Welcome to the June 2018 edition of An Open Book, hosted both at My Scribbler’s Heart AND CatholicMom.com!

Lately, I’ve gone from reading one book at a time to juggling an audiobook or two, a children’s book, and a couple of others simultaneously. It’s not my favorite way to read, but it’s getting the job done. There are two new books I’m eager to start next week!

The Solace of Water is the latest release by Elizabeth Byler Younts.  I’m intrigued by the premise of this Christian women’s fiction story of friendship between an African-American preacher’s wife and a reclusive Amish woman set in Pennsylvania in 1956. Kristine Wilson of  CBA Market Review says, “Byler Younts is a marvel with dialect and highly charged emotional scenes. Like a turbulent river, water is ever-present in this story of love, anger, and regeneration.”

I’m also itching to start the contemporary Christian romance Just Let Go by Courtney Walsh. The cover is just so lovely with those pretty flowers. And fitting, since Quinn is a flower shop owner paired with a haughty Olympic skier, Grady, as they renovate said flower shop.

The Vagabond Codes by J.D. Stone is a Young Adult thriller set in a dystopian America. I’m 3/4 of the way through the story of fourteen-year-old Ben and a small band of teens fighting for survival against artificial intelligence gone bad and roaming cannibals. In the early chapters especially, it struck me as part Falling Skies, part The Walking Dead, and part Battlestar Galactica. Lots of action, but as it progresses, more of Ben’s family history and personal conflict is revealed.

The last reading my oldest son did before finals started and baseball games littered the  calendar is William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. This is one of the few Shakespeare plays I haven’t yet read (which is crazy for a Classics major), so I was interested to learn that it’s less about Caesar and more about Brutus, who conspired to assassinate the first Roman emperor. 

I’m not sure where I ran across The Courage of Sarah Noble by Alice Dagliesh, but I knew this was a book my fourth-grade daughter would like. It is a true story about a girl who traveled with her father to build a new home for their family in the wilderness in 1707. There, she cares for her father and befriends her Indian neighbors. The book is a Newbery Medal winner.

Another Newbery Medal winner has been in my daughter’s reading pile: Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. This is the first survival story she’s read and is the first book in the Brian’s Saga series. While traveling to visit his father, thirteen-year-old Brian’s plane goes down, leaving him alone in the Canadian wilderness with nothing but his clothes, a windbreaker, and the hatchet his mother gave him.

Finally, the fourth grade class has been reading Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor (yet another Newbery Medal winner). My daughter tells me she likes the book, yet seems reluctant to do the required reading. Could be end-of-the-school-year burnout. Shiloh is the adorable beagle depicted on the cover, rescued from an abusive home by Marty. Marty tries to keep Shiloh a secret, but, as you might guess, the secret coming to light could have big consequences.

I spotted Blockhead: The Life of Fibonacci by Joseph D’Agnese in my Goodreads feed. My knowledge of the Fibonacci Sequence comes entirely from the TV show Touch, so I thought this might round out my knowledge a bit while entertaining my little kids. I love children’s books that introduce kids to big or complex subjects in age-appropriate ways. Blockhead depicts the medieval daydreamer Fibonacci as a misunderstood boy with a facility for numbers.  Eventually, he connects those numbers to the patterns found in nature.

My youngest daughter brought home Move Over, Rover by Karen Beaumont from the school library. This book immediately reminded me of Jan Brett’s The Mitten, which I wrote about last month. Instead of animals cramming themselves into a mitten, in Move Over, Rover, they are squeezed into a dog house. Instead of being driven out by a sneeze, they are driven out by the addition of a skunk! This picture book is a cute and easy read.

What are you reading? Share it at An Open Book and find new book recommendations too! #openbook Share on X

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Welcome to the May 2018 edition of An Open Book, hosted both at My Scribbler’s Heart AND CatholicMom.com!

