Welcome to the June 2024 edition of An Open Book, hosted both at My Scribbler’s Heart and CatholicMom.com!

My husband has been reading Big Whiskey: Kentucky Bourbon, Tennessee Whiskey, the Rebirth of Rye, and the Distilleries of America’s Premier Spirits Region by Carlo DeVito. It is considered the definitive guide to the American Whiskey Trail (or so the description says) and features distilleries in both Tennessee and Kentucky. It includes interviews, histories, facts, and photographs. My husband has found it a useful guide and an interesting book that would work well in a coffee-table style presentation. It does, unfortunately, have some typos sprinkled throughout. Might make a nice Father’s Day gift for the bourbon afficionado.

If you’re a fan of road trip novels, you’ll enjoy Nicole Deese’s second book in the Fog Harbor series, The Roads We Follow. Raegan Farrow, daughter of country music legend Luella Farrow, takes to the road with her mom and her two sisters in the tour bus their mother crossed the country in during the 1990s. Micah Davenport, son of Luella’s recently deceased but long-estranged best friend/singing partner, who’s searching for answers about his paternity, serves as their bus driver. I thoroughly enjoyed this family drama/contemporary Christian romance. Nicole Deese is one of my favorites, and this story of reconciliation, family communication, and using your God-given talents hits all the right marks.

Apparently, audiobooks on Spotify Premium are the key to getting someone other than me to wash the dishes in our house. My oldest son will willingly do them, unasked, while listening to books. He recently finished Cult of the Dead Cow: How the Original Hacking Supergroup Might Just Save the World by Joseph Menn. Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc) is credited with inventing “hacktivism,” creating a privacy tool (Tor), and helping to build cyberweapons. Among cDc’s alumni is former Democratic presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke. My son says the book isn’t highly technical, and those with merely an interest in computer history can enjoy it; it doesn’t presume you have prior technical knowledge of the subject.

He’s also been reading Pulitzer Prize winner The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara, the second book in The Civil War Trilogy. The Killer Angels takes the reader through the Battle of Gettysburg. Living so close to Gettysburg, the battle has special interest to our family, particularly since we learned my great-great-great grandfather served the Union Army as part of a regiment of German immigrants settled in Pennsylvania. My son appreciates that the point-of-view characters in the book—all major figures in the battle, such as Chamberlain, Buford, Lee, Longstreet, and others—have varying reasons for why they are fighting, opinions on how to fight, and thoughts about the war’s purpose. He said it demonstrates the passing of the Napoleonic ideals (such as honor in warfare) in the face of the changing technology of weaponry in the modern era. (I’ve read this one, too, and without a previous deep interest in history or warfare, I loved it.)

Morte Arthure (King Arthur’s Death, author unknown) turned out to be largely about Lancelot. My son enjoyed the earlier and latter chapters most. A lot of filler was in between, including large sections devoted to the son of Joseph of Arimathea attending Mass. Some of his disappointment with the book could be due to the translation he listened to, with many repeated phrases. He says if you have an interest in Arthurian legends, this may be of interest, but it is not the best introduction to the subject.

Two Sagas of Mythical Heroes: Hervor and Heidrick, Hrolf Kraki and His Companions translated by Jackson Crawford was a more accessible book to read than that of King Arthur. My son said that he could see the influence of these works on J.R.R. Tolkien’s writing. These tales were passed down orally in pre-Christian Norse times.

Finally, he also read J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fall of Gondolin. This book, like some other of Tolkien’s works I’ve shared for An Open Book, is for the Tolkien fan who’s already read the most popular novels (The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion). The Fall of Gondolin includes a more detailed rendering of some tales included in The Silmarillion. The author regarded this as one of the three ‘Great Tales’ of The Elder Days.

The last work my high school daughter’s class read this year was Robert Bolt’s two-part play, A Man for All Seasons. It concerns St. Thomas More, who as lord chancellor to King Henry VIII, was executed—martyred—in 1535. We are hoping to watch the award-winning 1966 movie adaption soon.

My middle school daughter read the Newbery Award winner When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead. From the description: “Shortly after a fall-out with her best friend, sixth grader Miranda starts receiving mysterious notes, and she doesn’t know what to do. . . It would be easy to ignore the strange messages, except that whoever is leaving them has an uncanny ability to predict the future. If that is the case, then Miranda has a big problem—because the notes tell her that someone is going to die, and she might be too late to stop it.”

In addition to the continuation of a series she’s had on loan from a friend, my daughter found another book by an author she’d enjoyed: Rescue by Jennifer A. Nielsen. Meg’s father, fighting for the Allies in WWII, has been captured by the Nazis. To rescue her father, with the help of an injured British spy, she must crack the code her father has left.

I received a review copy of George MacDonald’s The Golden Key and Other Fairy Tales by George MacDonald, recently published by Word on Fire’s Spark Classics imprint, edited by Haley Stewart. It’s a beautifully bound and formatted hardcover that looks and feels like a classic. My daughter particularly enjoyed the second tale, “The Light Princess.” In addition to it and “The Golden Key,” “Little Daylight” is included. MacDonald, who I’d not even heard of until probably the last decade, is considered one of the great Christian fantasy authors, an influence of J.R.R. Tolkien and Madeleine L’Engle, and a contemporary of G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis. Unfortunately, the tales I’ve read don’t appeal to me in the least, but my daughter enjoyed them. Perhaps I’m too old to appreciate them for the first time.

My fifth grader read The Odd Squad: Bully Bait by Michael Fry. This is an illustrated book, which seems to be my youngest son’s favorite thing. It features a super-short seventh grader, Nick, who’s forced to join a club with a couple of fellow misfits. They end up working together to face all their middle school problems, including a bully, who turns out to be more layered and sympathetic than they would’ve thought.

Because he can never seem to get enough of reading and re-reading Wimpy Kid books, he also read Diary of an Awesome Friendly Kid: Rowley Jefferson’s Journal by Jeff Kinney. Rowley is a secondary character in the Wimpy Kid series, best friend to Greg Heffley. Here, he is center stage with his own journal and a biography of sorts of Greg.

Finally, my son read the third book in the Boy/Girl Battle series. In Boys Against Girls, the boys try to frighten the girls with a local legend of the abaguchie creature. There’s revenge and retaliation on both sides and finally a truce. Sounds to me like the kind of simple, classic story you don’t hear much of anymore.

I’ve had the opportunity to review many Catholic children’s books lately, and I’ll feature some over the next several months. First is Arthur the Clumsy Altar Server Rings the Bells by Theresa Kiser. Ringing the bells at consecration is a big deal for young servers, and this fun picture book highlights those moments’ significance. As a mom to four altar servers over the years, I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve stared down those bells, willing a child new to serving to pick them up at the correct time.

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