Tag: books

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.

I feel like I’m in some sort of reading slump.  I read.  I find the book to be okay. Repeat.  I hope this slump ends soon.  I want to be excited about what I’m reading.  There will not be many recommendations this month.

Young Adult:  Summer Days and Summer Nights
Young Nonfiction:  Woosh!: Lonnie Johnson’s Super-Soaking Stream of Inventions

I am Pan
Mordicai Gerstein
Read for librarian book group
Pan’s kind of a stinker and so was this book in places.  Some pages I couldn’t follow the narrative set before me.  The art was frenetic in a way that I didn’t much care for, but fit well with the subject matter.  I think part of my tepid response stems from my resistance to Greek and Roman mythology in general and thus is no fault of the book itself.  If I had children who needed introduction to this world, I would indeed choose this book.

The Airport Book
Lisa Brown
Read for librarian book group
Good information about how the whole airport thing goes. Includes some fun side stories via picture.

There is a Tribe of Kids
Lane Smith
Read for librarian book group
My “exact words” nature spent a lot of time wondering at the word choices.  Most children would not be so picky and would just roll with it.  The illustrations were divine.

It Ain’t So Awful, Falafel
Firoozah Duman
Read for librarian book group
There were a lot of good and interesting details about being a late-70s temporary resident to the USA and then even more good and interesting details about being a temporary resident from Iran living in the USA during Khomeini’s takeover and the hostage crisis.  Those details kept me reading.  It wasn’t terribly plot-driven, and thus I wasn’t super compelled to keep reading, but I enjoyed the reading while it was happening.

Summer Days and Summer Nights
Edited by Stephanie Perkins
The first and the last stories were my favorite. In “Head, Scales Tongue, Tail” Leigh Bardugo takes a pretty normal summer romance story and switches things up at the end.  Lev Grossman uses the concept made famous in the movie Groundhog Day–living the same day repeatedly–and pushes it in a different direction in “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things.”  I also greatly enjoyed the powerful voice of Francesca Lia Block’s confessional-style memory of the summer before she and her friends left for college in “Sick Pleasure.”  There was one clinker in the bunch, but there always must be in such a collection.  As was the previous collection of stories edited by Ms. Perkins, (My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories) this is a seasonal delight that can be read year round.

The Summer of Chasing Mermaids
Sarah Okler
There were some glaring errors in this set-in-Oregon novel, the worst being the mention of sales tax.  Oregon does not have a sales tax.  While these regular errors detracted from a full enjoyment of the story, it was otherwise a goodly tale of the loss of voice (an actual, not metaphorical loss due to damage to vocal chords) and of finding a new way.  Plus, you know, some romance.  I also appreciate there was a tastefully-written female masturbation scene, as those are incredibly rare.  The bad characters were not super complex, but the family dynamics were.  Overall, a so-so experience, but one that kept me reading.

The Steep & Thorny Way
Cat Winters
The tale of Hamlet, retold.  Set in 1920s Washington County, Oregon, this Hamlet is the daughter of an African American father and a white mother.  Winters manages to expertly recreate the 1920’s setting, weave in dueling stories of discrimination (Hannalee’s mixed race, Joe Adder’s homosexuality) and the workings of the Klu Klux Klan in a town that accepts and welcomes their efforts.  (“They’re mostly a fundraising organization” seems to be the belief of the majority of the county.)

I have a great appreciate not only for Winter’s complex storytelling, but also the way she can combine historical fact so well with the appearance of ghosts.

The Outsiders
S. E. Hinton
My re-reading of this ended in sad feelings, but they were different than the sad feelings of my teenage years.  My adult self found this book to be terribly clunky in its narrative, so much so that I feel for the swaths of school children who now read this as a required text.  Sorry kids.  My generation really liked it, but it hasn’t held up so well.  I’m going to do my best to forget this reading and return to the squishy feelings of joy when thinking of Ponyboy and Sodapop and all of the other greasers.

You Can Fly: The Tuskegee Airmen
Carole Boston Weatherford and Jeffrey Boston Weatherford
Read for librarian book group
The tale of the Tuskegee Airmen via verse, rather than prose.  Poems were solid, illustrations fit the bill.  Nicely done.

Woosh!: Lonnie Johnson’s Super-Soaking Stream of Inventions
Barton/Tate
Read for librarian book group
The story of the guy who invented the Super Soaker water gun told via good text and illustrations.  It also encourages kids to take things apart and tinker with them.

Ruby
Francesca Lia Block & Carmen Stanton
I enjoyed Francesca Lia Block’s short story in Summer Days and Summer Nights and went searching for another of her books.  This was the result.  It’s fragmented it its telling, its prose is dense–yet short, and by the time I got to the end enough clues had been set out that I found the reveal cliche rather than amazing.  I didn’t love it, but I didn’t hate it either.

