I’ve been meaning to read this since the trailers for the film first came out; but of course at that point, everybody else had the exact same idea, and all the copies were checked out of the library. And I felt a little sheepish checking it out in the first place because I am older than its target audience, but not by a comfortable enough margin – like when I was in elementary school and I still watched Sesame Street but I couldn’t admit it for another few years yet – so I didn’t want to put the book on…
8 CommentsCategory: 3 Stars
I must be getting old. I could swear I read about this on somebody’s book blog – again! Just like A Map of Home! But apparently I didn’t because I just pulled up all of them on my blogroll and did searches and couldn’t find this damn book. So I am forced to conclude that I did what I sometimes do, which is search the library catalogue for a book that I did read about – in this case, Nancy Werlin’s Impossible, which Superfastreader said was good – and when I find they don’t have it in, I get another…
1 CommentI just spent five minutes combing through my “Reference” page trying to figure out where I heard about this book. I have no idea, but apparently it wasn’t from someone’s website. I guess I must have just grabbed it off the new books shelf at the library. A Map of Home is all about a girl called Nidali whose father is Palestinian and her mother is Greek-Egyptian, and they live in Kuwait first, and then Egypt, and then eventually America. While she is growing up. It’s a coming-of-age thing. Really, this book was excellent. The concept wasn’t the most original…
3 CommentsI put a hold on this book in November, after reading about it here, and I almost canceled it the day before it actually came in, because I thought surely the book was lost and would never be returned, and I was just out of luck as far as reading this book went. Which I thought was too bad because it sounded interesting, and I was curious to know what I missed out on when I dropped out of the library science master’s program. This book is amusing and entertaining, which is what it’s intended to be. The stories he…
Leave a CommentJust finished reading three books I’d been looking forward to, and none of them wholly pleased me. What I Was, Meg Rosoff – All about a boy called Hilary (bless) who goes to a British boarding school and becomes a bit obsessed with another young boy called Finn, who lives by himself in a little hut that can only be reached during low tide. I thought the revelation about Finn at the end was a bit of a let-down, since the rest of the book didn’t at all seem a revelation-type book. Besides which I do not appreciate stories in…
4 CommentsI love reading other people’s letters. It is probably the fault of the Jolly Postman. (Incidentally, Allan and Janet Ahlberg rocked my world as a little kid, and I only wish I’d known their names so I could have investigated their other books that were not Jolly Postman or Each Peach Pear Plum.) I think it’s fascinating when two people correspond regularly over a long period of time – much more fascinating than just reading collected letters of a single person, although that can be really really interesting too. Joy Street is the collected letters of the editor’s mother, Mirren,…
Leave a CommentI feel rather smug that I enjoyed this book as much as I did. Nobody suggested it to me, I just got it on my own. Then I liked it. The Children’s War is all about two kids in Europe during the second World War – Ilse, living in Germany and Morocco and France, whose father is Jewish and who really just wants to get back to her mother; and Nicolai, who doesn’t like the Hitler Youth and becomes friends with his nursemaid who is Ilse’s mother. Though both stories were interesting, I found Ilse’s to be the more compelling,…
2 CommentsWell, hmph. Well, not really hmph. I sort of take back my hmph. It’s that expectations/reality gap again – I should just stop reading positive reviews of books. If only there were some way of deciding what books to read without forming any expectations at all. Wouldn’t that be nice? But there are just some things that cause my expectations to become high, such as – let me think – okay, such as stories about children who go away to live with relatives/at a boarding school/with a bunch of strangers, and they have adventures. Or stories with Catholic orphans. Or…
5 CommentsI’ve been meaning to read this book for ten thousand years. I saw it at Bongs & Noodles once, when I had a bunch of B&N gift card credit, and thought seriously about getting it, before ultimately deciding on something totally different. And then I got it out of the library before Christmas last year. I love the library. I don’t know how anyone functions without the lovely library. This book is just what you might imagine, a history of virginity, or really, cultural attitudes towards virginity. It is completely fascinating. Really. I’ve been staying up late the past two…
3 Comments