Lisa
This first half of this book was so inscrutable I almost gave up. It is very worth sticking with. I'd read Looking For Alibrandi years ago so I knew there was potential, the plot is just very obfuscated here. In the vaguest terms, this is a book about a teenage girl in Australia with a troubled past who is attending a boarding school in a remote part of the country. The boarding school has a turf war with what I presume is some sort of Australian ROTC equivalent. The book is about how the main character resolves this turf war and learns about her past along the way.
Anyway, it's a great read. The resolution of the plot reminded a lot of Rebecca Stead's When You Reach Me. If you liked that, I wager you'd like this.
Couldn't put this down. Great overview of the Green River killer case by the son of one of the lead investigators.
I devoured this book and cried through at least half of it. I think the crying is partly because I'm pregnant and cry at the drop of a hat, but it really is touching.
This should be part of mandatory sensitivity training for middle schoolers.
This book is only 200 or so pages and I couldn't finish it.
So why a 3 star review?
The premise is fascinating. I also loved the way it was written. So much of this novel revolves around the power of language, particularly oral language and I think the author gave considerable attention to phrasing and word choice. It's elegant where it needs to be, abrasive where it needs to be, etc. I really applaud that.
But I felt nothing for the characters. Absolutely nothing. And when I put a book down for 2 weeks and can't compel myself to revisit, it's not a good sign. Particularly in a reading challenge year where I picked nothing but short books to try and catch up.
Definitely one of the weirder Newbery winners. This book is about Miguel, one of many sons in a New Mexico shepherding family. Miguel is 12 and really wants to be a vital member of his working family but struggles with recognition and validation from his father.
I'm here for the unusual plot. Definitely enjoyed the locale, not sure I'd ever read a book about Taos before. The dad in this book was a dismissive prick and it was hard to read through those scenes at times. But this book was written in 1953 so I'm hardly surprised.
if you're reading this book, you're probably an adult reading through every Newbery winner like me, but I'd be hard pressed to find an 11-12 year old whose attention was held by this.
I read this one with my kids. At first, they weren't too engaged but by the end of the story they were really engrossed in Alia's courageous story to save the books.
I appreciated this as an adult. It had cute moments and I liked the facts interspersed. Graham really grew tired of it halfway through. We stopped 2/3s of the way through and we'll try again tonight. Maybe he was just to sleepy for reading.
I have mixed feelings about this book. I'm not a saucy book reader in general, so this was way out of my wheelhouse and all the naughty parts just...smacked of Twilight in their repetition. But it was about time travel, so I plugged along. I found parts of the book very intriguing, like the ‘witch' Claire befriends. Frankly, I found her a bit more interesting than Claire.
Can't say if I'll pick up the sequels to this, they are doorstops and my to-read list is a mile long.
I love Scotland though, and it was a treat to read about highlanders and all the clan stuff. Loved it for that.
I shelved this at the library and the cover caught my eye. I typically don't bring home “True Tales” for my kids because those titles don't really hold their attention but I pre-read this and the story was so fascinating I knew I wanted to check it out.
Their attention was rapt from page 1. The art is great and I love that this isn't a book about a famous person. It's one unique event in the life of a man who could have been anyone's grandfather.
The front pages have lots of woodland animals so we had a nice time talking about all the animals that live on our property (we abut a stand of trees) that also live in Gowganda. There are lots of probing questions one could do with this book.
A very cool premise ruined by terrible, horrible, no good, very bad protagonists. And lame plots. Or lack thereof.
My son is doing a unit on famous artists at summer school and he has become fascinated by Van Gogh. We checked this out from the library. The author did a wonderful job conveying what an outcast VG was in a way that would be easy to understand for young readers.
The illustrations are beautiful!
This Israeli graphic novel about an ad hoc group of archaeologists who search for the Ark of the Covenant fell a little flat for me. There is a lot of presumed back story that I couldn't quite buy into. I did like the art style and color palette.
This was utterly painful to get through and entirely too kind to Benjamin Franklin, who is in all honesty a deeply conflicting founding father.
My older son is a mushroom fanatic. I found this book while I was doing my shelving at the library and immediately grabbed it to take it home. When I showed it to him his face lit up. We've seen a couple shelf mushrooms in our backyard so that was the page that interested him the most. All the illustrations are so cute. I recommend this for elementary to middle schoolers who are interested in the outdoors or heck even grown ups like me who want to see mushrooms with faces drawn on them!
My favorite comic artist writing a memoir? I have been waiting for this one to come to the library for months now. It's a beautiful read about her time working in the oil sands of Canada. Topic I was totally unfamiliar with. It's got the same wry wit as Hark! A Vagrant. She went through a lot, I thought to myself many times that I would not have been tough enough to endure working there. The first quarter of the book about the shackles of student loan debt resonated with me so, so much.
Fascinating look at the history of the Mormon religion intertwined with a murder case by Fundamentalists.
This was an interesting, readable look at the history of (chiefly) American incarceration. It's fairly old now (2002), so some of the content on the War on Drugs seems dated, but in general still feels very relevant. I found the chapters on gendered incarceration particularly good. I'd recommend it if you're interested in sociology.
This was a brief series of essays Carl Zimmer wrote about viruses. Very well researched and written. I didn't know anything about phages so that was super cool to learn about.
This is a terrific read. I actually did not know anything about Jim Thorpe other than that he was a Native American athlete. This is a wonderful introduction (aimed at a YA audience) to his education at the Carlisle school and their heralded football team. Again, I'd never read anything about the Carlisle school but it definitely echos the terrible era of residential schooling in Canada. A large portion of the book centers around Jim Thorpe's relationship with Pop Warner, and the sad situation surrounding Thorpe surrendering his Olympic medals.
I'd recommend this if you or a younger reader is interested in the history of football or Native American life at the turn of the 20th century.