Holy cats, Batman, I read two adult fiction books, plus a nonfiction.  What is going on?

Young Adult:  The Smell of Other People’s Houses
Grownup Nonfiction:  Spark Joy
Adult Fiction:  Eligible.  I can also recommend Eligible.

The White Cat and the Monk
Bogart/Smith
Read for librarian book group
There is apparently a poem a monk wrote about the white cat who came into his cell and their mutual search for things?  I’d never heard of this poem and wouldn’t have minded some form of it being reprinted in full at the end of the book.  The illustrations were too simple for the majority of the book–the rendering of the cat I found particularly unfortunate–though they shined on the illuminated manuscript pages.

Booked
Kwame Alexander
Read for librarian book group
Mr. Alexander brings us another book about a boy interested in sports (this time soccer) told in poetry form.  I love that about Kwame Alexander.  The book contains a solid middle-grade story with age-appropriate challenges (family, school, soccer, love). I enjoyed reading it, but found that two weeks later I couldn’t remember the plot.

Raymie Nightingale
Kate DiCamillo
Read for librarian book group
There was a lot of gushing love for this story by the librarians.  I did not feel the same.  The setting seemed to be a small town, yet Raymie Nightingale was unaware of many elements in her small town.  Nearly all of the characters were turned just the slightest bit too high on the quirky/unique scale and the narrative didn’t grab me and pull me in.  I felt fairly disconnected from the entire story.  I appreciated the illustration of magical thinking (I can fix a problem by doing something unrelated) that was so prevalent during my own childhood.

The Smell of Other People’s Houses
Bonnie Sue Hitchock
Read for librarian book group
This is in the running for Book with the Best Title, and the book itself was quite strong.  The narrative included multiple perspectives from several Alaskan teenagers in the 1960s and 1970s.  For such a slim book, it packed a lot of story.

Wink, Poppy, Midnight
April Genevieve Tucholke
Read for librarian book group
I liked the title and yet it gave me no clues what to expect.  It turns out that those words in the title are names of the three characters, who all take turns narrating.  This was an intriguing and enjoyable story that kept me guessing, and while it was tense in moments, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a “psychological thriller,” as someone does on the book jacket.

Spark Joy
Marie Kondo
About this time last year I “tidied” following the KonMarie Method as outlined in The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up.  And it has been very much a life-changing year.  This book is positioned as a “master class” in tidying and it gave me another shot of success, mostly in the clothes folding arena, which I thought I understood from the first book.  However, the illustrations illuminated just how much more tidier my clothes could be. And now they are.

p.s. The historian in me still needs to go on record as to the importance of saving letters you receive.  I do not agree with Marie Kondo at all.

Eligible
Curtis Sittenfeld
I’m a casual admirer of Pride & Prejudice, and a rabid fan of Curtis Sittenfeld.  That mean I was eager to read her adaptation of the classic Jane Austin novel. And what fun it  was!  All of the characters you love (or love to hate) find their contemporary doppelgängers in an adaptation that is as witty, frustrating and romantic as the original. (Yet so much easier to read.)  As usual, Sittenfeld has a wonderful way of writing, so no fewer than four quotes from the book made their way to my Goodreads Quotes page.  This was also quite discussable.

Eligible
Curtis Sittenfeld
(And then I read it all over again five days later)

The Love Song of Jonny Valentine
Teddy Wayne
Have you ever had a conversation with an 11-year-old boy who is really, really into something?  Maybe that something is something you don’t know anything about, so at first what he’s telling you is interesting. So it’s fun at first.  But then he just keeps going, because he’s super into his thing and maybe hasn’t matured enough to pick up on the social cues of when it’s time to wrap it up. And suddenly you’re feeling trapped and slightly panicked because, when exactly, will he stop talking?

That was this book.  If you want to be inside the head of an 11-year-old boy who has been groomed for pop stardom since he became a 9-year-old YouTube sensation, this is your book.  It’s full of details like his obsession with “chub” (his own and everyone else’s) his thoughts about what it takes to be a true star, his obsession with when exactly he will hit puberty, and what kind of clothing everyone is wearing.

The author’s point comes through clearly.  I walked away from this book frustrated with the way Jonny Valentine was being used to further various adult goals, and I felt sad that he will never have any normal interactions with children his own age.  But I also walked away frustrated because I couldn’t wait to be done with the book because his narration was relentless and unchanging and left me trapped and panicked.  I’ve spent the time sense wondering if it would have been a more successful book had it been written from multiple perspectives rather than Jonny’s singular, unrelenting one.