Parenthetical

Six intersecting stories, from a mid-19th century ship in the South Pacific to a post-WWI European castle to 1970s California to modern-day England to future Korea to even-further-future Hawaii. The characters are all connected mysteriously… or maybe not so much. The stories interrupt each other along the way to the future, and then pick back [...]

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Sherlock Holmes, contentedly retired to Sussex to keep bees (which Giddygeek and JanetCarter assure me is canon), meets his intellectual match in Mary Russell, the wealthy orphaned teenager up the road. They fight crime! One of you lovely people (sorry, I forget who) recommended this for our 8th grade summer reading list a couple of [...]

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I didn’t read a single piece of fiction this summer. This is unheard of. What’s even more surprising is that I read all four non-fiction books cover to cover and enjoyed most of them. From favorite to least: Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard, by Chip and Dan Heath — When I [...]

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On his way back from the Boys’ Island to his coming-of-age feast, Mau survives the giant tidal wave that wipes out his entire Nation. On her way to join her father at his new island governorship, Daphne’s ship is caught in the same wave and runs aground on Mau’s island; she is the only survivor. [...]

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I read a classic! On purpose! Without coercion! Twelve-year-old me wants a medal. My Antonia is the story of a sort of pioneer Magical Mystery Girl, as told through the eyes of Jim, a boy who travels from Virginia to frontier Nebraska to live with his grandparents after his parents die. A “Bohemian” (Czech?) family [...]

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A Grown-Up Table diversion into comics… Y is over. (Well, it’s been over for awhile, but I wait for the trade paperback compilations of the issues, and I just recently picked up the last one.) It’s one of the first series I fell in love with, and the end did not disappoint — I was [...]

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This ARC* randomly found its way into my life, and I picked it from my “haven’t read yet” shelf to take on a recent camping trip to Acadia National Park because it takes place in Maine, and I’m a sucker for reading a book while surrounded by its setting. The plot: Aslaug was raised by [...]

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Grown-up book! I picked this one up because the back reads, and I quote, “The rich and the privileged have fled the city, barricaded it behind roadblocks, and left it to crumble. The inner city has had to rediscover old ways — farming, barter, herb lore.” Near-future SF and self-sufficient urban community? Way to unintentionally [...]

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In a recent post I set myself a challenge to read one grown-up book for every 2 or 3 YA books I read this year, to give myself the same chance at a literary lens for adulthood that I had for childhood/adolescence. For my first meal at the grown-up table, I picked The Abstinence Teacher, [...]

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