48 Hour Book Challenge Finish Line

7 Comments

So, this year was a bust. I kind of knew it would be: Hubby was gone and I was single-parenting, which means I don’t sleep well and the girls demand more of my attention. (I thought at ages 15, 11, and 9 it would be better. It’s the 9-year-old that still needs me.)

There’s a someecard that sums up what happened this weekend, but for the life of me, I can’t find it. Which also sums up this weekend.

Everything that could go wrong (from a daughter throwing up due to dehydration to a crisis with friends) did. Well, maybe not everything: The house didn’t burn down. But, every time I pulled out a book to sit down and read, it felt like I either fell asleep or someone needed something.

I shouldn’t complain. I did finish two books I’d started and read three other ones, so there’s that.
And I got in 11 1/2 hours of reading and 45 minutes of blogging/social media. (More or less. I realized while writing this that I wasn’t especially diligent.)

In retrospect: I should have started later on Friday and spent more time today reading. I think my numbers would have been higher overall if I had.

At any rate, I gave it a go. And maybe next year will be better.

Enchanted Air

Leave a comment

by Margarita Engle
First sentence: “When my parents met, it was love at first sight.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Content: It talks indirectly about drugs, sex, and teen pregnancy, as well as the violence of war, but it doesn’t dwell on that. It’ll be in the children’s biography section of the bookstore

I noticed that Abby had read this one and liked it, so I pulled it off my pile to give it a try. I mostly wanted something I could finish in one sitting, and this one — being a memoir in verse — fit the bill.

I didn’t expect to be thoroughly delighted by it.

Margarita is the daughter of a Cuban immigrant and the son of Ukranian holocaust survivors. Needless to say, she had an interesting story to start. Add to that the conflict in the 1950s with the Cuban revolution and the subsequent cold war, she definitely had  a story to tell. But: she chose to tell it through travel, through depictions of the island itself (which she described so lushly) as well as her family’s vacations to Mexico and Europe. She portrayed herself as an awkward child, caught between two countries and then unexpectedly cut off from half of her family. I can only imagine what her mother felt.

Elegantly told, beautifully imagined, it’s a love story to the power of words and images and home. (And I’m glad that her hope in her afterward for more normalized relations between the U.S. and Cuba may slowly be coming to fruition. I would love to visit there someday.)

Spelled

Leave a comment

by Betsy Schow
First sentence: “
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Review copy picked up at CI3 and signed by the author, who was a delightful person to talk to.
Content: Language-wise, it’s probably more advanced than the younger middle grade set can handle (unless they’re precocious), but content-wise there’s nothing. It’s in the YA section (grades 6-8), but it’d be good for a 4th or 5th grader as well.

You know, living in Kansas there’s one thing we get a lot around here: Oz stories. Seriously. It has its own section in the bookstore. And every time a spinoff comes (or a new reissue of the classic story, or a book about the film), we all kind of roll our eyes, knowing that we’ll have customers who just eat this stuff up.

This book is no exception.

It’s basically a twist on the Oz tale: Dorothy (Dorothea in this version) is a princess in the Emerald tower, and she’s kept captive because of a curse that was placed on her when she was born. As she’s gotten older, she’s grown to hate the restrictions on her life, and so she breaks the protection spell…. and all havoc breaks loose. Magic is turned upside down, the wicked witches are let loose, and suddenly Dorothea, her maid Riz, and her fiance (it happened very suddenly) are on an adventure to set things right.

If you know the plot of the book (or the movie for that matter). you’ll recognize the arc of Dorothea’s quest. And that’s okay. Schow was riffing on the well-known story, adding her own elements (having Ozma be the Hydra and turn into Baba Yaga was a nice tough). But, it was really just okay. The humor was okay. The romance was okay. The twist at the end was… okay. It never really became more than just “this is a decent book.” Which isn’t bad. And I’m sure fans of Oz will really like this one.

I suppose I was just hoping for more than okay.

The Truth Commission

Leave a comment

by Susan Juby
First sentence: “First let me say that this will not be an easy tale to tell, so I’ll warm up with an author’s note.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Review copy pilfered off the ARC shelves at my place of employment.
Content: There’s some discussion of rape and bullying and a character doing drugs, but there’s no swearing, etc. It’s currently in the Teen section (grades 9-12), but I’d give it to a 7th or 8th grader.

This is going to be quick since I need to head to work. The basic story: Normandy Pale (she’s a girl) goes to an elite art school on an island off the coast of British Columbia. Her claim to fame? Her older sister immortalized a very awful version of their family in a cult popular graphic novel.

Normandy has never been happy with this, but when her sister shows back up into their lives (having suddenly left a prestigious art college in California), she’s really not happy. Add to that her friends Neil and Dusk (her name is really Dawn, but her personality is more Dusk-like) deciding that what they need to do is elicit Truth from people who aren’t fully honest with themselves, Normandy’s a bit of a mess.

