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

In the car and as he moves about the house in the early morning and late night, my husband has been listening to Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth. The author examines, through research and interviews, what she’s found to be the key to success in a wide variety of endeavors ranging from spelling bees to business, independent of a person’s intelligence or circumstances. It’s a mixture of characteristics she calls “grit.”

It wouldn’t be An Open Book without a Star Wars book, now would it? My husband also just completed Phasma: Journey to Star Wars: The Last Jedi by Delilah S. Dawson. Captain Phasma is a First Order officer, and this is her story. Apparently there’s more to her than a gleaming chrome helmet.

I’ve read so many good books lately, including the historical romance The Lackemaker (Laura Frantz), the contemporary romance novella The Cupcake Dilemma (Jennifer Rodewald), and advance review copies of Theresa Linden’s Anyone But Him and Amanda Lauer’s A Life Such as Heaven Intended (both coming next month).

As for what I’m currently enjoying, Tammy L. Gray’s Until I Knew Myself, the first book in her Brentwood Series, is open on my Kindle.  One of the things I love about her contemporary romances is that she’s not afraid to address life outside a Christian bubble. I’m only at the beginning of the novel, and while I know it will include a redemptive theme, these characters haven’t a hint of God in their lives (and it shows). Looking forward to seeing how this group of wayward childhood friends find their way to peace.

I’m also listening to a book I previously read in 2013: Love’s Reckoning, also by Laura Frantz. I’d never read beyond this first book in the Ballantyne Legacy series, and I’m refreshing my faulty memory before completing the audiobook series. The first book takes place in the post-Revolutionary War period close to where I now live. The series moves from York County, Pennsylvania to what’s now the Pittsburgh area (where I grew up). I’m looking forward to enjoying this story of a Scottish blacksmith apprentice and the daughter of the master blacksmith a second time.

I’ll say right off the bat that my children are being much better educated than I was. Much. As a classics major, I’ve never read a Greek tragedy, yet these are not even my son’s first. He is reading them as part of his Humanities courses. He recently read Agamemnon by Aeschylus, and he’s recounted the bloody tale for me several times while studying. (And let me say, there are some startlingly funny Agamemnon/Taylor Swift memes out there. Think “Bad Blood.”)

He’s now beginning Oedipus the King by Sophocles. Spoiler alert for the tragedies: There will be blood and a slew of bodies on stage by the end of the play. And now I understand what an Oedipus Complex is.

My Revolutionary War-period fan just completed Johnny Tremain: A Story of Boston in Revolt, a Newbery Medal winner by Esther Forbes. My daughter really enjoyed this book, which she said is about an orphaned and injured silversmith finding his place in the world. John Hancock and Samuel Adams make appearances. While the recommended grade level is 5-7, I think I’d like to read this one myself.

My daughter is also finishing a book she picked up on the recommendation of a friend: The Girl Who Threw Butterflies by Mick Cochrane. The title is a reference to a baseball pitch, as the main character, Molly Williams, joins the (boys’) baseball team in the wake of her father’s unexpected death.

I recently purchased Jean Schoonover-Egolf’s third entry in the Molly McBride series, Molly McBride and the Party Invitation: A Story About the Virtue of Charity. The bright illustrations kept my kids engaged in the story about a little girl who is reluctant to invite the class bully to her birthday party. Understandably so. What follows is a difficult lesson (for children and grownups) in loving others as Christ loves, despite their flaws.

One of my little boy’s longtime favorites that was brought out again last week is The Pout-Pout Fish in the Big-Big Dark by Deborah Diesen and Dan Hanna. We enjoy the rhyming, repeated text, and the illustrations are colorful, clever, and fun to linger over. Our copy is well-loved (read: tattered). One quibble with this book: The plot involves a fish trying to recapture a missing pearl for a clam. A clam. I suppose “clam” is easier to rhyme than “oyster,” but pearls come from oysters, and let’s not forget it. Even more disturbing, not a single Amazon review mentions this error.  Perhaps we all need a lesson in bivalve mollusks.

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

With the addition of Hoopla Digital to our local library membership, travel time, and ongoing frustrations with his progressive lenses, my husband’s favorite way of “reading” has become audiobooks. He’s been listening to Bloodline by Claudia Gray. This Star Wars story takes place before The Force Awakens, at the birth of The Resistance. My husband characterizes it as less an action story and more political intrigue, focusing on Princess Leia in particular.

I’d read so many glowing reviews of The Lady and the Lionheart by Joanne Bischof, that I feared the book could never live up to the hype. I discovered, however, that it’s worthy of the praise it’s received. If you enjoy a character-driven story, a gentle romance, and a book that tugs on your heartstrings, you’ll enjoy the novel. Like any good fiction, there are themes and layers that resonate with truth, calling the reader to go deeper, examining what truly defiles the body, and how we participate in Christ’s suffering and sacrifice. Set amidst 19th century circus life, it’s a book that leaves an impression.

I’d also read many raves about Pulitzer-prize winner All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. It tells the story of two children during World War II: one a blind French girl whose father hides a sought-after gem, and the other a German orphan boy with an affinity for radio communication. The story was beautifully written, the characters expertly drawn, but in the end, while I enjoyed the book, I felt as if the hint of hope was too little, too late for me. (For more discussion, check out this month’s Sabbath Rest Book Talk.)

