The Garden, by Elsie V. Aidinoff

Find this book in the Hawley Library.

I read this book awhile ago, and combined with a bit of forgetfulness is the fact that I really need to return this very overdue book - but I wanted to mention it here and recommend it, I think especially for girls/women.

This is the story of Eve, from THE garden , told from her and the serpent's perspective. In this book, God is very typical old-testament God, very jealous and angry and, well, petty. The serpent takes on a whole new depth of character outside the Bible. He is the source of wisdom - which is neither good nor bad but does *include* bad, because wisdom includes all knowledge. In this version of the story, God is raising Adam and teaching him about the world, and The Serpent is raising Eve. Eve is very curious, and The Serpent answers all her questions. She wants to know what the world is like outside of the garden, so they go on trips.

There are a lot of surprises and intense thinking/relationship scenes. This book in no way is meant to be taken literally, or interpreted as part of the Bible or anything, it's just a story, with those characters and in that time, that gives a different perspective, one that is much more in depth.

Rainbow Road, Alex Sanchez

Find this book in the Hawley Library.

This is the third and final book in Sanchez's Rainbow trilogy (Rainbow Boys and Rainbow High were the first two). Like the first two, it is light and fun. The characters are real enough and experience things genuinely, and although these aren't particularly deep books and the characters don't reveal amazingly deep feelings or anything like that, they are enjoyable without being too fluffy.

In this one, Jason, Kyle, and Nelson (same characters), set off on a road trip across country during the summer after they graduate high school. They meet a lot of crazy people, some normal people, get into some high jinks, fall in love, fall out of love, and fall in love again. Nelson *finally* meets a great guy. Kyle *finally* gets over some of his ocd-ness and learns to relax. And Jason . . .well, Jason was never my favorite anyway. (Nelson is my favorite, but I've got a weak spot for Kyle 'cuz I'm kinda straight laced and goody goody like him. Or at least I was before I learned to not be so uptight about these things).

At any rate, now that this trilogy is done I'm really excited to read other things by this same author. Like So Hard to Say (which I requested the library buy). Anybody read that one yet?

NH Flume Award - Nominate your favorite book!

Nomination deadline is December 15th

The winning nominations will be next year's summer reading list.

Donorboy, Brendan Halpin

Find this book in the Hawley Library

We meet Rosalind just after she has lost her moms in a freak accident and has moved in with her sperm-donor father. She didn’t know her father before this, never hung out, he wasn’t involved in her upbringing. This isn’t the story of what its like to have grown up with lesbian parents and no dad, this is the story of what its like to lose two parents but then suddenly have a new one thrust into your life.

The story is told through a lot of emails from Sean, the donor dad, and a lot of journal writing from Rosalind, girl with no moms. Some text messaging, IMs, other written or recorded forms of communication are thrown in, but not so much as to be too annoying (and it can be really annoying to read pages and pages of IMing back and forth). Instead, the voices of the main characters really come through and I really became quite attached to these well-developed whole and round characters. By which I mean that they seem like real people. They have problems, they aren’t perfect, but they aren’t awful either and they grow and learn and are generally interesting.

Basically, Rosalind has to deal with both losing her moms and all the grief that that entails and she screws up in school and goes to some parties and is generally a teenager (and not even a crazy one at that). And Sean needs to learn to be a dad to a 15-year-old after having no practice whatsoever.

It’s a really touching story without being schmaltzy, and realistic and fairly original. Overall, one of the better books I’ve read recently.

Geography Club, Brent Hartinger

Russell thinks he's the only gay kid in his school. Even his best friends don't know about him being gay, and as a result, he feels incredibly lonely. When he gets on an internet chatroom for gay teens, he finds that there is another gay kid at his school, and then he comes out to his other best friend, who turns out to be a lesbian!

Ok, so now there are 5 kids in the school and they know each other is gay. The school is really repressive. Like the opposite of Boy Meets Boy. They want to hang out together, but still be secret, so they form a fake club, geography club, hoping that no one will figure out what the real story is.

That works out ok, but meanwhile Russell got another friend that is manipulating him, and everyone is on edge because, as I said above, the school environment is really oppressive - kids are just really really mean to each other.

I won't give away all what happens, but will just add that it's a really good book, and really short. I like good, quick books.

Autobiography of My Dead Brother, Walter Dean Myers

Find this book in the Hawley Library.

This is the latest from Walter Dean Myers, who I think is a brilliant writer. This one incorporates graphic novel type illustrations, making it a bit of a hybrid – something else I love. So why aren’t I head over heels in love with this book?

