Review of The Gifts of Imperfection, by Brene Brown

Nonfiction Review, Personal Growth, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

The Gifts of Imperfection

Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are

Your Guide to a Wholehearted Life

by Brene Brown, PhD, LMSW

Hazelden, 2010. 135 pages.
Starred Review
2011 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #2 Other Nonfiction

This is a lovely inspirational book, especially for people like me who are learning to outgrow perfectionism. It’s a book about owning our own stories and loving ourselves, even though we are imperfect. I savored it slowly, and lots of quotes from the book ended up on Sonderquotes, because they really spoke to me and the life I want to live.

The author was doing studies on negative emotions like shame, fear and vulnerability. As she was studying shame resilience, she noticed patterns in people who live wholehearted lives.

“I heard stories about the power of embracing imperfection and vulnerability. I learned about the inextricable connection between joy and gratitude, and how things that I take for granted, like rest and play, are as vital to our health as nutrition and exercise. These research participants trusted themselves, and they talked about authenticity and love and belonging in a way that was completely new to me.”

This book covers what she found, in nice, practical tips. It’s a personal book, because she tried to put the principles she learned into her own life and family. After she did, she says:

“I was healthier, more joyful, and more grateful than I had ever felt. I felt calmer and grounded, and significantly less anxious. I had rekindled my creative life, reconnected with my family and friends in a new way, and most important, felt truly comfortable in my own skin for the first time in my life.”

She explains Wholehearted living in the first paragraph of the main text:

“Wholehearted living is about engaging in our lives from a place of worthiness. It means cultivating the courage, compassion, and connection to wake up in the morning and think, No matter what gets done and how much is left undone, I am enough. It’s going to bed at night thinking, Yes, I am imperfect and vulnerable and sometimes afraid, but that doesn’t change the truth that I am also brave and worthy of love and belonging.”

There is lots and lots of good stuff in this book. Here’s a section I particularly liked:

“Love and belonging are essential to the human experience. As I conducted my interviews, I realized that only one thing separated the men and women who felt a deep sense of love and belonging from the people who seem to be struggling for it. That one thing is the belief in their worthiness. It’s as simple and complicated as this: If we want to fully experience love and belonging, we must believe that we are worthy of love and belonging.

“When we can let go of what other people think and own our story, we gain access to our worthiness — the feeling that we are enough just as we are and that we are worthy of love and belonging. When we spend a lifetime trying to distance ourselves from the parts of our lives that don’t fit with who we think we’re supposed to be, we stand outside of our story and hustle for our worthiness by constantly performing, perfecting, pleasing, and proving. Our sense of worthiness — that critically important piece that gives us access to love and belonging — lives inside of our story.”

At the start of the book, the author talks about the concepts of love and belonging, and what she learned when she researched shame, which we all have. Then she goes on to chapters that cover Guideposts of Wholehearted Living, complete with ideas for cultivating them and building them into our lives. These Guideposts are:

1. Cultivating Authenticity: Letting Go of What People Think
2. Cultivating Self-Compassion: Letting Go of Perfectionism
3. Cultivating a Resilient Spirit: Letting Go of Numbing and Powerlessness
4. Cultivating Gratitude and Joy: Letting Go of Scarcity and Fear of the Dark
5. Cultivating Intuition and Trusting Faith: Letting Go of the Need for Certainty
6. Cultivating Creativity: Letting Go of Comparison
7. Cultivating Play and Rest: Letting Go of Exhaustion as a Status Symbol and Productivity as Self-Worth
8. Cultivating Calm and Stillness: Letting Go of Anxiety as a Lifestyle
9. Cultivating Meaningful Work: Letting Go of Self-Doubt and “Supposed To”
10. Cultivating Laughter, Song, and Dance: Letting Go of Being Cool and “Always in Control”

If this sounds as lovely to you as it did to me, I promise that you will find inspiring and helpful words in this book.