My oldest son is still concentrating on the Greek mythology he began reading last month, but he brought home a new book he received at a  school assembly: Bible Basics for Catholics: A New Picture of Salvation History by John Bergsma. His copy has a different cover and is marked the “Special Augustine Institute Edition,” but I don’t know how that differs from other editions. It takes the reader through the Bible with a broad eight-chapter overview, including some stick figure illustrations.

After seeing this National Book Award winner recommended twice within a few days, I requested a copy from the library. It’s The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy by Jeanne Birdsall. My daughter enjoyed what she thought was a more realistic depiction of family life than she usually reads. The children needed correction, and the siblings sometimes didn’t agree.

Shoo-Fly Girl by Lois Lenski is about an Amish girl who (along with other Amish children) attends public school. This author is a new favorite of my daughter’s, and she’s slowly working her way through the library collection. It includes a recipe for shoo-fly pie, which is a big deal in Lancaster, PA, but which I always find a bit bland.

After studying the Epic of Gilgamesh, my oldest son was enthusiastic about sharing the story with his little siblings and found this picture book, which I borrowed from the library. Gilgamesh the King by Ludmila Zeman is the first book in a trilogy. (Why the library carries the first one and not the remaining two is beyond me.) We enjoyed the retelling for children and ancient-looking but still inviting illustrations.

The Mercy Watson series is our all-time FAVORITE for beginning readers! The series features a pampered pet pig, Mercy (a “porcine wonder”), who loves nothing more than hot buttered toast. In her quest for it – and a bit of adventure – Mercy is involved in some hilarious escapades. Mercy Watson Goes for a Ride by Kate DiCamillo is my favorite of the series. And, I absolutely love the illustrations by Chris Van Dusen, which make me laugh out loud. Mercy wears such a look of innocent glee.

Our copy of Puppies! Puppies! Puppies! by Susan Meyers is well-loved and tattered. All of our children have loved this simple picture book. They study the illustrations by David Walker on each page, and pick out which puppy represents them. Cute rhyming story, fun read-aloud, and charming illustrations.

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!

 

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

After a recent overnight trip to Washington, DC with our family, my husband picked up Star Spangled Banner: The Unlikely Story of America’s National Anthem by Marc Ferris. His interest was piqued by our visit to the Smithsonian Museum of American History, where the original flag that inspired Francis Scott Key is on display. Not as moving as the display at Fort McHenry in Baltimore, but close. We’re looking forward to learning more about our anthem’s history.

On the way to and from Washington, DC, I listened to Christmas at Carnton by Tamera Alexander. I loved this historical Christian romance set during the Civil War in Tennessee.  The narration was extremely well done, in my opinion, and I was immediately drawn into this story of a pregnant widow in dire financial straits and an injured Confederate sharp shooter. Easily the best Christmas book I’ve read/listened to this season.

While waiting for hotel staff to resolve our overflowing toilet issue in the hotel room, I was able to finish Charming the Troublemaker by Pepper Basham. I enjoyed this second book in the Mitchell’s Crossroads series set in Appalachia (Virginia, to be specific) much more than the first. Both main characters, brokenhearted but independent Rainey and lonely, charming Alex are likable, but Alex’s originality steals the show. Light humor and gentle faith themes make this “kissing book” a fun, easy read.

For Christmas, we gave our oldest son Life-Changing Love by Theresa Linden, the second in the West Brothers series of Catholic teen fiction by Theresa Linden. He received Roland West, Loner for Christmas last year, and eagerly dug into this book during his Christmas break. While clumsy redhead Caitlyn graces the cover, Roland and his brothers are front and center in this book, and it’s equally enjoyable for boys and girls.

His only homework during the Christmas break is to begin reading Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes by Edith Hamilton. Somehow I missed reading something this comprehensive despite majoring in Classics in college. I love that my son enjoys these classic myths.

At the recommendation of Franciscan Mom, my fourth-grader is enjoying books by Lois Lenski. She zipped through Strawberry Girl, and is currently reading Indian Captive: The Story of Mary Jemison.  This Newbery Award-winner recounts the true story of a young girl captured and raised among the Seneca Indians. My daughter is captivated.

The other book open next to “her” side of the loveseat is a Christmas gift: The Other Side of Freedom by Cynthia T. Toney. She’s told me twice so far what a good book it is.  On a southern strawberry farm in 1925, young Sal and his Italian immigrant family must discern when to be silent and when to speak up in defense of his father as they become embroiled in a case of bootlegging and police corruption.

My new reader borrowed Christmas with Morris and Boris by Bernard Wiseman from the school library. We have a collection of Morris the Moose stories that all of my children have loved. Listening to a beginning reader can be tedious, and the humor of Morris makes the task more pleasant.

I’ve also introduced her to Henry and Mudge through Henry and Mudge and the Bedtime Thumps by Cynthia Rylant. This series about a boy and his HUGE (but not Clifford-sized) dog is also fun for new readers and their families. I love Cynthia Rylant’s writing for children.

My youngest child received a copy of The Monks’ Daily Bread by Sylvia Dorham. This simple rhyming book, delightfully illustrated, follows the monks through their daily routine when the cupboards are bare, and they must rely on God’s providence for their dinner. A great read-aloud book that children will long remember and treasure.

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!