July 2011

Moritsugu, Kim. The Restoration of Emily: a Novel. Toronto, Ont.: Simon & Pierre, 2006. Print.

My husband picked this up for me, when asked to get me “something for the cottage” on a day he was going to the library and I couldn’t get there.  This turned out to be perfect.  When he read the back, saying that it was about a woman with a teenage son who restores old houses, he knew I’d have something in common with the main character.  I did like her, and sympathized with her struggles in her personal and professional life.  I read it fairly quickly, mostly in a deck chair on the dock at a beloved aunt and uncle’s cottage, with occasional cups of tea and glasses of wine to go with it.  In that kind of situation, I recommend this book.

Grisham, John. Theodore Boone, Kid Lawyer. New York: Dutton Children’s, 2010. Print.

I don’t think I’ve ever actually read a Grisham novel before, but I guess I don’t have to apologize for that.  This one caught my eye simply because I didn’t know he’d written any YA books, and I guess this is his first.  Like the recent Nickerson book, I started it at bedtime and ended up finishing the same night.  I found it quite enjoyable and reasonably realistic – Grisham resists the temptation to have his kid hero be in dire peril and solve a mystery that the adults around him can’t.  It was perhaps a bit pedantic here and there, but it didn’t detract from the story; and as a pedant myself, I appreciated the way he has the family watching Perry Mason, with the mother irritatedly saying “It doesn’t happen that way in real life!”.

Another good side of this is that LibraryThing recommends 10 other books by authors I’ve mostly never heard of, so there’s a whole genre out there I’ve been missing so far and can catch up on!

Nickerson, Sara, and Sally Wern Comport. How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. Print.

This was a rare case of me giving a book to a kid to read without reading it myself, and it totally backfired.  Said child got up to about page 60, but then never got any further.  I started it myself the other night at bedtime to see what it was like, and I loved it – I read the whole thing that night, staying up far too late!

The main character is a middle-school-aged girl who has problems at home – her father is dead and her mother sound clinically depressed to me, from the description.  It turns out that the mother owns a creepy old house, and the mystery of how it came to be hers is what kicks off the action of the book.  Nickerson has written a book that kept fooling me into thinking it was going to play into a predictable type, but never did – weaving elements of mystery, horror, graphic novels and fantasy together (without ever asking for a suspension of disbelief) and bringing it all to a satisfying conclusion.  Scholastic ranks this at a Grade 6 level, and I think that’s appropriate, although it was clearly beyond my Grade 6 tester.

The best analogy I can come up with is to E. L. Konigsberg, although LibraryThing suggests Gordon Korman and Jerry Spinelli as recommendations.

Sfar, Joann, and Audré Jardel. Vampire Loves. New York: First Second, 2006. Print.

In the summer I’m responsible for providing appropriate reading material for the kids at home to augment their own choices for pleasure reading.  I aim for three books a week – a fiction, a non-fiction, and a graphic novel. This was my pick for a 13-year-old boy who had read the Little Vampire books when he was younger. I end up reading most of the books I pick myself, and I found myself unimpressed with this one as I was reading it.  It has stuck with me, though, and I find myself thinking about it.

The drawings seem less accomplished than I remember from Little Vampire, although it has been quite a while since I’ve looked at them. The main character reminds me of a teenage boy, drifting from girl to girl and not quite sure what he’s doing, but never quite satisfied either.

I’m not sure whether to recommend this, but I’ll definitely continue to check out Sfar’s work, especially The Rabbi’s Cat, which seems to be popular and well-regarded.

Boniface, William, and Stephen Gilpin. The Hero Revealed: the Extraordinary Adventures of Ordinary Boy. New York: HarperCollins, 2006. Print.

Both of my boys read and enjoyed this book, and I quite liked it too. In Superopolis everyone has a unique superpower, except the main character. It’s a premise that any super-hero-obsessed 11-year-old boy would be willing to give a chance, and Ordinary Boy is such a likable character, and the book so action-packed, that they are not disappointed.

OB, as he is known for short, and his friends in his team, the “Junior Leaguers” help their parents to defeat Superopolis’s biggest villain, Professor Brain-Drain. The book does fall a bit into that annoying kid’s book trap of having kids present and helping at events that in real life would be too scary for them, but hey, we obviously suspended a lot of belief at the whole superpower notion, right?