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/gifts_of_imperfection.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of The Order of Odd-Fish, by James Kennedy

Der Orden der Seltsamen Sonderlinge, Fantasy, Stand-outs, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

The Order of Odd-Fish

by James Kennedy

Laurel-Leaf Books, 2008. 403 pages.
Starred Review
2011 Sonderbooks Standout: #7, Fantasy for Teens

It’s high time I reviewed this book. I first decided I had to read it when I met the author, James Kennedy, at the 2010 ALA Annual Conference when I attended the YA Author Coffee Klatch. It sounded very much like a book my sons would enjoy, since they are big fans of Douglas Adams, so I purchased a copy to give my younger son for his upcoming 16th birthday. (And the next March, I sent a copy to my older son for his 23rd birthday.)

Then 2011 ALA Annual Conference was coming up, and I saw James Kennedy’s name on the schedule. I still hadn’t read his book! So I tucked my son’s copy into my carry-on and began reading it on the plane. Sure enough, I saw James at the Newbery Banquet, and it was fun to be able to tell him where I was in the book and talk about it. On the way home from New Orleans, I tweeted my progress, and that was fun, too. I was impressed with how he pulled off an excellent ending, which I was wondering about along the way.

Then I could have sworn I had reviewed the book when I finally caught up on writing reviews last Fall. But it turned out it got out of my to-be-reviewed pile when my son decided to finally read it and took it to his room.

I highly recommend the book for fans of Douglas Adams or Jasper Fforde. Only, Douglas Adams and Jasper Fforde have adult protagonists (not that that deters teen readers), but The Order of Odd-Fish has a teen protagonist. So this might be a good choice for teens whom you suspect will enjoy Douglas Adams or Jasper Fforde.

The first word that comes to mind every time I attempt to describe The Order of Odd-Fish is “bizarre.” Like the Hitchhiker’s Guide books, it’s got its own twisted and very funny logic that plays on traditional fantasy tropes.

Take our protagonist, Jo Larouche. She’s got a prophecy about her and is a “chosen” child, but it’s quite different than the Chosen One in more traditional fantasy novels. Make that very different.

Probably the simplest way to capture the spirit of this novel is to give you the description of Jo’s Aunt Lily, including the part where she found Jo:

“The story of Lily Larouche was well known.

“She had been a famous actress long ago, with a reputation for strange behavior. The tabloids knew she was good for at least one sensational rumour per week:

“LILY LAROUCHE THROWS RODENT AT STARLET

“LILY LAROUCHE ARRESTED AGAIN FOR RECKLESS HOT-AIR BALLOONING

“HEARTSICK PRESIDENT SHAVES OFF OWN EYEBROWS IN DESPERATE BID TO WIN LILY LAROUCHE’S LOVE

“The rumors usually proved true. Lily Larouche had hurled a live rat at another actress who had insulted her. For many years, her hot-air balloon had been a nuisance over Los Angeles, regularly disrupting air traffic. And Lily Larouche still had on her desk, floating in a jar of formaldehyde, the lonely eyebrows of President Eisenhower.

“Then came the most mysterious headline:

“LILY LAROUCHE DISAPPEARS!

“She had vanished. Her notorious ruby palace, which for years had hosted the wildest parties in Hollywood, was empty. Nobody knew where she had gone.

“Then, forty years later, there was a new headline:

“LILY LAROUCHE RETURNS! (WITH A “DANGEROUS” COMPANION)

“Lily Larouche had awakened in her dusty bed, in her ruby palace. But she had no idea how she had got there. And she had no idea what she had been doing for the past forty years.

“Then she heard a distant crying. She followed the sound to her laundry room — and there, inside the washing machine, she found a baby.

“She also found a note:

“This is Jo. Please take care of her.
But beware.
This is a DANGEROUS baby.”

As the book opens, Jo Larouche is now thirteen years old. Unbeknownst to her, she is about to travel to Eldritch City, meet the Order of Odd-Fish, see Aunt Lily regain her memory, and learn why she herself is so DANGEROUS.

And the story has only begun to be bizarre.