Told as a work of “creative non-fiction” (complete with footnotes), this is really a delightful read. Juby’s exploring things like perception and truth, and whether or not it’s good to be honest with each other and with ourselves. It has a messy ending (being “true to life”), and some bumps along the way (the parents were particularly milquetoast) but in the end, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

48 HBC Check-in

2 Comments

I’m probably going to read a bit more tonight, but since I’m not putting up another review for the book I just finished (a reread of Batman: the Dark Knight Returns for my graphic novel book group), I thought I’d check in.

I got about 4 1/2 hours of reading done in between everything else today, Which isn’t great, but isn’t too shabby, either.

Then again: we went and saw Inside Out today. It was fantastic. And then we had a crisis we had to take care of. And I’m single parenting for the weekend. So, all things considered: an okay start.

If you’re participating, how are you doing?

The Marvels

3 Comments

by Brian Selznick
First sentence (which comes about 400 pages in): “Joseph was lost.”
Support your local bookstore: buy it there!
Review copy provided by the publisher.
Release date: September 15, 2015
Content: It’s a huge book, which will be daunting. But 2/3 of it is pictures. And the text section may be a big confusing for younger readers. There is some smoking by adults, but other than that, there’s nothing that would stop me from giving this to a precocious 9- or 10-year-old. It will be in the Middle Grade (grades 3-5) section of the bookstore.

I don’t usually like to write about books months before they come out. But, since this is the first one I finished for the 48 hour book challenge, I figured it was okay.

I’m also going to be coy and not tell you too much about the book. I knew very little about it going in, and I think that’s the best way to experience it.

That said, I liked this one nearly as much as Hugo. It’s about the theater and family and truth in storytelling. Selznick’s art is gorgeous, as always, and even though the text section starts out a bit confusing, stick with it. It’s completely worth it at the end. Oh: and read the afterword. It makes everything that much better.

There’s really not much else to say, except: I can’t wait to share it with everyone else.

Deadly Design

Leave a comment

by Debra Dockter
First sentence: “I was five years old when I found out that my older brother wasn’t just my brother.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Review copy downloaded from Edelweiss.
Content: There was a LOT of swearing in this (including quite a few f-bombs) plus some off-screen sex. That puts this squarely in the Teen section (grades 9+) of the bookstore.

I didn’t quite know what to expect out of this one, when I first picked it up. It’s billed as a sci-fi thriller, but I don’t quite think that fits. It’s not really futuristic, though it is dealing with gene splicing and genetic manipulation. And it wasn’t really thriller-y, except for a bit near the end. So, I came to think of it more as a medical drama, and on that level it worked for me.

Kyle McAdams is the younger son of a couple who had problems conceiving and bearing children. The one they did have died fairly young. So, they went to a doctor who promised them that he could “create” healthy children for them: one egg, one sperm, some genetic manipulation and they’ll have a healthy kid. Except, in the petri dish, the egg splt, and suddenly they had two children. They chose to have one at a time, and so Connor was born two years before Kyle. The catch: they were identical, pretty much in every way.

So, Kyle spent most of his life (in small-town Kansas, outside of Wichita. Yes, the author is local(ish).) in the shadow of his older, perfect brother. Connor was into sports, the Valedictorian, had the perfect girlfriend. Kyle was… not. Even so, when Connor drops dead right before his 18th birthday, Kyle is shaken: they share the same genes, does this mean he’ll die, as well?

When Kyle starts going down the rabbit hole of his origin, what he finds out gets creepier and creepier. He and his brother aren’t the only genetically modified humans out there, and they all seem do die right before their 18th birthday. The question is: why?

I’ll be up front: Kyle is a bit of a moody jerk. (A bit is an understatement.) That makes it hard to connect with him. And so, what kept me reading at the beginning was the novelty factor: I love a good Kansas book that gets Kansas right, as opposed to being just a “nowhere” place. I loved that she got the feel of small town right. Or the visits they made to Wichita. Or the weather. It was lovely. And I loved her ruthlessness: she was killing people off right and left in the first third of the book. It’s always refreshing to have an author write like that.

It also helped that Kyle became less sulky and annoying as the book went on. I began to care about his plight, though I never really felt a sense of urgency about his death. I don’t know why that was; Dockter showed herself willing to kill everyone off, and they told me that Kyle was going to die. Therefore, there should have been tension, but I just didn’t feel it. I came to care about the people Kyle interacted with, and when the twist happened, I was pretty shocked. (No, I didn’t see it coming; then again, I never do.)

