is hastily married off to the younger son of Lord Dudly (just like in real life) but Lord Dudly’s son in the book spends his nights in human form, reciting poetry and his days as a horse.

Yes, as a horse! In the world of this book, some of the people assume animal forms!  Nothing on the cover or the plot synopsis indicates anything about this interesting wrinkle in made-up history.

I found this aspect delightful and enjoyed reading, despite the conventional chaste-romance plot.  And so I recommend this book for you!

I am Princess X
Cherie Priest
Resistance was high, namely due to the title and the mix of graphic novel/traditional narrative.  For some reason I can deal better with all graphic novel or all traditional narrative, but when combined there is some sort of anti-synergy that happens.

But all that resistance dissipated by the end of the first chapter.  This book has a great setup:  two girls create Princess X in fifth grade and spend all of middle school writing and illustrating adventures.  Then one girl dies and all the Princess X stories are lost.  Flash forward three years to when the surviving friend is walking around town and to her surprise, finds a Princess X sticker.

How did the sticker get there and who else knows about Princess X?  Follow along to find out.

Tattoos on the Heart
Gregory Boyle
Father Boyle is executive director of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles and has spent his life working in the projects and with gang members.  This is a collection of stories about his experiences.  The stories are short, more like vignettes, and they are collected together in several themes.

I enjoyed this book, but I think Father Gregory is a probably a better in-person storyteller than an on-the-page writer.

The Fifteenth Minute
Sarina Bowen
We continue on in the Ivy series, this time with Lianne, an actress famous for being a sort of female Harry Potter, and DJ, whose on a weird kind of probation and isn’t sure how long he will last at Harkness College.  This is a run-of-the-mill M/F love story.  That also deals with rape accusation.  While I think Bowen threads the needle somewhat well, it’s worth pointing out that rapes that go unreported are much more common than false accusations.

Patchett tells us the story of a recently retired woman visiting her daughter living in a Swiss Zen center.  Q&A and stuff here.

What if your parents leave Chicago to live in the country and raise Ostriches?  Find out in this issue of One Teen Story.

17 books this month.  It seems I’m back in the groove.  And there were even books I really liked.  Perhaps the reading slump is over?

Picture Book: Thunder Boy, Jr.
Middle Grade:  Wolf Hollow
Young Adult:  The Lie Tree, American Girls
Young Nonfiction: We Will Not Be Silent
Smart Smut:  After Hours

Thunder Boy, Jr.
Sherman Alexie/Yuyi Morales
Read for Librarian Book Group
Thunder Boy, Jr. wants a new name in this gorgeously illustrated picture book.

School’s First Day of School
Rex/Robinson
Read for Librarian Book Group
It seems that not only students get nervous for the first day.

Steamboat School
Hopkinson/Husband
Read for Librarian Book Group
This was an interesting story based on historical fact.  I was down for that.  The illustrations troubled me, reminding me of stereotypical Jim Crow-era illustrations of Black people.

I’ve heard that Ron Husband, the illustrator, is thrilled to have this story go forward and I can see he’s had great success as an animator.  Is he “reclaiming” the style?  Does my white-lady discomfort matter? I look forward to the discussion at book group.

Frank & Lucky Get Schooled
Perkins
Read for Librarian Book Group
I’m tardy in writing this review and have sent the book back to the library so I’m fuzzy on the details, but something about this story bugged me.  I also remember being delighted by the explanation of fractions by showing the dog and the boy on the bed.  But it was only that page I liked.

Echo Echo
Marilyn Singer, Josee Masse
Read for Librarian Book Group
Ms. Singer has invented a type of poetry where lines can be read both forward and backward and the poem will make sense. About this type of poetry I can say that it is mostly kind of pedantic and occasionally magical.

I enjoyed the color palette and the illustrations.

As Brave As You
Jason Reynolds
Read for Librarian Book Group
Oh, Jason Reynolds, when will you adopt a standard plot arc?  Your characters are interesting, your settings are interesting, your episodes are interesting and unfortunately, there isn’t anything that compels me to keep reading.

If you are looking for a nice meander through rural Virginia with two boys from Brooklyn staying with their grandparents for a few weeks in the summer this is your book.  Stuff happens.  And then some other stuff happens.  And then the book is over.

Wolf Hollow
Lauren Wolk
Read for Librarian Book Group
It’s quite nice when poets write prose as all that poetry stuff tends to carry over in a good way with the whole word choice thing.  This book is beautifully written.  The middle-grade specific dilemma is spot-on (and super frustrating) and the characters are nicely realized.  I enjoyed the historical time period of the 1930s also.  If someone has ever moved to town and upended your life, this is probably the book for you.

Weetzie Bat
Fancesca Lia Block
I’d heard of these books, though I’m not sure how.  Much like I’ve always known that Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s Father, so I’ve known of Weetize Bat’s existence. (Well, not always, because this book was published in 1989, but you know what I’m saying.) But I didn’t know what a Weetize Bat was.  Luckily, a slow day at work and an ebook copy from the Multnomah County Library caught me up.

