Speaking from Among the Bones

Baby C came home from the hospital and a few days later, Alex came home from the library with this…I had put a hold on it and of course the hold came up at the most inopportune time…but I finished it and I enjoyed it. Easter at Buckshaw and the crypt in Bishop’s Lacey is opened and disturbed…sounds like a ghost story and maybe a bit like of of the most famous ghost stories in Christian lore…and then, because he can, Alan Bradley tosses a curve ball on the last pages…a good book for a new mom!

Oh, and have I mentioned that I think the name Flavia is awesome? I would have named Baby C Flavia, but Alex wasn’t a fan…and I think I like her name better than Flavia now anyway…but Flavia is still an awesome name.

(April - May 2013)

Cool Water

(Note to self: stop using your phone to take pictures. Your camera that is just a camera works SOOOOO much better!)

Hello December…will I ever get caught up? This is still an October read and I still have the month of November to get through too…Fingers crossed! My pile of to-reads is going to grow soon too…Christmas is coming!

Cool Water. This book was a gift from my parents for Christmas? my birthday? a couple of years ago (oddly it’s not written in…that never happens in my family). It sat on the dresser and gathered dust, but as I’ve been unofficially on the book diet again, I’m slowly getting through that pile.

Cool Water follows some of the townsfolk in Juliet, Saskatchewan around for a day. There are some real characters in Juliet, but Dianne Warren describes their lives in such a way that they are fully believable. For a couple of nights after finishing Cool Water, I still dreamed about the characters in the book, mostly Vicki and Lee. It doesn’t happen often that I dream about characters from a book, but they seemed so real.

I was disappointed when the book ended because I wanted to know more (to me, a sign of a good book!). What happened to Vicki’s family? What happened to Lee and the horse and the postcards? What about Jodi and her trip to Alberta? What about Lila and the hard conversation(s) with Rachelle? So many questions…maybe that’s why I dreamed about them…maybe I was giving myself the endings I wanted…

Dear George Clooney: Please Marry My Mom

Hmmm. What can I say? I picked this book up because the author, Susin Nielsen, is Canadian and she wrote some Degrassi episodes. As in old Degrassi. From when I was a kid.

It's one of those funny in-between books - Violet, the protagonist is 12, so is it kidlit or YA fiction?

Violet is an angry and upset young lady - her father, a director, ran off to California with his star, married her, and had twins. Violet lives in Vancouver with her mom and her five year old sister. Her sister's reaction to the divorce is slightly less angry than Violet's - Rosie has taken to wetting the bed and biting a girl at the daycare.

I was on the fence with this book. I loved how Violet and her friend Phoebe take control of what they think is an out-of-control situation, Violet's mom's love life, and send George Clooney a long letter detailing why he should marry Violet's mom. I love the everyday 12 year old-ness of the book - the cute guy from Winnipeg who calls Violet Pamplemousse, Violet's proclamations that she's not into boys, she'll never be into boys, look at all the guys her mom has dated that didn't work out so all boys are gross and her simultaneous (and somewhat confusing to her) crush on aforementioned cute guy from Winnipeg, the mean girl, the influence of social media on her life (I am oh so glad there was no social media when I was 12. Life was interesting enough as it was!), the Magic 8 ball conversation with her father.

Overall I liked this book for what it was - a book for a pre-teen/young teenager. I loved all of the Vancouver references. I even liked the cute ending. The only thing that drove me nuts was that the boring, dorky man Violet's mom ended up with (who isn't actually boring or dorky) was the white knight who rode in and fixed all the things wrong with their home and car - bannisters secured, old furniture removed, mufflers fixed, etc.

The Sisters Brothers

The Sisters Brothers is the 2011 winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction. I really liked this book...the tone was great and it was pretty funny in some parts! Eli Sisters narrates the book and he is a very compassionate hired assassin. Charlie Sisters, Eli's older brother, is more ruthless and has no (very little?) conscience. The ongoing ordeal of Tub the horse is both humorous and heart breaking. The imagery of the Wild West and the lawlessness and debauchery that went hand in hand with the gold rush is excellent. Their journey down the West Coast and back again really does bring them full circle from young boys living in an abusive home, to hired guns, to grown men, safe in their home...

Oh, and can I just say, I love the cover!

I Am Half-Sick of Shadows

Flavia de Luce is back and it's Christmas at Buckshaw and there is a film crew on site and a baby is born (it is CHRISTMAS after all) and of course, someone is murdered...

This might have been my favourite of the four so far - the relationship between Flavia and her sisters is expanded just enough to make me feel better about it. Flavia is still quite isolated and I'd love to see her make some friends. We learn a little bit more about Dogger - was he a medic during the war? Flavia sets off the most spectacular fireworks display. Buckshaw might be saved from creditors by Shakespeare, but will it? And maybe Santa Claus delivered some amazing chemistry supplies to Flavia.

I can't wait for book five...

A Red Herring Without Mustard

I LOVE Flavia de Luce. I love these books and I can't wait to read the fourth one (my pile of library books in getting smaller and I'm now tackling them by due date...which means I have to wait a bit to read it). This time Flavia gets herself mixed up in a bloody murder, a brutal beating and a counterfeit antique business...and of course she solves most of the crimes. In this book more than in the first two, I really felt bad for Flavia - she is very isolated at Buckshaw and her only friends seem to be Dogger and Mrs. Mullet. Her sisters torment her, as older sisters do, and because she doesn't go to school, she doesn't seem to interact with the other children in the Bishop's Lacey.

I love Flavia's obsession with chemistry and I love even more that she has her own lab. I would have loved to have a my very own lab when I was 11...