That said, I do have one major complaint: Kyle didn’t DO much of anything. He went to doctors who told him stuff, and people helped him, and doctors solved his problems (mostly). But he was more a reactor than an actor in his life. I wanted Kyle to be brilliant and find a solution to save his life, but no. Mostly he had other people do the work while he waited around for them.

But, that said, I did enjoy the science and the drama of it. It’s a solid debut novel and I am interested to see what Dockter writes next.

The Improbable Theory of Ana and Zak

Leave a comment

by Brian Katcher
First sentence: “Zak!”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Content: There’s some swearing, and one (brief) naked scene (which was alluded to), as well as passing references to drug use and drinking. It’s in the YA section (grades 6-8) of the bookstore.

I can sum up this book in one sentence: Hermione and Michael Cera spend a crazy action-filled night at Seattle ComicCon and fall strongly in like.

It sounds simplistic, and like I didn’t care for the book, neither of which is true. The book may not be tackling the deepest subjects ever, but it’s not all fluff. And I found myself — in spite of the improbable situations that Ana and Zak found themselves in — thoroughly enjoying their adventure.

Ana is the daughter of super strict parents. Seriously: she believes that she makes one mistake — like her older sister, Nicole, did — and she’s kicked out of the house. So, she does everything right, from following her parents’ (insane) rules to letting them choose her college for her.

Zak’s father died a few years back and his mother recently remarried a guy Zak — uber geek extraordinaire — has nothing in common with. So, he spends his time being the slacker, failing health (by turning in a paper copied from Wikepedia, hyperlinks and everything. Who does that?), and having no desire to even go to college when he graduates in the spring.

They come together one fateful night, when the health teacher (who also happens to be the quiz bowl coach), um, encourages Zak to come to a tournament (by telling him she’ll waive his plagiarized paper and allow him to pass the class) instead of going to his favorite con, Washingcon, that happens to be in Seattle the same weekend as the tournament. Ana is loathe to have him on her team, especially since her first impression of him was terrible. Zak is loathe to be on the team, mostly because he finds Ana rigid and cold and because he’d much rather be AT the con rather than just near it. So, of course, they spend the entire night together at the con, looking for Ana’s younger brother who snuck out to attend.

The con itself was my favorite part (good thing it was most of the book); having never been to one before (shock! It’s on my bucket list, if only to people watch), I thoroughly enjoyed the con atmosphere Katcher painted. I don’t know if it was realistic; there were bullies and gay weddings and gaming tournaments and singing and Zak being some sort of geek god, but I ate it up. If that’s what a con is, then heck yeah, I want to go.

No, it wasn’t perfect: the ending took a turn for the weird when they ran into trouble with a drug runner, and the confrontation with Ana’s mom (when it came out that they were lying about where they were) was pretty unsatisfying (especially since I has just spent the whole book hating her). But, for the most part, it was a thoroughly enjoyable geeky adventure.

And you really can’t ask for much more than that.

State of the TBR Pile: June 2015

Leave a comment

A couple of items of business first: 1) Pam at Mother Reader is doing her 48 hour Book Challenge again this year. It starts THIS coming Friday and runs through Sunday. I don’t know how much I’ll be able to participate, mostly since I’m going to be single-mom-ing this week. I may be able to get some in. If YOU can, however, I highly recommend it. It’s a blast! (And a good way to knock down the TBR pile…)

2) KidlitCon Registration is OPEN! Woot! (I haven’t registered yet; the early bird registration is good through August 24th, though, so I have some time.) If you haven’t had the chance to go to this Con yet, you should. It’s the best. (Granted, it’s really the only con I go to, so I’m kinda biased.)

My TBR Pile is more out of control than usual. (No surprise.) In fact, this is what it looks like:

The small stack on the left is what I’m actually reading right now. The books on the right are ones I’m looking at, considering for a work initiative thingy we’ve been doing. I need a YA book for July, and nothing’s grabbing me. The graphic novels on the right are ones for my book group (which no one showed up to last time. Sadness.)

And the big stack in the back? That’s the pile I actually try to choose from when I need a new book to read:

Trouble is a Friend of Mine by Stephanie Tromley (Publisher rep recommendation)
Walk on Earth a Stranger by Rae Carson (Because I liked the Fire and Thorns trilogy)
The Wand and Sea by Claire Caterer (An author event coming up)
The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins (People at work are raving about this one)
Seriously Wicked by Tina Connolly (It looked cute)
Lois Lane: Fallout by Gwenda Bond (Been getting some good buzz)
How to Write a Novel by Melanie Sumner (Publisher rep recommendation)
Husky by J. E. Sayre (Publisher rep recommendation)
Spelled by Betsy Schow (Because it’s Wizard of Oz and looks fun)
The Cage by Megan Shepherd
Truth Commission by Susan Juby
Read Between the Lines by Jo Knowles

What’s on your TBR pile?