Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

I was a good girl and showered early last night, which meant I had time to do something after my shower; I used that time to finish reading Nidhi Chanani’s Jukebox.

It was, as my 14-year-old says, pretty okay.

To be fair, it’s visually beautiful–the premise lends itself to some fantastic two-page spreads. And it isn’t that the plot isn’t interesting; the idea of going back in time through records played on a magic jukebox is a great one. It’s just that it’s a fast adventure tale, and so the details–the specifics, the ‘why exactly’s, the ‘what makes these people tick’s–are just kind of vague. The relationship between Naz and Shahi is definitely there but could have been fleshed out, and the major plot points mostly feel a bit abrupt (and slightly random) to me. I am, of course, decades older than the intended audience, but part of this is a writing issue; the book just wanted to be 50 or more pages longer and more detailed. (My favorite thing about it was googling the famous musicians as their albums came up and learning more about them.) As for my intended audience children? I’ll have to let you know what they think after they read it. (They may not actually care.)

Alrighty, I’m off to the next thing. Happy Tuesday!

I suppose, for a lover of historical fiction, I’m on the picky side–not only do I generally avoid the American Civil War like the plague, I lose some interest with each receding century. I was, therefore, less than enthusiastic to see a book with a Silk Road setting on this year’s list of Newbery Honor books–and an outrageously long-titled book to boot. From the very first line of Daniel Nayeri’s The Many Assassinations of Samir, the Seller of Dreams, however, I was pretty much hooked. (Seriously–how can you not want to read a book that begins with “The first time I was stoned to death by an angry mob, I was not even a criminal”?)

I read somewhere that Samir is a buddy comedy, and when I finished it, I realized that it’s true–when I try to compare it to a movie, classics like “The Sting,” “Lethal Weapon,” and “Undercover Blues” come to mind. (That last is a husband/wife team, but still.) Having been saved by the aforementioned angry mob by a portly merchant with a penchant for tales–especially tall ones–Monkey is disturbed by his new master’s casual relationship with the truth and yet somehow drawn into his schemes. When Monkey, Samir, and the rest of their caravan realize that multiple killers have been hired to exact someone‘s revenge upon the Seller of Dreams, however, the novel takes on an “Indiana Jones” sort of quality–with a sprinkling of “Charade” thrown in. What results is a humorous action/adventure tale with an astonishing amount of heart (both emotional and philosophical), and I’m still inwardly grinning over how much more I enjoyed it than I thought I would. Don’t miss this one!

I was really going to review another book today, but it’s clearly far too late for me to do justice to a book I absolutely loved. On the other hand, I was legitimately doing other things earlier–to whit:

1)I made my hubby sandwiches for lunch. 2)I got dressed and ready before I had to take my 3rd grader to school. 3)I took the third grader to school. 4)I stayed and wrote a couple of PTA checks with the president and our book fair person. 5)I went straight from the school to the eye doctor, where 6)I got my pupils dilated, which affected my activities for the next several hours. 7)I stopped at Reams. 8)I got home, exercised, and made quesadillas. I did not write a book review, because I wasn’t at all sure that my eyes would be usable for the task. 9)I fetched my 3rd grader–and ended up napping on the couch for a bit afterwards. 10)I spent the rest of the day doing mom things–including three loads of laundry and schlepping my son to piano and back–and one of my kiddos got sick. I did spend time relaxing after all the kids were in bed, because who doesn’t?

I suppose I’ll keep my fingers crossed for Monday…

It was clearly more than just a week, folks. We actually spent Friday the 9th in Logan, the 10 was my youngest girlie’s 9th birthday, and then the next week saw me making dinner for neighbors two days in a row, juggling more kid appointments, and gratefully accepting wheat from neighbors who were getting rid of it. (Which involved schlepping not-light boxes up and down stairs. I also went to the temple, which was very nice.) My son’s basketball season ended with his last game on the 17th, my two older girls went to a surprise birthday party for one of their favorite cousins, which involved spending the night in Clearfield, and–you get the idea. Monday, of course, was a holiday with all the kiddos home, so there was shopping and the day got away from me (not to mention the distractions). Last night my hubby and I got to go to a BYU basketball game in Provo, thanks to tickets from his brother, and since BYU pulled off a home court victory over Baylor, who was ranked 11th to our 25th, it was quite a fun night. And that brings us up to date!