I’ll definitely be blogging more about this book. When James Kennedy noted that his book had been translated into German with the title Der Orden der Seltsamer Sonderlinge, I was so delighted, he promised me a copy. As all my readers surely know by now, Sonder is a German prefix meaning “special.” What I don’t proclaim so frequently is that I’d already known that a Sonderling is someone who’s “special” in the less flattering sense of the term — more recent translations include “nerd” and, well, “odd-fish.” But however you want to look at it, I maintain this proves that The Order of Odd-fish is a Sonderbook indeed! James Kennedy did send me a copy of the German edition, and I’m planning to blog about reading it — as soon as I get caught up on posting Sonderbooks Standouts.

Meanwhile, this is definitely a great choice for people who enjoy books that are bizarre, clever, and very funny.

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/order_of_odd_fish.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a book I purchased at ALA Annual Conference for my son, and had signed by the author.

Review of I Want My Hat Back, by Jon Klassen

Animal Characters, Award Winners, Picture Book Review, Readalouds, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

I Want My Hat Back

by Jon Klassen

Candlewick Press, 2011. 36 pages.
Starred Review
2012 Geisel Honor Book
2011 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #4 Picture Books

This book is brilliant. I was happy it won a Geisel Honor for a book for beginning readers, because it’s written in a way that makes it easy for beginning readers and tells a story that will delight them when they understand what’s happened.

I have a co-worker whose favorite picture books are ones where someone gets eaten. I made sure to bring this book straight to her when I checked it out. I also handed it to my teenage son to read. It’s the kind of book everyone enjoys.

The illustrations are simple and flat, with the eyes looking straight at the reader. The text is color coded for the speaker, with a bear walking through the pages looking for his hat. He wants his hat. He loves his hat. Each animal he meets, he asks, “Have you seen my hat?” After their various responses, he says, “OK. Thank you anyway.”

Eventually, after he’s lying down in despair, a deer asks him what his hat looks like. When he describes it, the bear — and the reader — suddenly remember where he’s seen it before. This moment of realization is portrayed so cleverly with a red page and wide open eyes.

Describing this book takes more words than are in the book — and reading the book is so much better. The ending is left ambiguous for the tender-hearted, but most kids will be proud to figure out what really happened. And you have to admit, the bear is repeating what was said to him.

I promise all ages will enjoy this book! Check it out and read it yourself.

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Picture_Books/i_want_my_hat_back.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of A Ball for Daisy, by Chris Raschka

Animal Characters, Award Winners, Contemporary, Good for the Very Young, Picture Book Review, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

A Ball for Daisy

by Chris Raschka

Schwartz and Wade Books, New York, 2011. 32 pages.
Starred Review
2012 Caldecott Medal Winner
2011 Sonderbooks Stand-out: Picture Books #7

Here’s a truly wonderful wordless picture book. Chris Raschka portrays the heights and depths of emotion with simple painted lines and colors.

A Ball for Daisy features a little dog named Daisy. You can clearly see that Daisy loves her red ball. She plays with it, wags her tail when she catches it, and cuddles up next to it for a nap.

But when Daisy and her owner take it to the park, another dog begins to play, and he pops Daisy’s ball. Daisy’s sadness when this happens is unmistakeable.

Fortunately, there’s a happy ending as the other dog and its owner make things right the next day.

The pictures in this book are exuberant and varied, making the simple story great fun to read. The pages where Daisy’s trying to figure out what happened to her ball include shaking the limp casing, howling, and just being sad. The pages where Daisy is playing or sleeping reflect Daisy’s joyful and unworried existence. There’s a nice circular feeling as the end echoes the beginning, with Daisy cozying up to her new ball. All’s right in the world.

What child doesn’t know what it feels like to lose something? The story is universal, and can be “read” by the very young, yet will still fascinate older people with the beauty of the artwork.

I’m pleased with the Caldecott committee’s decision this year, as I have a feeling children will be enjoying this book for years to come.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Picture_Books/ball_for_daisy.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, by Alan Bradley

Fiction Review, Historical, Mystery, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

I Am Half-Sick of Shadows, by Alan Bradley

Delacorte Press, New York, 2011. 293 pages.
Starred Review
2011 Sonderbooks Standout: #4, Other Fiction

Lovely! A fourth Flavia DeLuce book! I am so happy with how quickly Alan Bradley is writing! And I was all the more happy when I saw this was a Christmas book. I thought it an interesting coincidence that I read two Christmas mysteries this year (The other was A Christmas Homecoming, by Anne Perry), and both involved a theatrical company secluded at an English country home at Christmas in a snowstorm, when a murder occurs. Honestly, I enjoyed this one more because it had Flavia deLuce!

