The Book Search

And the hits just keep coming!  Boy, have I read some great books lately!  Here are two of my favorites. The first one is "Max in the House of Spies" by Adam Gidwitz.  I haven't read all of Gidwitz's works, but I loved "The Inquisitors" so I was excited to see this one come up in my Netgalley feed.  It did NOT disappoint.  It's about Max, an 11 year old living with his parents in Berlin in 1939.  The family is trying to figure out how to cope with the limitations on their lives that the Nazis are putting in place.  After Kristallnacht, Max's parents insist that he go on the Kindertransport to London.  He doesn't want to leave his parents, but they don't give him a choice, so he goes.  As he's traveling on the ship, he finds he's picked up two immortal beings, Stein and Berg (who sound a bit like tiny vaudevillians) that are now sitting on his shoulders, simultaneously trying to throw him under the bus and help him get through all this...

 I'm branching out from all the speculative fiction I've been reading to catch up on some realistic fiction.  Here are two of my new favorites! The first one is called "The Partition Project" by Saadia Faruqi.   She also wrote this one that I liked a lot too called "A Place at the Table"  It's about Maha (short for Mahnoor) who lives in Texas with her loving parents and her older brother.  The story opens with the family at the airport getting ready to pick up Dadi, who is Maha's dad's adoptive mother.  Dadi is going to come and live with the family and Maha is meant to act as a kind of a baby-sitter to Dadi.  Maha is not happy about losing her bedroom (she gets her own room, but it's up in the attic) to Dadi and she's struggling to connect to Dadi, who is often abrupt and and kind of cranky.  Maha's deepest passion is journalism and she's very excited when her teacher assigns them a documentary project.  Except she has no idea w...