🐇🥕🛤️🍁☕️🍁A Favorite and a Meh

    This week I reread Watership Down by Richard Adams, an influential book in my life. I read it the first time when I was in junior high. I had an hour bus ride and was able to get many pages in. I realized that the book was about more than rabbits seeking a new place to live in safety. It looked at different systems of government: authoritarian, kleptocracy, isolationist, and democracy. Adams manages to take these big ideas and make them vital to the lives of a group of rabbits. I wasn't surprised to learn that Adams served in World War II. His rabbit characters have the camaraderie of a group of soldiers fighting a fierce enemy. Hazel is the leader. His brother Fiver is a visionary. Bigwig is the powerhouse. Blackberry is the thinker. Dandelion is the storyteller. The rabbits have their own language and mythology, much like a Tolkien novel. What is needed for flourishing? A balance of freedom and responsibility. 

🐇🥕🛤️

    The Time Hop Coffee Shop by Phaedra Patrick is about a magical coffee shop. It only appears to the people it chooses. Greta Perks is in her forties and longing for her past life as a famous actress in coffee commercials. During that time, she met the man in the commercial who became her husband both in real life and in Maple Gold Coffee land. They had a daughter who also appeared in the commercials and is now a surly teenager. Everything in her life- her marriage, her career, and her relationship with her daughter isn't what she dreamed. Then she gets an invitation to the coffee shop, and a special blend lets her live in the town from the Maple Gold commercials, where she is gorgeous, successful, loved by her wonderful husband, and adored by her daughter. Life is perfect. Or is it? The main premise is fun, but I found the book's pacing a little slow and its message, live the life you have, somewhat trite.

🍁☕️🍁

⚾️🏟️🧢🦩💀🦩👞⛵️🐈📚🐲💳 Memoir, Murder, Magical, and Mythical

 

    My mother and her big sister grew up in Maryland in the 1940s and 1950s. This lovely memoir, About My Mother: True Stories of a Horse-Crazy Daughter and Her Baseball-Obsessed Mother by Peggy Rowe, is set in roughly the same time period. The memoir circulates around Peggy and her mother's relationship. It was one of opposites. Peggy's mother only did things the right way, which also happened to be her way. Peggy was horse-obsessed. Her mother never had a hair out of place, and Peggy's fondest desire was to dress as Annie Oakley. Peggy got herself into some funny scraps. What shines through the pages is the love these women had for each other. And how crazy her mother was about the Orioles!

⚾️🏟️🧢

    Sometimes you need to read a cozy mystery, and I'm finding Donna Andrews' Meg Langslow series to be a balance of murder and mayhem with romance and buffoonery. Book #3, Revenge of the Wrought-Iron Flamingos, takes place in a single weekend in Yorktown, Virginia. Meg Langslow is an ornamental blacksmith and native of the area. Practically everyone there is a relative. They are an eccentric bunch. Her boyfriend's mother is the organizer of the annual Yorktown Reenactment of the siege of Yorktown with an accompanying craft fair. Her boyfriend's mother is dedicated to complete authenticity, including having the cannons firing night and day for realism. No wonder there's a murder!

🦩💀🦩

    Lost Evangeline: A Norendy Tale by Kate DiCamillo, illustrated by Sophie Blackall, is the last book in the series. They are all set in Norendy, a vaguely 18th-century European country where strange, enchanting things happen. Evangeline is a very tiny girl found by her cobbler father in the toe of a shoe brought for repair. The cobbler's wife never takes to the girl, but the father and daughter share a love of the sea and a desire to be sailors. 

👞⛵️🐈

    I have read some historical novels by Kate Quinn, including The Huntress and The Alice Network, and enjoyed them. The Astral Library is a fantasy departure for her from her usual genre. The Astral Library is a place of sanctuary for the disenfranchised. I found it to be a great defense of public libraries. Libraries are one of the few places you can linger without spending money. When my children were young, we would go and use the computers, read stories, and each one could pick out five books to take home. Two of my daughters worked as pages at the library. It was a place we looked forward to visiting every week. Quinn captures the refuge quality of libraries through her main character Alix. Alix has graduated from the foster system she's been in since age eight. She works three jobs and pays rent to live on someone's couch. Her barely stitched-together life is coming unraveled. She goes to her favorite place, the Boston Public Library, and enters a door from the Reading Room she never noticed before. She finds herself in Astral Library and is invited to live in a book of her choosing. The library, however, is under attack. Could Alix be the one to save it?

