The Book Search

 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...

 Ahhh, summer!  Time to take a break from the usual and try a few new things...  We've been traveling this year to someplace completely different-Alberta, Canada.  The weather was forecasting rain every single day for the entire two weeks we were here and today, they were really right.  It's 49 degrees and windy and raining so we're staying tucked in our hotel!  We've seen some beautiful places  like this- The Athabasca Glacier Me and my sweetie at Emerald Lake     At the Valley of the Five Lakes-all of them are beautiful! But it's good to think about reading...  I've read so many wonderful ones while we're on vacation!  Here are two of my new  favorites.    The first one is called "The Summer of June" by Jamie Sumner.  I heard her read some of her first book "Roll With it" in this YouTube video. And I love her voice SO MUCH.  I could really hear her reading her new one as well.  June is a girl who live...

I'm enjoying the winter break-we got to come and spend some time with my family in Western NC, we've eaten A LOT, laughed a lot, walked a lot...  Today it's POURING  so I had a little time to finish some books!  YAY!!! The first one is called "Skylark and Wallcreeper" by Anne O'Brien Carelli.  It's told from two different perspectives-Collette and Lily.  Collette is Lily's grandmother and lives in a nursing home in New Jersey.  When they have to evacuate because of Hurricane Sandy, Collette gives Lily a pen and tells her not to lose it, that it's important, but in the chaotic aftermath of the storm, the pen disappears.  It turns out that the pen is link to Collette's past that Lily doesn't know anything about.  Collette grew up in France in the 1930s and 1940s and was involved in the French Underground.  So the story has pieces from World War 2 (told from Collette's perspective) and the present day (told from Lily's perspective). ...

I've been diving back into middle grade fiction after a bit of respite.  I found several on Netgalley that have been languishing in my To Be Read pile so it's great to be able to dig up a few gems!  Here's what I've been reading! The first one is called "Behind the Canvas" by Alexander Vance.  It's his second book (although I didn't read the first) and I really love his voice.  This story is about a girl named Claudia who feels like she doesn't fit in.  She really likes art and all her classmates think she's weird.  The weirdness comes to the forefront when her class is on a trip to the Florence Museum of Arts and Culture and she notices a boy with vivid blue eyes in one of the paintings.  Except no one else can see him.  She sets forth on a quest to free the boy from an evil sorceress and ends up walking through some of the most famous paintings in the world.  It's a super fun and thrilling adventure but what I really liked were the foot...