From a Certain Point of View (40 Stories Celebrating 40 Years of Star Wars) is a short story collection that depicts familiar Star Wars events from different points of view. Stories include ones told from the perspective of rebels left behind on Yavin and even from the monster in the trash compactor! It’s a clever idea and includes authors of some Star Wars novels, including Chuck Wendig and Delilah S. Dawson, as well as actor/writer Wil Wheaton. My husband has been listening to this on audiobook in the car, and while, for the most part, he finds the stories interesting, he is disappointed that, like the franchise as a whole, it can no longer be considered what we’d call traditionally “family-friendly.”

I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to read a book by Kara Isaac, but I finally downloaded Then There Was You. First off, I love the cover, which captures the locale and the tone of the book quite well! It’s a charming, witty Christian romance set mainly in Australia. Sassy but suffering Paige McAllister is a worthy match for celebrity Christian bandleader Josh Tyler, whose family founded what sounds like the megachurch of all megachurches. This won’t be the last book I read by Kara Isaac.

In anticipation of May’s Sabbath Rest Book Talk, I’m listening to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, read by Nick Offerman. I only read this classic for the first time as an adult, and I’m immensely enjoying the audiobook version – both because of  Twain’s prose and Offerman’s interpretation. I look forward to running errands in the car, just so I can listen.

My son’s humanities class is not reading The Odyssey by Homer, but they spent time discussing its plot. Intrigued by the story, my son has decided to read it on his own, and is enjoying it more than he expected. (Old does not equal dull.) This is a classic that, along with Homer’s The Iliad, I’d like to re-read myself.

My fourth grader enjoyed The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall so much that she’s reading the next book in the series, The Penderwicks on Gardam Street. From the book description, “Mr. Penderwick’s sister has decided it’s time for him to start dating—and the girls know that can only mean one thing: disaster. Enter the Save-Daddy Plan—a plot so brilliant, so bold, so funny, that only the Penderwick girls could have come up with it.”

For an enrichment project at school, my daughter is writing some book reviews for the newspaper they are creating. (Book reviews? Where do kids come up with this stuff?!) She’s chosen to feature several books that the school librarian informed her were not being checked out often. One of those is The Indian in the Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks, which I read to her when she was young. And of which she has no memory.  Now that she’s read it herself, she loves the book! She assured me that if she were to have a little live Indian, cowboy, horses, et al, in her care, she would not part with them willingly.

The Mitten, illustrated by Jan Brett, has long been a favorite of my children. Each of the four have loved it, but in recent years, it’s been a particularly fun bedtime read for the kids since the introduction of some printable fun.  As each increasingly large animal climbs into the boy’s lost mitten, the children take turns adding the paper animals to the paper mitten until the bear’s sneeze forces them to fly out in all directions. Beautifully illustrated!

The Curious Garden by Peter Brown was recommended reading in my daughter’s 4H project book. In the story, a city devoid of all plant life is revitalized by a little boy who cultivates a tiny garden on an abandoned railway. I read the story to the younger children, who were very interested in the illustrations that start out dingy and dull and become lively and vibrant as the story progresses. It’s a charming story of how given just the littlest bit of soil and the right conditions, nature finds a way. It reminded me of a hike my husband and I did years ago, which he and my oldest son (and a bunch of Boy Scouts) recently completed. Not far from the Appalachian trail stand some remnants of a forgotten town, including a steam shovel, left where it was last parked. A tree has grown up inside of it!

What are you reading? Share it at An Open Book and find new book recommendations too! #openbook Share on X

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Want more details on An Open Book? You can also sign up for An Open Book reminder email, which goes out one week before the link-up. No blog? That’s okay. Just tell us what you’re reading in the comment box.

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THANKS FOR STOPPING BY! STAY A WHILE AND LOOK AROUND. LEAVE A COMMENT. SHARE WITH A FRIEND. IF YOU LIKE WHAT YOU SEE, PLEASE SIGN UP FROM MY AUTHOR NEWSLETTER TO KEEP UP-TO-DATE ON NEW RELEASES, EXTRAS, AND HOT DEALS!