Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

I was really, really going to write a review today, folks, only I got caught up getting dinner in the crockpot, collecting library books that are due and not renewable tomorrow, and calling to make appointments, and then somehow it was time to eat lunch and pick my 14-year-old up for her 2:00 appointment. From there it’s been mostly go, go, go, and now I’m most definitely not mentally capable of much critical thought. Here, then, is a review of another color…

Parents of school-aged children out there–have you heard of the Graphic Library series? In some ways it’s a bit like the “Who Was ______?” series, only they’re graphic novels of between 25-35 pages long about all kinds of people from history. There are categories–inventors, courageous children, etc.–and today I read (in order to pass it along to my children) Elizebeth Friedman: Expert Codebreaker of World War II. I’ll admit that the art in the series isn’t always fantastic–and honestly, neither is the writing. Regardless, I keep checking them out and making my children read them after I do, because a)I love history, b)it’s important and I want to communicate that to my children, and c)requiring them to read graphic novels of 35 pages or fewer isn’t unreasonable. Every once in a while one of them balks a bit, but I remain hardhearted–and I love that my 9-year-old knows who Claudette Colvin is.

The one about Elizebeth Friedman, however–and yes, spell check’s hissy fit notwithstanding, that IS how you spell her first name–was more my style of art AND beyond fascinating. I had no idea how big of a role Friedman played in cracking codes in the US–for decades, no less! She SHOULD be a big deal in history books, but instead (shocker) an unscrupulous man took public credit for some of her more serious accomplishments, and it’s been relatively recently that she’s begun to receive the credit she deserves. Look her up if you want some interesting reading for the day!