If you haven’t met Flavia before, you will probably do fine just reading this one; you will get the idea. But all the books are so much fun, I do recommend reading them all.

Flavia is an 11-year-old chemical genius with a deep love of poisons. And she’s very good at solving mysteries, but not so good at leaving crime solving to adults. Her mother died years ago climbing mountains, and her father doesn’t pay a lot of attention to bringing up his three daughters. Flavia and her older sisters manage to torment each other rather mercilessly. I did like that it wasn’t quite as bad in this installment — they showed some affection for each other at Christmas.

I love Alan Bradley’s titles, and this one comes from Alfred Tennyson’s poem, “The Lady of Shalott.” In this book, Colonel de Luce, still needing to raise money, has rented out Buckshaw to a film company. The family is still planning to use their own rooms. But then, with the village visiting to see the great film stars perform Romeo and Juliet, a blizzard hits and everyone camps out at Buckshaw — and someone dies. Flavia herself finds the body — in the middle of the night.

I’ve always said that a nice murder mystery makes the perfect Christmas reading, and I thoroughly enjoyed this one. If you can’t be snowed in yourself, how nice to read about others being snowed in, anyway. And I still can’t help but love Flavia. In this book, she does some excellent deducing, and it’s her own home, so surely she can be forgiven for nosing where she’s told to stay away?

Here are some words from Flavia herself:

“Most chemists, whether they admit it or not, have a favorite corner of their craft in which they are forever tinkering, and mine is poisons.

“While I could still become quite excited by recalling how I had dyed my sister Feely’s knickers a distinctive Malay yellow by boiling them in a solution of lead acetate, followed by a jolly good stewing in a solution of potassium chromate, what really made my heart leap up with joy was my ability to produce a makeshift but handy poison by scraping the vivid green verdigris from the copper float-ball of one of Buckshaw’s Victorian toilet tanks.”

Flavia de Luce isn’t someone you forget in a hurry. This is a lovely addition to the series, and I hope that Alan Bradley continues to add books quickly.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Fiction/half_sick_of_shadows.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of Faith and Will, by Julia Cameron

Christian, Musings, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

Faith and Will

Weathering the Storms in Our Spiritual Lives

by Julia Cameron

Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, New York, 2009. 221 pages.
Starred Review
2011 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #1 Other Nonfiction

A big huge thank you to my sister Becky for giving me this book. It was kind of funny: I had already checked it out and was posting quotations from it in Sonderquotes when she gave me a copy. It was good to own a copy, because I think I have pulled more quotations from it than any other book I’ve read since I started posting Sonderquotes. So I’ve taken a very long time reading it, with all the time it’s spent in my Sonderquotes queue, and it’s good the library copies were available to others during that time.

Julia Cameron begins the book this way:

“I would like to begin at the beginning, but I do not know what the beginning is anymore. I am a person at midlife. I am a believer who is trying one more time to believe. That is to say I am caught off guard by life and by feelings of emptiness.

“I want there to be more reassurance than I currently feel that we are on the right path. By ‘we’ I mean God and me. I have been trying consciously to work with God for twenty-five years now, and a great deal has been made of my life that I think has a lot of value — but I am one more time asking for something to be made of me and it that I myself can hold on to. Me. Personally. Not as some abstract but as a genuine comfort.

“I am a writer and a teacher — “worthy” things, but I am not feeling my worth in them right now. I must again come to some relationship to God that will enable me to pursue my career as an outward manifestation of inwardly held values. In other words, what needs mending here is probably not the outward form — I suspect that after a great deal of soul-searching I would still come back to being a writer and a teacher — but the inward connection. I must feel I am doing what God would have me do.”