In the meantime, I don’t have to fix dinner tonight, since it’s Zupas night for the elementary school, and so I can actually review one of the books waiting for me to deal with. On Saturday night, while my blessed hubby drove to Clearfield and back to retrieve our teenagers (the younger of which didn’t want to take the train home), I finished Andrea Beatriz Arango’s Something Like Home. It was more quietly poignant than Arango’s Newbery-winning debut, Iveliz Explains It All, and there were fewer random Spanish phrases (most of which I could more easily translate). Honestly? If you take Jamie Sumner’s Tune It Out, mix it with Joan Bauer’s Raising Lumie, and throw in a dash of Cynthia Voigt’s Homecoming, you get a pretty good approximation of the plot of Something Like Home. (Maybe also a dash of Dusti Bowling’s Across the Desert?) Laura’s parents have been sent to rehab, she’s living with an aunt she’s never met, and the reality of a temporary–or not so temporary?–living arrangement/existence is complicated. Who (and what) helps, how Laura comes to terms with the upheaval she’s experienced, and what life is going to look like going forward is the crux of this verse novel, and a solid verse novel it is. I ended up feeling like Laura’s mental transition happened a bit abruptly, that there was less of a gradual transition than I might have expected, but I did read it over an extended period of time, so that may have been on me. In the meantime, this is a book for those whose families aren’t typical but are still families, and goodness knows we need those in our world. Give it a shot!

Can I seriously just go to sleep now and wake up when it’s over? Because four children have therapy on four different days and parent/teacher conferences on three different days, my second girlie has two orthodontist appointments, I need to help out with the elementary school’s Scholastic book fair as much as I can, I may need to cancel piano lessons, and did I mention that I’m triple-booked for some of these things on Thursday? UGH.

The bright spot–such as it is–is that I’m more than halfway done creating dinner out of various things, including smoked chicken that needs using, so there’s that (and of course, I’m doing it now because there won’t be time to do it later). I can also review Thien Pham’s Family Style: Memories of an American from Vietnam, which I finished last Thursday and was fascinated by. (Yes, I just ended that sentence with a preposition. Sue me.) Pham’s graphic memoir of his emigration from Vietnam and growing up years in the US culminates with a satisfying decision on Pham’s part and a series of comics highlighting his research and writing process for the book, both of which contribute to a sense of completion that graphic memoirs for youth sometimes (understandably) struggle with. There are people that make you angry AND people who remind you that there is real goodness in the world; there are also some teenage decisions that make you cringe. I’m still deciding whether or not to give Family Style to my 8-year-old (who will be 9 in FIVE DAYS, in case you’re wondering), but for teens (even maybe tweens) and up, I recommend it as well worth your time.

Now. Wish me luck on the week ahead…

Why is it extra-special, you may ask? Well, my son’s going to take a break from piano until basketball is over, which means I’ll only be driving two kids to piano for the new 2-3 weeks, which means that my two remaining piano students can use the two slots we have on Monday, which means that I don’t have to drive my usual Friday awkward zig-zag (from home to dance to piano to dance to home). Hallelujah! Unfortunately, my youngest isn’t having such a great Friday–but this time, she’s the one who instigated the friend drama. (I’m hoping she’ll have a change of heart and might possibly write an apology card to the friend, who’s in our neighborhood. We could deliver it and–hopefully–everyone involved would have a better rest of their weekend.)

In the meantime, my PTA meeting and tasks are over for the day, I’ve done my time on the elliptical, and I finished the YF audiobook that had an intriguing premise–Abbie Emmons’ 100 Days of Sunlight. A boy with no legs volunteers to help a girl accidentally blinded in a car accident on the condition that no one tells her about his disability; as a result, she starts out raging at him because ‘he can’t possibly understand what it’s like’. Interesting, right? And it is interesting, even if Tessa’s complete temper tantrum over what will likely be a temporary problem drove me crazy. (I’m 44 and not prone to drama, you understand. I can see teens not blinking an eye at her reaction.) Weston’s story, which he tells in a series of flashbacks, is both interesting and not quite what I expected–in a good way–and his friends and family are fantastic; Tessa herself lives with loving, supportive grandparents, and it’s nice. The outcome of the story is pretty thoroughly predictable, but the journey was enjoyable enough for me that I liked it better by the end than I did at the halfway point. I wouldn’t say my adult friends need to rush out and read it, but if you’ve got teen girls and you’d like them to read something more thought-provoking than the equivalent of ‘Sweet Valley High,’ this is a solid book to put in their hands. Happy Weekend!