Mostly because the subject of the book is same ‘ol same ‘ol for Walter Dean Myers – inner city kids, suddenly and they aren’t quite sure how, get mixed up in gang stuff and drug dealing and then somebody or somebodies die by gun violence. It’s an important story, but Myers has done it, and done it well. The book is great, I will recommend it, but I was a bit disappointed just because the theme is somewhat overdone, at least by this author.

Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy, Gary Schmidt

Find this book in the Hawley Library


From the description of this book, I didn’t really think I was going to like it. I read it because it got some literary awards. So once again, I should say that I learned my lesson not to judge a book by its (back) cover. Though of course, I haven’t really learned that lesson yet.

So the story is set back in the day in a rural Maine community. Turner, son of a preacher man, is the main character. He’s just moved from Boston, where people are more liberal and there are more people in general so he doesn’t feel so much like the entire town is watching him to make sure he never slips up. (Of course he does, and there are some side plots about that.) Lizzie is his friend, a really good friend (but not a special friend, at least it doesn’t seem like it goes that far.) but she is black, a member of a community founded by ex-slaves. Some of the townspeople hate having the black people there, and convince Turner’s dad to help oust them.

Things happen – houses burn, people die – you know. What I most recommend this book on is its solid writing, believable and deep characters, and fluid plot-line. Really good.

Somebody's Daughter, Marie Myung Ok Lee

I read this book mostly because it has personal appeal to me: it is about a girl who is Korean but adopted to a white family in America. My sister is Korean and grew up here with us, her totally white family. The plot centers around when she is about 18, goes off to college but ends up leaving school (much to her adoptive parents horror) and going to Korea to try to figure out who she is.

I’m having a hard time saying whether I liked this book or not because I had so many personal expectations going in. And this girl’s story and my sister’s just don’t overlap very much at all, so the book didn’t meet my expectations.

Anyway, the girl in the story, Sarah Thorson, goes to Korea and enrolls in a school to learn Korean. Although she appears Korean, she really is pretty much an outsider there because she can’t speak the language at all and doesn’t understand the first thing about the culture. Her white family had told her her parents had died in a car crash, which she finds out was a total lie – she was found abandoned at a fire station and no one has any idea who her parents are.

The book switches back and forth between Sarah’s story and the story of her birth mother. So we as readers know who she is and what her life was like. The book is interesting in that it takes a good look at a portion of the US population that seems under-represented (from my biased point of view) – there are so many Korean adoptees in our country. On the other hand, the story is so specific that it is hard to take a larger lesson. The author does hit on one point that seems more universal, at least from conversations with my sister and some other Korean adoptees we’ve known: it is bizarre to walk around looking Korean on the outside, but being acculturated as white because of who you grow up with and the larger environment. Especially then when you go out into the world as an adult and people don’t know your family so they don’t know you didn’t grow up within a certain culture. When my sister went to college, other Asian students were trying to talk with her about certain cultural things and she had to explain herself. The book does a good job explaining that aspect of being adopted.

Flying Leap, Judy Budnitz

This book was recommended to me by one of the other bloggers on here - ray.

I had been reading a string of fairly boring and totally not recommendable books, thus the lack of posts for a while, and this one finally broke that god-awful streak.

I love short stories, which this is a collection of. I love them 'cuz they cut to the chase, they mix it up, they are a bit raw - there's no time or space for slowly getting the reader acclimated to a character or a situation, it's sink or swim.

And what I love about this particular collection of short stories is that the author makes use of a style you see often with south and central american authors but not so much elsewhere. Fantastical realism. This is not to say fantasy, not at all. It's just that things happen that don't really happen in real life to sort of push people and expose their emotions and who they are through how they react. Like in the second story, the character's mother is dying and his aunts pressure him to donate his heart. The doctor pressures him, too, as does his girlfriend. And through that action we see what kind of crazy things people think and do.

I don't think I'm explaining this particularly well, which is sad because I really really loved most of these stories (I think some at the end of the book are a little dull). In fact, that story I was referring to earlier I actually recognized - it had been read on my all time favorite radio program ever - This American Life. (It's episode 256, Living Without, in case you want to hear it.)

Summer Reading Books Clubs - easy extra credit!

The dates and times for the summer reading 'book clubs' have been announced. Attend one and receive a homework/extra credit pass. Meet in the library.

September 12, 6:30-7:30pm
Please talk to the librarians if you plan on attending this evening discussion.

September 20, 2:30 - 3:30pm

Sickened

Born Confused

Lullaby

Boy Meets Boy

Crank

September 21, 2:30 - 3:30pm

The curious incident of the dog in the night-time

Eragon

Vampire High

First Meetings in the Ender's Universe

The House of the Scorpion

Pirates

The DaVinci Code

Ask in the library if you have any questions!