📚🐲💳

⛵️👨‍🏫📝🛝👟📸🦜🏨💌Wrecked by Elizabeth Strout, Warmed by Katherin Center, Enchanted by Kate DiCamillo

 

    I have been reading Elizabeth Strout for a while and looked forward to her latest novel, The Things We Never Say.

https://barbpruittwrites.blogspot.com/search?q=Elizabeth+Strout

I appreciate how authentic her characters feel and how genuine their emotions and actions are. Reading her novel is like looking at a painting that is slightly off center, by design. The goal is to cause an internal dissonance that heightens engagement with her novels. Loneliness is a central theme in Strout's work. Artie Dam is a compassionate, effective high school teacher who is deeply troubled by the current culture's bending toward casual cruelty and corruption. He is kind to those who are wounded. He receives news that changes his life, and he has to decide how to live with it. So much of the book's action is internal and interpersonal drama, but it feels large. It reminds me of the movie It's a Wonderful Life. It caused me to ponder how much difference one life could make.

⛵️👨‍🏫📝

    Katherine Center's romance novels aren't just escapist reading. She wrestles with poignant struggles that women face — aging, changing bodies, motherhood, and beauty culture. I like that she doesn't give neat answers, but instead portrays the complexity of those topics. 

    And she still tells a compelling story with lots of action and humor.

    Lanie is a native Texan and mother of three boys, four and under, who moves to Massachusetts so her husband can pursue his music career. She leaves behind her support system and a life that barely worked, but now doesn't. Motherhood has completely pulled her under. Someone asks how far along she is, and it breaks her. She's not pregnant. Things need to be different, so she starts by joining a gym. It changes things. 

🛝👟📸

    The Hotel Balzaar: A Norendy Tale by Kate DiCamillo, illustrated by Júlia Sardà, is the second Norendy tale. The characters from the first book, The Puppets of Spelhorst, don't appear in the second book, but the stories are from the same universe. They have the same magical, anything-can-happen feel. A young girl, Marta, lives in the Hotel Balzaar where her mother works as a maid because Marta's father, a soldier, never returned from the war. Marta's job is to be a mouse: quiet, unobtrusive, and not talking or being noticed by anyone. Then a mysterious, elderly countess with a beautiful green parrot arrives and notices Marta. She tells Marta seven stories that reveal Marta's greatest wish. Extraordinary.

🦜🏨💌

❤️📖🏞️🐕❤️🎧🐺👑🦉Two Sister Stories and a Romance

 

    The Secret Book of Flara Lea by Patti Callahan Henry is historical fiction. It jumps back and forth between the early 1940s and the 1960s in England. Two sisters were sent from their home during Operation Pied Piper, where the children of London were evacuated to safer locations during the Blitz. Older sister Hazel and little sister Flora are taken in by Bridie and her teenage son, Harry. Hazel, fourteen, takes her responsibility to protect five-year-old Flora seriously. Hazel creates a magical world through stories that she only tells to her little sister. It's called Whisper Wood. Flora tragically disappears. Twenty years later, Hazel finds a book entitled Whisper Wood, by an American author. Is it her sister? Even though this book isn't attributed this way, it felt like magical realism. It kept me guessing through its plot twists. 

❤️📖🏞️

    I do like a bit of romance. This Story Might Save Your Life by Tiffany Crum is a best friends trope. Benny and Joy are long-time best friends and famous podcasters. Their podcasts feature different scenarios where someone survives a life-threatening situation. One of them knows how, and the other has to guess. It's humorous and heartwarming. Joy has narcolepsy, and she has found herself in several life-threatening situations. The book opens with Joy cryptically passing Benny a note as they record their podcast. The next day, she disappeared. As Benny searches for her, their backstory is revealed. Crum has several I-didn't-see-that-coming moments. I also learned a lot about narcolepsy. It doesn't sound fun. I found the book to be creative and twisty.

🐕❤️🎧

    Kate DiCamillo is a magical author. At the recommendation of a granddaughter, I read The Puppets of Spelhorst: A Norendy Tale. It is part of a trilogy that is made up of short novellas. I read an interesting review that talked about passive protagonists in children's books- think Pinocchio- and it made me consider this book from a child's view. Children can perceive themselves as having no power, but large desires. The five puppet characters in this book, a girl, a boy, a king, an owl, and a wolf, aren't magical. They don't come to life. They can only talk to each other, but DiCamillo enlivens them through conversations, observations and by believing in their purpose for being created. She also captures the interaction between the two sisters who receive these puppets. This is a fantastic book, and I look forward to reading the rest of the trilogy. 

🐺👑🦉