What follows is a book of musings and meditations, talking about faith, guidance, and choices. There are no chapter divisions, so the book rambles a bit, but I found the rambling tracked well with my own thinking. She reassured me and encouraged me that God is good and God’s will for us is good, creative, and joyful.

I pulled lots (and am still pulling) and lots and lots of quotations from the book that resonated for me. Read through some of these on Sonderquotes, and you will get a good sense of whether this book would delight you as it has delighted me.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Nonfiction/faith_and_will.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a book given to me by my sister.

Review of Ship Breaker, by Paolo Bacigalupi

Adventure, Award Winners, Science Fiction, Stand-outs, Starred Review, Suspense, Teen Fiction Review 0

Ship Breaker

by Paolo Bacigalupi

Little, Brown, and Company, New York, 2010. 326 pages.
Starred Review
2011 Printz Award Winner
2010 National Book Award Finalist
2011 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #2 Other Teen Fiction

Ship Breaker tells the story of a boy caught on the wrong side of progress in a future world after the Age of Acceleration has ended. The story is gripping, with Nailer in life-or-death danger on every page. Yet Paolo Bacigalupi builds a world that shows the consequences of society’s actions now, without ever letting the story slow down to tell us what’s going on. We learn through the eyes of the characters.

The book begins with Nailer crawling through the ducts of an old oil tanker, lit only by LED glowpaint on his forehead. He’s after the light stuff – copper wiring, steel clips, things that can be dragged out to his crew waiting outside.

The author doesn’t have to tell us they’re poor. He describes the wire being pulled out of the duct, “She sucked the wire out like a rice noodle from a bowl of Chen’s soup ration.” We begin to understand that he’s scavenging parts when we read about the new clipper ships: “Replacements for the massive coal- and oil-burning wrecks that he and his crew worked to destroy all day long: gull-white sails, carbon-fiber hulls, and faster than anything except a maglev train.”

Nailer was too slow in there, and he needs to go back in to get more scavenge before a big storm hits. He forgets to renew his LED paint, and gets caught in the dark. That’s okay, he’s finding plenty of copper wire that leads him out – until a duct collapses under him and he falls into a tank of oil.

“How could he die in such a stupid way? This wasn’t even a storage tank. Just some room full of pooled waste oil. It was a joke, really. Lucky Strike had found an oil pocket on a ship and bought his way free. Nailer had found one and it was going to kill him.

“I’m going to drown in goddamn money.

“Nailer almost laughed at the thought. No one knew exactly how much oil Lucky Strike had found and smuggled out. The man had done it slow, over time. Sneaking it out bucket by bucket until he had enough to buy out his indenture and burn off his work tattoos. But he’d had enough left over to set himself up as a labor broker selling slots into the very heavy crews that he’d escaped. Just a little oil had done so much for Lucky Strike, and Nailer was up to his neck in the damn stuff.”

Then one of his crewmates, Sloth, finds him. He begs her to bring help, to get him out, but she can’t resist the thought of pulling her own Lucky Strike. But when Nailer does find a way out, even though the oil goes out with him, Sloth is exposed as a traitor, and Nailer’s new nickname is Lucky Boy, because everyone knows he should have died.

That dramatic incident is important, because after the storm Nailer and his crewmate Pima find a wrecked clipper ship with one lone survivor. The rings on the girl’s fingers alone would be enough to set them up for life. But Nailer doesn’t have the heart to kill the girl, because he now knows what it was like to be left for dead. That incident gets him thinking throughout the book about what it means to be family, what it means to be Crew.

The tension in this book doesn’t let up for a second, and it’s life-or-death danger on almost every page. Nailer and Pima aren’t the only ones to find the girl, and the group with Nailer’s father is not at all interested in keeping her alive, only in getting money from her.

They go from one danger to another, with Nailer trying to figure out not only what’s the right thing to do, but also how to stay alive.

This book is a thriller all the way along, with a never-flagging plot. And it presents hard-hitting commentary and questions about our way of life now.

I finally read this book when taking a class on the Printz Award. It definitely seems worthy of the award it won: Besides telling a rip-roaring story, it warns us that in our policies even now, we should look out for the little guys. We should think about the consequences of the things we do.