…that the Maple Pancake Flavored Puffs from Trader Joe’s are tasty.

Oh, and I’m sorry I missed Monday.

The end.

I wrote a whole bunch of PTA checks this morning, friends–including one to myself, which will never stop being incredibly weird. (Writing yourself a check and then not signing it is almost as difficult as not flushing the toilet when the power’s out and you have a well with an electric pump–you tell yourself not to and tell yourself not to, but habit and muscle memory are powerful, powerful things.) After an exercise-and-hair-washing stint at home, I went to the bank to deposit checks for the PTA as well, by which time I just managed to eat lunch and be ready to walk to get my elementary schooler.

The rest of the day was filled with mom things (including a sitting-on-the-couch nap), but before dinner I managed to finish Alison McGhee’s Dear Brother, which I’m now reviewing so that my grabby reader girls can get their hands on it. (That doesn’t include the one with three AP classes–she’s too busy to be grabby.) I reviewed McGhee’s Dear Sister back in 2022, and after looking over my review, I have more or less the same thing to say about Dear Brother–namely, that its portrayal of sibling relationships feels amazingly spot on, with the antagonism and the begrudging growth (and/or admission) of sentiment. In Brother, our sister protagonist is blindsided by her family’s acquisition of the pet her brother wants, instead of the dog she’s been longing for. It’s the icing on the cake of her sibling resentment, and her tirade about it may or may not last for at least 50 pages; growth and change do come, however, and in a way that made this parent smile. I recommend! I also have to give a shoutout to Tuan Nini, whose illustrations are vital to the book as a whole. I’m more of a text person than an art person, but Dear Brother would only be half a book without its art.

And speaking of sibling relationships, my foster brother reached out to my sister on Facebook after two decades of my parents wondering what happened to him after he went to live with extended family. Miracles happen–and siblings matter. Have a great day!

and then I didn’t even get a Squishmallow happy meal, so my justification for giving into McDonald’s (when really I just knowingly ran errands hungry) didn’t even work. Dang it!

On the other hand, though, my hubby and I have gotten to bed a bit earlier the last two nights, AND I just finished Kayla Miller’s Break, which should make certain of my children pretty happy. The latest installment in Miller’s ‘Olive’ books introduces Olive’s dad and deals with her ambivalence about his return into her regular life after living in New Zealand for a few years; it also touches on phone and social media use. (And while I wanted to shake Olive and spell out the mistakes she is so obviously making, Miller’s handling of the situation works much better.) The series seems to be trending in a ‘getting deeper’ direction, which is a nice thing to see; fans should definitely enjoy this one, and younger middle graders attracted to realistic fiction would do well to give Olive a chance.

In other news, I’m liking the Finch app as motivation for accomplishing the regular small things that sometimes fall by the wayside, my dad’s 82nd birthday was yesterday, and I’m making chicken recipe after chicken recipe since Ream’s had boneless skinless chicken breasts on for $1.59/lb last week. Hope everyone else is having a good January!

You know those books that engage you just fine when you’re reading, but that you have to push yourself to pick up? That’s what Scout Is Not a Band Kid was for me. (Maybe it’s because I was a band kid?) Of course, it’s entirely possible that the average middle grade reader will enjoy this graphic novel about a girl who joins band solely because the trip at the end of the year will enable her to meet her favorite author; as a parent and former band geek, however, I found Scout to be more selfish and less likeable than I wanted her to be. On the other hand, the ‘what makes a good friend question’ is subtly but successfully explored, and the glimpse of the (also) subtle differences between Canadian life versus life in the US was interesting for me. Ultimately, however, it wasn’t my favorite of my recent graphic novel reads.

In other news, the Youth Media Awards Webcast was this morning at 6 am (8 am Eastern, only I’m not in Eastern), and I got up to watch it. So many more good books I want to read! And we had this Orange-Maple French Toast Casserole for dinner last night, which all of us seemed to mostly like. (Translation? The littles didn’t like the orange segments on top.) I’d recommend it; it also had the benefit of using up a bunch of stale grocery store bakery rolls that needed to be eaten. What’s not to love?