Highly recommended, especially for boys around Grade 4 or 5 who are into Spiderman and dream of having their own powers.

Adamson, Gil. The Outlander: a Novel. New York: Ecco, 2008. Print.

I have the feeling this book was recommended to me my LibraryThing, not because of books I’ve read, but books that are on my “to read someday” list. However, it popped up on my library hold list and I figured it was about what I was looking for.

It was indeed… a historical setting, a sympathetic main character, exciting adventures, and memorable supporting characters. I have been struggling lately knowing how much to say in these “reviews”, since the point is to keep track of what I might want to be searching for later, but I don’t want to include spoilers.

So, I’ll try to describe a bit here, without giving anything away.  Mary is a young widow, just 19, whose only child died within a few days of being born. She suffers from mental illness (schizophrenia, I guess, considering that she sees visions and hears voices?) and murders her husband. At the beginning of the book she is running away, pursued by her brothers-in-law, two very similar looking large, red-headed men. William Moreland is a loner she runs across and spends time with in the wilderness of 1903 Western Canada. There’s a mining town and a dwarf, and I suppose you could label this a “Western”, but trying to pigeonhole it in that way would be a shame.

Gruen, Sara. Ape House: a Novel. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2010. Print.

Water for Elephants was one of the first books we read in my current book club, and like everybody else I know, I loved it. I was eager to see if this book would hold my interest as well.

The main character, John, is a reporter who is sent to visit a language lab where great apes (specifically, bonobos) are being studied. Protesters bomb the facility and John ends up covering the news, although of course the actual story is much more complicated! I found the reading quite thrilling and I finished it within a day or two of starting.

I’m not sure this is quite as satisfying as Water for Elephants, but it was a good read nonetheless, and I’d recommend it.

Haddon, Mark. Boom!, Or, 70,000 Light Years. [Toronto]: Doubleday Canada, 2009. Print.

This is another book I picked up on a whim from the “new to our library” shelf in the children’s section.  I know Mark Haddon, of course, from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, but didn’t realize he’d written a children’s book.  It turns out that he actually published it in 1992, but edited it heavily for a 2009 re-issue.

Two middle-school-aged kids overhear two of their teachers talking in what they think might be some kind of code.  The mystery is too strong to resist, especially for the main character’s best friend, who disappears.  The main characters, Jim, ends up enlisting his sister’s help to try and track down the villains.  Although nominally a thriller, this book had me chuckling at several points.  Scholastic doesn’t list it on their website, but typing the first couple of paragraphs into MS Word suggested a Grade 3 reading level, which sounds about right.

Jones, Diana Wynne. Howl’s Moving Castle. New York: Greenwillow, 1986. Print.

I picked this up on a whim, in the “new to our library” section of our children’s department.  The name was familiar, and I knew it had been made into a movie recently, so thought it might be good for family movie night.

She had me chucking on the first page, poking gentle fun at the fairy tales where it’s always the third son who succeeds in getting half the kingdom and the princess’s hand in marriage, after the first two sons have failed.  I ended up speeding through the book in a little over a day, and it was perfect summer reading for a blistering hot hour in the park, up to my ankles in the wading pool.  The action moves along merrily, there’s plenty of excitement, and enough twists in the plot to keep me interested.  Highly recommended.

Gannett, Ruth Stiles, and Ruth Chrisman Gannett. My Father’s Dragon. New York: Random House, 1948. Print.

This book stopped me dead in my tracks when I saw it on the library shelf.  Although it’s not the same cover I remember, this book was in the library either at my first school or in town, and I got it out multiple times when I was a child.  I was a little apprehensive about re-reading it, but I found it held up well over the decades.  It’s a much lower reading level than I remembered. Scholastic pegs it at a grade level of 4.8, which seems high.  It’s a fairly gentle, yet exciting, tale about a boy who goes on a voyage and rescues a dragon.  The part that stuck in my young mind was the precise and mysterious list of things he packs in his knapsack; each and every one of them are needed and accounted for by the end of the trip.

Highly recommended, especially for reading aloud at bedtime; the ten short chapters are perfect for reading one, then allowing a second, and being done in a week.