Here are my notes on his brilliant acceptance speech at the Printz Awards.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/ship_breaker.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of Stuck, by Oliver Jeffers

Delightfully Silly, Picture Book Review, Readalouds, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

Stuck

by Oliver Jeffers

Philomel Books, New York, 2011. 36 pages.
Starred Review
2011 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #2 Picture Books

Reading this picture book made me laugh out loud, and then, of course, try to get everyone around me to read it.

“It all began when Floyd’s kite became stuck in a tree. He tried pulling and swinging, but it wouldn’t come unstuck.

“The trouble

    REALLY

began when he threw his FAVORITE SHOE to knock the kite loose. . .

“. . . and THAT got stuck too!”

Floyd throws more and more things up in the tree. The pictures help make the predicament hilarious. And there are some surprising reflections: “Cats get stuck in trees all the time, but this was getting ridiculous.”

There are a couple of times we think he’s doing something constructive, like fetching a ladder.

“. . . and up he threw it.

“I’m sure you can guess what happened.”

Floyd throws more and more things into the tree, getting bigger and more ridiculous things all along the way. My favorite one is “A curious whale in THE WRONG PLACE at THE WRONG TIME to knock down the lighthouse…”

The pictures remind me very much of the video game where you collect things by rolling over them as progressively bigger things get stuck.

Well, this is another book I don’t want to say too much and ruin it for you. Me telling you the story isn’t nearly as funny as the words and pictures of this book discovered together. Anybody who’s old enough to ever have gotten something stuck in a tree will enjoy this book.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Picture_Books/stuck.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of Midnight in Austenland, by Shannon Hale

Austenalia, Chick Lit, Fiction Review, Mystery, Romance, Starred Review 0

Midnight in Austenland

by Shannon Hale

Bloomsbury, New York, 2012. 277 pages.
Starred Review

I’m interrupting my posting of my 2011 Sonderbooks Stand-outs to write a review of a book that will most definitely be a 2012 Sonderbooks Stand-out, if not my favorite book of the whole year.

Shannon Hale’s Austenland was a 2007 Sonderbooks Stand-out, though that was the year I was working on my Master’s in Library Science and didn’t get very many reviews written. The idea is a fun one, playing off all the Jane Austen frenzy that continues to happen in our time. It’s about a young woman who goes to what is essentially a Jane Austen theme park in England. Guests come to an English manor and are submerged in Regency culture and finish off their vacation with a ball. The original book parallelled Pride and Prejudice in many ways and was a fun and romantic read.

In Midnight in Austenland, Shannon Hale has surpassed herself.

Now, I should say that this book is particularly delightful to me because this time the heroine is a divorced mom whose husband cheated on her. I definitely related to her and her feelings as she worked through the divorce. She felt like a complete idiot because she hadn’t seen the clues that he was cheating, and as the book goes on, it dawns on her just how long he had lied to her. It’s very easy to see — when it’s someone else — that she should not beat herself up for believing someone who vowed to be true to her. But I completely related to all her turmoil about it.

I also loved this book because I am a Jane Austen aficionado. In college, I wrote my English Literature research paper on Jane Austen. I had more than a month to write it — so I spent the time reading ALL her novels and wrote the paper staying up all night the night before it was due.

Pride and Prejudice is definitely my favorite, but Northanger Abbey is the most light-hearted and just plain fun. Midnight in Austenland parallels Northanger Abbey in so many beautiful ways. In fact, the similarities enhanced the story. You see, Charlotte, our heroine in Midnight in Austenland is playing a “Bloody Murderer” game after the lights go out. In the dark, lit only by a flash of lightning, she is in a secret room and touches a cold hand attached to a covered dead body.

But when Charlotte goes back the next day, there is no body. Did she imagine it in the dark, in the night? In fact, is this book simply paralleling Northanger Abbey, in which silly Catherine Morland imagines a murder has taken place where there was none?

I don’t want to say too much more because I don’t want to give away any delicious details. I did like that Charlotte has been reading Agatha Christie, so there was still a tribute to novel-reading, as Catherine Morland had been reading The Mysteries of Udolfo. Again, we weren’t sure if Charlotte was drawing conclusions because she’d read too many detective novels.