I've wondered from the very beginning about the fate of Flavia's mother, Harriet and it looked like maybe this book had some clues that confirmed some of my suspicions, but no, it was just a trick Ophelia and Daphne played on Flavia that Bradley played on his readers. Hello actual red herring.

I'm so glad I discovered Flavia de Luce!

The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag

This is the second Flavia de Luce book and I just got an email from the library that the third and fourth ones are waiting for me to pick up! I am really enjoying this young British sleuth!

In this book, a travelling puppeteer shows up in Bishop's Lacey with a broken down van and a very unhappy assistant. Two shows are arranged for the church hall and during the second one, the puppeteer is killed. Flavia noses around and collects clues and discovers a surprising connection between the pupeteer's death and a death five or six years earlier.

Alan Bradley does such a good job of weaving his mystery that I wasn't sure who did want and who was innocent and who wasn't innocent, but had no hand in either death...I love Flavia and her potions and chemistry! I'm looking forward to A Red Herring without Mustard.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

Quick housekeeping:

Today is the last day of January and I'm on pace to read 60 books this year. Looking back to the last two years where I kept very close track of my reading and the three or so years prior to that where I kept loose track, I am confident that I won't read 60 books (there are months when reading drops off...December, May), but I'm still aiming for 52 books. I didn't read finish any non-fiction this month, but I'm not going to force myself to do that (see the RULES)...but if you have any good non-fiction suggestions, I'd love to hear them!

Okay, so do you know why I picked this book up? Because of the cover. And the fact that it was the only non-fantasy/vampire/wizard/weird futuristic novel in the turning bookcase right beside the picture books. I know: don't judge books by their covers, but the stamp drew me in. Good thing I missed the scary dead bird. But I really did enjoy this book. I also need to get out of the kids' side of the library...or not. I have a pile of non-kidlit beside my bed to read.

Anyway.

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie. That's what I'm supposed to be talking about.

It was really good. So good that when I discovered, by turning  the last page, that there are at least two more novels featuring detective Flavia de Luce, I knew I'd try to track them down.

Just another momentary aside. It drives me bananas that paperbacks aren't catalogued by title and author at our library. So if I find something I want that either the library only bought in soft cover or was only printed in soft cover, I just have to keep searching the (unalphabetized) turning shelves for the titles I want and hope that maybe someone got the book at another branch but returned it to one of the two we visit.

Back to the book. Flavia is an eleven year old English girl, living in a crumbling manor house in the English countryside in 1950. She has no mother (although maybe her deceased mother isn't actually dead?), an eccentric father and two horrid older sisters (aren't all older sisters horrid from an eleven year old's perspective?). She is also a chemistry prodigy and has a wild imagination. She's smart and she's nosy curious, which makes for a good detective.

I quite liked this book. It had enough twists and turns to keep me on my toes and was very well written (and is a Canadian novel...I wrongly assumed it had a British author). I was particularly impressed that a retired man could capture the essence of an eleven year old girl so well!

I just discovered there are six Falvia de Luce books, four released with the fifth to come in 2013...guess what will be gracing my bedside table next! (oh wait, one more update. An additional four have been added...that make ten [ahem, yay math skills])

Oh, and bonus points. Alan Bradley lives(d) in Kelowna.

If you hadn't already figured it out, I highly recommend this book. And I'm a geek.

The Disappeared

Oh, July book number two, The Disappeared by Kim Echlin, you were tough on me. I read the first half very quickly and then it languished beside my bed. I'd read a couple of pages a night and give up. I'm not sure what it was. I think it started when Anne went to Cambodia and found Serey. You can sense the foreboding from the beginning, but it becomes overwhelming once Anne gets to Cambodia and starts to (she thinks) settle in.

I don't know about this book. I loaned to my sister, so we'll see what she thinks...I finished it during the week that started all the crazy health stuff, so it may have just been the wrong time to be reading this book...

Has anyone else read it?

Clutter Rehab

I discovered the Org Junkie website a few weeks ago and decided to do the 52 weeks of decluttering challenge. And then I discovered the writer had a book. I had to wait for a while to get this book - very popular at the library - and when I did get it, it only took a few hours to read it. It was good and I thought I'd actually go out and buy a copy (I couldn't do that before or it wouldn't count for the challenge!) but as often as I've picked it up in the last few days, I decided I didn't need to go buy it...not right now anyway. I'm trying to reduce my clutter, not add to it. And the website has pretty much all of it on it...I do like holding the little book in my hands though...we'll see, I might cave. But for now, I'm just going to try to keep renewing the book!

If you're trying to organize your life or your home or your office, I totally recommend your book. And if you're one of those well-organized people I aspire to be, I still recommend this book - she had some great tips and we can all use great tips!

Darkwing

When I worked somewhere that I don't work now, I was fortunate to be involved (peripherally) on a project involving Kenneth Oppel's book Silverwing. I read the trilogy and I enjoyed it - I think I need to reread it though because I remember Firewing being more difficult to follow than Silverwing and Sunwing...but that's not anything to do with this book. You can find some clips of the show on YouTube.

Anyway. Darkwing.


I've been meaning to pick this book up for a while - not only is it another Kenneth Oppel bat book, but there are dinosaurs. And I was going to be a paleaontologist. I was. Really.

Anyway.

I really enjoyed this book - it was a fairly quick read, but it was good. There were some pretty big themes in the book - discrimination and stereotypes being two of them - but they were dealt with so well, they were almost invisible. I'd like to reread Silverwing for sure now (I think it's in my bookcase!) because I felt like maybe I remembered some of those themes being the same...

The naming of the animals was well done - particularly the leader of the Felids being called Patriofelis, the rogue, meat eating Felid, Carnassial and his eventual mate Panthera. I love names...

This book is definitely worth picking up...