I have to say, this was the perfect airplane book. I know because I spent eighteen hours traveling to London last week (I know, right? Long flight with several layovers), and Thames was my primary reading material. My grandmother sent it to me for my birthday, and originally I wasn’t going to bring it along on the trip. It’s a big fat hardback with heavy pages and four sets of plates (two color, two black-and-white) – very beautiful, but not practical on a plane trip where luggage has weight considerations. But I couldn’t resist. Thames wasn’t what I expected –…
1 CommentCategory: 3 Stars
Fifteen-year-old Miranda has a pretty normal life, until a meteor hits the moon. It shoves the moon closer to the earth (eek!), which as you might expect does not do good things for the earth. Tsunamis take out New York and Florida and California; volcanoes begin erupting all over the place, filling the air with ash for miles around. And Miranda’s family copes. I first heard about this book shortly after I read Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now, and I didn’t want to do another girl-copes-with-end-of-world-scenario book straight away, because of how grim How I Live Now was. But…
12 CommentsRecommended by Darla D from Books and Other Thoughts – I knew I had to read this when she said “dinosaurs” and “Victorian”, and then she carried right on and said “street urchin” and “vicar’s daughter” and “clock-maker”, which is not totally unlike Ella saying “Warning, it’s very Gothic” about Blackbriar. I am leaving for a fantastic and glorious vacation in London (don’t go anywhere, London, I am coming back to you soon!), so I had collected all my books together to return to the library before I left (I know, right?). And still I could not return them until…
2 CommentsOkay, okay, okay. So I read A Cricket in Times Square (of course). And then I read the one about Tucker the Rat. But DID YOU KNOW that the same author also wrote a charming book about a boy whose father dies and he goes to live with his uptight aunt, and she tries to make him get rid of his dog, and he finds a genie called Abdullah? Well – yeah. It’s true! He finds a genie, and the genie falls in love with the maid-of-all-work, Rose, and the dog falls in love with the uptight aunt, and everything…
1 CommentI like it when it rains on a weekend that I don’t have any outside plans. This weekend, I curled up in my comfy chair and read Blackbriar. (Originally I opened up my blinds, too, so that I could see the rain, but there was THE HUGEST BUG EVER on the outside of my window, seriously, it was as big as a grown hummingbird, and it wouldn’t go away when I rapped on the window, so I closed the blinds again and just enjoyed the sounds of the rain.) Ella was right. It is indeed extremely Gothic. Fifteen-year-old Danny and…
4 CommentsA slim friendly book about elements that make children’s books appealing to kids. I read about it on Nymeth’s blog, and I of course had to go get it from the library straight away. I like reading books about books. Jerry Griswold mentions a number of things in books that appeal to little children – snugness (yessss!), scariness, smallness, lightness, and aliveness. I don’t think this is a comprehensive list, but I liked what he said about these five things. Especially the snug section – I loved reading about people who had found their own little places to go. There…
2 CommentsThis was a gift that I bought for someone’s birthday, and I read it before I gave it to my friend. I’m sorry! In my defense, I read it incredibly carefully. I mean just incredibly carefully, you have no idea, I practically had to poke my nose inside the book, because I was opening the covers only the littlest possible bit. Whatever, there is no excuse for me. This is fine when I do it with my friend tim, or my Indie Sister, or even my mother, because I know they are all doing the same thing with (at least…
5 CommentsThe Brooklyn Follies is all about a middle-aged man called Nathan Glass, divorced, a cancer survivor, estranged from his daughter, who goes to Brooklyn to die. While there, he reunites with his nephew Tom, who is working in a bookshop for an earnest, checkered-past-y, rather gullible man called Harry. The events of the story come together to give Nathan a life again. Hm. I cannot decide what my final verdict on the book is. In parts, I really really liked it. It was extremely well-written, as I noticed from the first. I would say this was its most notable characteristic,…
Leave a CommentConfession: Sometimes when I read book reviews on other people’s blogs, I am paying so much attention to one thing, that I immediately forget a lot of what the review says. For instance, Colleen mentioned that Sima’s Undergarments for Women is not a book about friendship, as she’d expected, but rather a story about love and loss and the consequences of decisions. I did not pay any attention to this “not about friendship” business, because I was too busy thinking, Ilana Stanger-Ross, that is a simply fantastic name. Sima’s Undergarments for Women is about a woman called Sima who owns…
3 Comments