Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

Did you read Jean Webster’s Daddy-Long-Legs as a kid?  Because my mother did, and this is what baffles me.  I grew up reading all kinds of old classics from generations past–it was part of life at our house, I thought–and yet I didn’t realize that this existed until a few years ago.  It was published in 1912 (the year my father’s mother was born, I believe) and is still in print in more than one edition, which says a great deal about its lasting appeal.  Daddy-Long-Legs is a light, remarkably fast read, especially since the vast majority of it is made up of letters from the orphaned heroine to her mysterious benefactor, a unknown trustee at her orphanage who offered to pay her way through college.  The ending isn’t terribly difficult to see coming, but that didn’t lessen my enjoyment of it.  If you grew up loving books like An Old-Fashioned Girl, Freckles, and Anne of Green Gables, but somehow missed Webster’s book, this is a situation that should be rectified immediately.

I’m currently waiting for the sequel to come in at the library.

Today was my niece’s baby shower and my amazing mother’s birthday–and I am tired.

My friend Andrea picked A Dash of Trouble (Love Sugar Magic #1) for book club many moons ago, I’m sure; it’s no secret that I’m behind on my books!  My awesome hubby found it for me on audio, however, and I found listening to it to be a genuine pleasure.  Leonora’s family and friends were a delight, as was the glimpse into Latin-American culture; Leo herself was actually my biggest problem.  I had no issue with her frustration over being kept in the dark about her bruja heritage, because that would have driven me crazy as well.  (#youngestchildproblems)  Her single-minded obsession with experimenting with and performing magic herself, however, regardless of a)what her sisters told her, b)what she promised to the various people she involved, and c)what happened to the innocent people around her made me want to scream.  It takes WAY too long, in my opinion, for her to wake up and realize that all of the sneaking and lying and messing recklessly with powers she’s been warned about has hurt other people, and even then her remorse is partly forced on her.  (Who wreaks havoc on other people’s lives and then refuses to ask the logical person for help because her biggest fear is not that people might suffer endlessly for her actions, but that she won’t be allowed to experiment with magic anymore?  I know adolescents are self-absorbed, but seriously, come ON.)

Okay, rant over.  That is the kind of story line that bugs me more than most people, and the book was still completely enjoyable.  Anna Meriano is clearly an author with a sense of humor, and that aspect of the story was delightful; the denouement was also (mostly) worth the aggravation.  (Everything comes out right in the end, in case you were wondering.  That doesn’t feel like a spoiler, because it’s that kind of book.)  I’m planning on giving it to my two older girls to read; I’m also, however, planning on reading the sequel when they get to it.  If a school-ish story mixed up with Latin culture, a touch of magic, and a family focus appeals, you won’t want to miss this one.

I won a signed copy of Nova Ren Suma’s The Walls Around Us in February of 2016–right around the time my barely-one-year-old was being evaluated for tubes.  (She hadn’t slept through the night in 6 months.)  I was perpetually exhausted at that point in my life; I’m still trying to catch up on the books I received then.  To that end I started The Walls Around Us a few weeks ago and quickly discovered two things:

1.  It’s beautifully, hauntingly, incredibly written.
2.  It’s also WAY darker than my usual fare.

That combination generally messes with my head a bit, you know?  Something that well written ends up insinuating itself into my awareness to a degree that the darkness is more than I prefer to live with; I therefore handed it over to my friend Britt, who reads darker fare more quickly than I do.  For your reading pleasure, here is her guest review!

4 stars

I’m sure my millions of devoted followers noticed that I missed my post on Friday; some of you may have deduced holiday preparations as the most likely cause.  (We did, indeed, dye eggs on Friday afternoon, and the evening just felt busier from there.)  I almost skipped tonight as well–it’s been a full weekend with family, normal Easter happenings, and our oldest niece on my husband’s side going through the temple in preparation for her full-time mission to Arizona.  I didn’t, however, because I wanted to set down in print (so to speak) my small success for this year and my goal for the next.

This year, in our church, we’re studying the New Testament.  Our study manual/guide/whatever-you-want-to-call-it suggested that one way to focus on the Savior during the Easter season would be to read, daily, about the last week before His crucifixion and subsequent resurrection.  I managed to keep up with that, although not without room for personal improvement, and it made a definite difference in my focus.  Next year, I would like to expand that focus to include my children to a realistic degree (my youngest will still only be 5).  That’s what our time on earth is about, right?  Improvement?

Wish me luck, folks–and Happy Easter!  The tomb is empty, and He is risen.  Nothing that has ever been or will ever be matters more than that.