I think I can stay spoiler-free if I simply comment that this book has the best heroine-escapes-from-deadly-peril scene EVER!

In short, Shannon Hale combines lots of humor with Jane Austen parallels, romance, suspense, mystery, gothic themes, and eerie atmosphere in a book that will make divorced women everywhere feel empowered.

You can read Midnight in Austenland without having read Austenland, though I do recommend reading both. The heroines and their stories are different — they are just at the same theme park with some of the same actors and the same administrator.

To get you in the mood, I’ll quote from some of the Prologue, where we’re told about Charlotte. It does echo Northanger Abbey:

“No one who knew Charlotte Constance Kinder since her youth would suppose her born to be a heroine. She was a practical girl from infancy, only fussing as much as was necessary and exhibiting no alarming opinions. Common wisdom asserts that heroines are born from calamity, and yet our Charlotte’s early life was pretty standard. Not only did her parents avoid fatal accidents, but they also never locked her up in a hidden attic room….

“We may never know what turned once-nice James away. Was it the fact that his wife was making more money than he was? (A lot more.) Or that his wife had turned out to be clever? (That can be inconvenient.) Had Charlotte changed? Had James? Was marriage just too hard to maintain in this crazy, shifting world?

“Charlotte hadn’t thought so. But then, Charlotte had been wrong before.

“She was wrong when she assumed her husband’s late nights were work-related. She was wrong when she blamed his increasingly sullen behavior on an iron deficiency. She was wrong when she believed the coldness in their bed could be fixed with flannel sheets.

“Poor Charlotte. So nice, so clever, so wrong.

“Charlotte came to believe that no single action kills a marriage. From the moment it begins to stumble, there are a thousand shots at changing course, and she had invested her whole soul in each of those second chances, which failed anyway. It was like being caught in her own personal Groundhog Day, only without the delightful Bill Murray to make her laugh. She would wake up, marvel anew at the bone-crushing weight in her chest, dress in her best clothes, as if for war, and set out with a blazing hope that today would be different. Today James would remember he loved her and come home to the family. Today she would win back her marriage, and her life.

“Eventually the time came when Charlotte sat in the messy ruins of her marriage and felt as weak as a cooked noodle. She would never be nice or clever enough. Hope had been beaten to death. She dried her eyes, shut down her heart, and plunged herself into an emotion coma. So much easier not to feel.

“Once numbness shuts down a damaged heart, a miracle is required to restart it. Things would prove rough for our heroine. Her only hope was Jane Austen.”

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Source: This review is based on my own book, which I pre-ordered via Amazon.com.

Review of Drawing From Memory, by Allen Say

Art, Biography, Children's Nonfiction Review, Graphic Memoir, Stand-outs, Starred Review, True Stories 1

Drawing From Memory

by Allen Say

Scholastic Press, 2011. 64 pages.
Starred Review
2011 Sonderbooks Standout: #4 Children’s Nonfiction

Drawing From Memory is not quite a graphic novel (make that graphic biography). There are some speech bubbles, but the majority of pictures don’t have them. This is a remembrance with lots and lots of pictures. The pictures vary from drawings to photos to comics to realistic paintings.

Allen Say moved into his own apartment (from his grandmother’s house) when he was not-quite thirteen years old. Shortly after moving to the apartment, he read a story about a boy three years older, who was apprenticed to Noro Shinpei, one of the most famous cartoonists in Japan. Allen decided to find him and ask to be an apprentice as well.

The book tells the story of Allen’s years with his Sensei, learning and growing, and eventually getting the chance to go to America. He talks about the process of learning to draw, those who learned with him, and especially the close relationship with his teacher. Best of all is the wide variety of illustrations that accompany the story and make it alive.

This is one of those wonderful books in large format that may get hidden in the Biography section of the library. This isn’t the sort of story you’d want for a report, but it’s very much an inspiring story of someone’s life and about finding and following your calling. This is a delightful book.

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Childrens_Nonfiction/drawing_from_memory.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on an Advance Review Copy I got at 2011 ALA Annual Conference.