Hunger Gamesby Suzanne Collins This summer I read Scott Westerfeld’s Pretties/Uglies series and loved the fresh-take on storytelling in Young Adult novels. One member of our bookclub has been campaigning for Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games for a few months, and I wanted to quickly read it so I could get on to my Christmas break …
Miss Hargreavesby Frank Baker A phantasmagorical magic lantern show, Miss Hargreaves is a treat–a luscious Anglophilic truffle of a novel. Brittish-isms? Check. Cathedrals and church music? Check. Eccentric old ladies? Check. A Jeeves and Wooster novel-cum-fantasy? Check. One of NPR’s book critics, librarian Nancy Pearl, offered Miss Hargreaves up as one of her “under the …
Home to Holly Springsby Jan Karon One of my secret guilty pleasures is the Mitford series by Jan Karon. Too quaint, bordering on maudlin, pat plot lines … but, oh, do I love Father Tim, Cynthia, Dooley, and all the animal and human characters that make up life in Mitford. Interestingly, I started the books …
Prettiesby Scott Westerfeld I had no intention of reading this entire YA series; to be honest, I only read Scott Westerfeld’s first book, Uglies, because I promised some students I would (see my post from June 15, 2010). But Westerfeld left the reader hanging at the end of Uglies, the publisher cunningly included a five …
Finnby Jon Clinch [spoiler warning] Eight months after putting Finn aside I took the novel up again and finally finished this dark and incredibly creative novel. Jon Clinch tells the back story of Pap Finn, following faithfully much of Mark Twain’s narrative in Huckleberry Finn: we see Judge Thatcher, Widow Douglas, the Preacher. Interestingly, Huck …
The Color of Lightening by Paulette Jiles I’ve heard that there really is no such thing as heat lightening–but when I was little, those flashes that lit up the night sky with no thunder, no discernible bolt of lightening, and usually when the weather was hot and humid, we called “heat lightening”. Paulette Jiles novel …
The NPR reviewer who critiqued Iain Pears’ Stone’s Fall last spring found it hard to put this nearly 600-pager down. And while I DID finally find it difficult to put down, it took a few days for the novel to work its magic. The historical novel is vast, starting in 1953 with the death of …
The Selected Works of T.S. Spivetby Reif Larsen I had no idea when I opened this beautiful, quirky, and imaginative novel what awaited me–every page is embellished with hand-drawn maps, drawings, schematics, sidebars, and footnotes that follow up on some reference in the narrative. Supposedly the story of twelve-year-old T.S. (Tecumseh Sparrow) Spivet, map maker …
Ugliesby Scott Westerfield It was during a classroom discussion of Fahrenheit 451 that one of my students said, “This is just like the Uglies.” What followed was a rather confusing rush of plot tidbits from two or three of the girls. I’m not sure the novel even sounded interesting to me at that point, but …
Servants’ Quartersby Lynn Freed It has been at least a year or longer since I’ve been compelled to read straight through a book, taking time only to eat, sleep, walk the dogs, and keep the house running. Lynn Freed transported me completely into a world I’ve read about, but only rarely. The voices of Penelope …
This is my symphony 