I finished listening to The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner’s Dilemma last night–now I can pass it on to my 12-year-old!–and while the old ornery part of me noted that it is, essentially, a third book (of 400-500 pages or so!) in which Reynie, Sticky, Constance, and Kate battle Mr. Curtain and his men with off-and-on adult assistance, I still quite enjoyed it.  I haven’t yet read the prequel, although my oldest has, but I did see on Trenton Lee Stewart’s website that another MBS book is due out this fall, after 10 years.  Whether that one will revive the story arc that Prisoner’s Dilemma concluded remains to be seen, but I’m looking forward to it.  Stewart spins a good yarn, with individualized characters, and he certainly keeps you reading.  If your latter-elementary or middle schooler likes adventures with riddles and puzzles, this is a good bet–for girls OR boys.  Let me know what you think!*

*Incidentally, this feels like a very brief review, but it covers what I thought needed to be said.  I might have expanded it, only I’ve been doing other things today and I’m down to the wire as far as figuring out what to feed my offspring for dinner.  Suggestions?

I ask this question of myself daily, in reference to all sorts of people and situations, but today I’m referencing the invitations I ought to be addressing for my niece’s baby shower.  Why was I so diligent about addressing the lion’s share of them only to put off the handful I have remaining?  Because I’m seriously putting them off again.  Tomorrow, I’m telling myself–and they need to happen, so I’ll likely manage it–but I could have done it over the weekend, theoretically.  Why was the big segment easy but the small one feels so difficult?

Thoughts?

My oldest actually checked Marcus Sedgwick’s Scarlett Hart:  Monster Hunter out of her school library and read it; I grabbed it from our county library system because she thought her younger sister might enjoy it as well.  (I’ll be interested to see if that’s the case, actually; she might find it scary, she might find it confusing, or she might love it to bits.  One never knows.)  It’s been knocking around my bedroom for a while, waiting for me to finish it, and I finally committed myself to that very activity the other night.  Hurrah!  (By the way, if you’re thinking that most of my reviews begin with a book that’s been hanging around for a while that I’ve finally gotten to–you’re not wrong.)

Scarlett Hart is an orphaned young lady following in her monster-hunter-parents’ footsteps;  her loyal butler is both her partner-in-crime and her cover, since she’s too young to officially report their kills and collect the bounties herself.  Their world feels like a hodgepodge of Regency, Victorian, and Edwardian England (with a healthy dose of steampunk thrown in), but Sedgwick’s art focuses more on the monsters than the background details.  It’s a premise sure to appeal to adventure-lovers who don’t mind their monsters on the creepy side, and while the villains are fairly one-dimensional, the story works overall.  I was entertained but not entranced, in part (I’m sure) because I’m several decades older than the intended audience.  You’ll have to tell me what you think!

Since my girls’ dance recital is looming, I finally sat down tonight to read some of the emails about the next few weeks.

Ugh.

I knew their dance pictures were being taken on a Saturday; I NOW know that each dance class reports at a specific time, and one of my daughters’ times is 7:30 am.

ON A SATURDAY.

I now ALSO know that this dance studio, just like our previous studio, does a long dress rehearsal the night before the recital, which means that we get to juggle littles with sitting in an auditorium for hours AGAIN.  I can’t really fault the reasoning behind it, and if my youngest kids were the dancers involved, it wouldn’t be a huge deal, but AAAHHHHH.  Shoot me now.

I’m not cut out to be a dance parent, folks.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go shed some inner tears about what time I have to get up this Saturday morning.

I really am trying to encourage books to leave my house–or at least, the books that aren’t worth keeping or aren’t mine.  Barbara Freese’s Coal:  A Human History falls into the latter category; I borrowed it from my in-laws ages ago, got far enough into it not to want to give up on it, and then, well, life happened.  (Pregnancy and newborns and toddlers are ALL death to the ability to concentrate.)  Luckily, my fabulous hubby found it on audio for me, and between listening to it while exercising/doing housework and following along with the statistics in the hard copy that’s been sitting on my shelf, I finally managed to finish it.  More than that, I concentrated on it well enough that I’m now fairly bursting with knowledge about the history of coal–huzzah!  (I’d be a riot at parties, if I actually went to any.)

The thing is, coal’s history really IS fascinating.  Coal was a catalyst for and the major contributor to much of the industrialization our world has seen, and we still get more than fifty percent of our electricity from it.  (That surprised me.)  Sadly, it’s also a major contributor to our world’s pollution levels, and the solutions to that problem are complicated.  (For many reasons, by the way.  A few weeks ago I would have assumed that coal was coal, if I’d thought about it at all.  Now I know something about the difference between anthracite and bituminous coal, eastern and western coal and their respective sulfur contents–the things I never knew I never knew!)  I enjoyed the history more than the contemporary analysis, partly because problems that have no clear solution make me anxious and partly because I love history (that is, after all, why I borrowed the book from my father-in-law in the first place).  I don’t necessarily quibble with the trajectory of Freese’s history, you understand; I just enjoyed the main section of the book most.

Bottom line?  This is a fascinating read, although it’s by nature a dryer sort of nonfiction.  If you enjoy history and/or information–or you have secret yearnings to know more about coal–give this one a try.