Dammit!  Why did I not know of these books when I was a YA?  I would have loved their not-quite-grounded-in-reality punk rock, ‘zine ethos.  As I work more and more with stellar youth librarians, I mourn the fact that I had no such librarian fairy godmother figure in my own youth.  This book is a short read, and completely captures the turn of the 80s into the 90s.

Burn Baby Burn
Meg Medina
Nora just wants to get through high school, celebrate her 18th birthday with her best friend by dancing all night, and keep out of the way of her increasingly volatile little brother.  Plus, there’s this guy at work…  It’s 1977, Nora lives in New York City and young couples keep getting murdered.

Medina (author of the super awesome Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass) captures the fear and feminism of 1977 while exploring the topics of post-high school plans, inter-sibling violence, falling in love and serial killer spree.

The Lie Tree
Frances Hardinge
Read for Librarian Book Group
It’s nice to be reminded, every once in a while, that smart women used to have to play dumb.  It’s good to remember that women and girls interested in science were actively discouraged from the pursuit of knowledge.

We join Faith, our Victorian-era hero, as her family is fleeing to a remote English island to attempt to escape the scandal her father has brought upon the family, as well as to visit an archaeological dig.  Things go downhill from there, but as her life falls to shreds around her, Faith’s feelings and relationships evolve.

This story is masterfully layered.  I loved it.

“This is a battlefield, Faith!  We are given no weapons, and cannot be seen to fight.  But fight we must, or perish!”

If I Was Your Girl
Meredith Russo
The story of a teenage girl starting over in a new town.  She’s living with her father, making new friends and a boy likes her.  But this new start is her first time experiencing high school as a girl.  Navigating all these new things is complicated, not to mention trying to figure out when to tell the new people in her current life about her previous life.

Break My Heart 1,000 Times
Daniel Waters
This was one of those books that arrived on hold at the library and I had no idea how it had made its way onto my list.  However!  I loved the premise: the everyday common occurrence of ghosts.  These ghosts don’t harm, or scare, they just hang around, due to the Event, which is some tragic thing that caused massive death and destruction.

There’s mystery in this post-event life, and love, and scary situations.  It was a good summer read.

Highly Illogical Behavior
John Corey Whaley
Read for Librarian Book Group
JCW writes yet another book with engaging characters that pull me right into the narrative.  What happens when a “project” turns into a “friendship”?  How do you tell your new friend this whole thing started from a false place?

Good stuff here not only about the above, but about M/F relationships, specifically of the high school variety.  It’s nice to see the sexual pressure coming from the female side and the reasons the male is demurring.

American Girls
Alison Umminger
Read for Librarian Book Group
Excellent nuanced portrayal of an American girl.  So nuanced it’s hard to get into in a brief review.  Essentially, a fifteen-year-old girl partially runs away and is partially exiled to LA to live with her older sister for the summer.  There, she does some research, hangs out on the set of a terrible TV show, researches the Manson Girls, develops a crush and tries to understand her sister’s life.

You can read it on that level and this would be a good book. But there’s a lot more than that going on.  Also, it’s amusing, and the prose is quite lovely.

We Will Not Be Silent
Russell Freedman
Read for Librarian Book Group
A concise history of the White Rose Student Movement and a very nice example of nonfiction for youth that has been published of late.

Willing Victim: Remastered
Cara McKenna
Amy Jo Cousins is to blame for this plunge down a rabbit hole.  I’ve loved everything she’s written and when she recommended this book, commenting that it was “hella dirty, funny, wicked smart, and the reason I will forever hear the name Laurel in my head growled with a Boston accent”.  I wasted no time one-clicking my way to my own copy and said goodbye to my reasonable bedtime.

This book is the least vanilla of the smart smut books I’ve read and it was fabulous!  McKenna went places my feminist self has always found off-putting and what I found was illuminating.  Also, it scratched a very specific Masshole itch I didn’t know I had.

After Hours
Cara McKenna
After reading Willing Victim (twice) I moved onto this gem, which I enjoyed even more.  Again, McKenna explored submission through a feminist lens.  On the first read-though I found myself skimming through the plot parts for the action, of which there was plenty.  A second reading gave me time to appreciate the stellar character development.

Someday, someone’s going ask me for a list of really good Smart Smut books and this will be in the top five.

My first (grown up) One Story arrived today.  I greatly enjoyed it, and the couple in the story has stuck with me.

Due to a hitch in the giddy-up of the beginning of my subscription to One Teen Story I received two issues in quick succession.*  This was a very good saying goodbye story, in this case two friends about to be separated after their high school graduation.

I also dig the cover.  I have to say, the presentation of One Teen Story is much more fun than One Story. You get a cover design and there are little YouTube clips.

*Although looking at the website, I see that I missed an issue between the two.  To contact customer service again or not? Hmmm.  That missing story does look quite good.

A friend told me about, One Story, this great literary publisher who sends you one story in the mail on a regular basis.  There is also One Teen Story which is a YA short story.  They are inexpensive subscriptions, so I subscribed to both.  My first one arrived in the mail today.  I especially enjoyed the setting during the 1992 LA Riots.

Also, the cover is awesome too.