Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

I’ve been buying cheap books whenever I can to donate to our school’s literacy night; the catch, of course, is that I want to read (or at least skim) most of them before they actually get donated. To that end, I gave my 8-year-old a choice between a couple of recently acquired books for our next read-aloud, and she went with Ulf Stark’s The Runaways. Published in English in 2019, it had a very European-ish feel; the author is Swedish, so I’m assuming it was written in his native language. (The title page, however, only included the original title. It didn’t name the original language, as far as I could tell–and it was, weirdly, at the end of the book.) Gottfried Jr. loves his big, cranky, foul-mouthed grandfather, and when Grandpa talks about how much he hates the hospital, they plan together to run away. Their adventure–right down to Gottfried Jr.’s confession to his father–doesn’t develop quite as I expected it to, but ultimately, there is a surprising degree of poignancy and ultimate understanding–at least, of the most important things.

It’s hard to accurately recommend a book that isn’t going to fit with most American kids’ expectations of how a story proceeds; on the other hand, it’s less than 130 pages (including multiple full-page illustrations) and yet provides plenty of material for discussion. I’d actually be tempted to teach this one.

On the homefront, the older girls had a cousin sleepover this weekend, but my youngest hasn’t been feeling well (she threw up last night, but only once), so it’s been a bit of a different experience all around. Still, thank goodness for cooler weather–bring on fall!