How Do Dinosaurs Get Well Soon? by Jane Yolan

Isabelle hasn't been feeling well all week so we've been spending lots of time reading books, watching some of our favorite movies, and drinking lots and lots of juice!  Today we got our one of our favorite books by Jane Yolen, How Do Dinosaurs Get Well Soon?  Super cute book about teaching kiddos how to behave when they are sick - but mostly just a great book to enjoy reading together.  And Isabelle has since decided that she LOVES making dinosaurs noises, especially when we are suppose to be trying to fall asleep!

March 22, 2016

All THREE of these highly-anticipated and well-reviewed books are all getting released on Tuesday, March 22:

Jane Steele by Lyndsay Faye

The Summer Before the War by Helen SimonSon

The Nest by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

They are all currently sitting on my book cart at work - processed and ready to go out on the shelves early Tuesday morning.  Of course, I want to read all of them at the same time, but (realistically) I can only start with one.  Thoughts???

No Flying in the House by Betty Brock

 ★★★★

This charming little book was written in 1970 by Betty Brock.  It tells the story of Annabel Tippens - who seems like an ordinary girl, except for her tiny talking dog Gloria who has looked after her since she was a baby.  But then Annabel meets a cat named Belinda and she learns that she may not be as ordinary as she thought.  In fact, she may be a fairy whose parents were vanished years ago to mysterious island.  And she may be able to fly!

Filled with love, adventure, and all the wonderful things that magical stories are made of this is a cute story of a six-year-old girl whose life changes in a mere instant when she learns who she is.  I loved the characters (especially Gloria) and the beautiful illustrations through out the book.  I wish I would have read this story as a child, but it was just as charming reading it as an adult.  I also read it to my one-year-old daughter before bedtime.  We tried to read a chapter a night - which was fun for both of us - and makes going to bed a little easier for her.  I found this book through a group on goodreads called Kindred Spirits - a group devoted to discovering and rediscovering middle-grade and young adult classics.  I have the complete list on my blog here or it can be found on the Kindred Spirits home page.  Looking forward to reading more classic books in the future!!

The Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult (audio)

★★★

"You couldn't have strength without weakness, you couldn't have light without dark, you couldn't have love without loss."

I've read also a dozen of Jodi Picoult's novels over the years, and this one was rather different than her usual books.  I generally enjoyed it, but I guess I was expecting a bit more. - especially from the ending.

The book centers around Trixie Stone - a fourteen-year-old teenager - and her parents, Daniel and Laura.  Trixie is a typical teenager who has just been dumped by Jason, the "love of her life" and also the most popular boy in her school.  Trixie is heartbroken and at a loss  what to do with herself after losing Jason and she is determined to win him back.  Her and her best friend devise a plan at a high school party when her friend's mom is out of town, but the party gets out of control and Trixie reveals to her dad the next morning that Jason raped her.

Throughout the remainder of the book, readers are left to struggle with the question as to if Trixie was raped and if and what she is telling the truth about.  As details are revealed we go back and forth and things begin to get a lot more complicated.  Jason is charged with rape and the whole town becomes involved.  Daniel and Laura are also having problems on their own and the family struggles to deal with the incident and aftermath.  

I liked a lot of things about this book.  Daniel is a primarily as stay-at-home dad and I really enjoyed seeing his relationship with Trixie since my husband stays at home with our daughter.  The novel brought up a lot of questions on what a father (or parent) would do to protect their children.  The father-daughter relationship was particularly unique.  I also connected with Trixie as a young teenager and the emotions that she was going through during and after her breakup with Jason.  I had my first "real" boyfriend at around the same age and it really brought up a lot of emotions.  Trixie was (in perspective) so young, but that made her feelings all the more real.  There was also a strong presence of "the tenth circle" (aka the circle of hell) throughout the novel.  Laura is a professor at a local college and her main course is teaching Dante's Inferno.  Daniel has a connection to this concept as well and is a comic book artist whose new story features a father journeying through the circles of hell to rescue his daughter.  At the end of each chapter there is another story told through comics and this is bits and pieces for Daniel's new book.  I really liked this incorporate and thought that it brought a really unique aspect to the novel.  It reminded me of when Picoult used original music in the audio book edition of her book "Sing You Home."  I listened to the audio of "The Tenth Circle" as well, but checked out the print book so that I could read the comic book parts.

I enjoyed a lot of aspect of this story, but I kept expecting something else to happen and the ending didn't add up as much as it usually does for me when I read a Jodi Picoult.  Plus the supernatural aspects did not work for me at all.  I've seen it done well - even from Picoult - but this felt awkward and disjointed.  Even so, this was a relatively good book that brought out a lot of emotions on a touch subject.

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo

★★★★

"Open your heart.  Someone will come.  Someone will come for you.  But first you must open your heard."

Isabelle and I read this together over the last couple of months and it was a wonderful little book!  This is the story of Edward Tulane, a china rabbit who goes an a very long journey from owner to owner over the timespan of many decades.  The chapters were short and simple and I loved the additional of colored pictures throughout.  It reminded me a lot of a fairy tale, but I've heard it compared to a fable as well.  I loved the last page where the entire book was compiled into a short tale and the author has a really neat website featuring Edward and his journey.  The story was a bit sad in places, but ultimately had a satisfying ending!

The Amateur Marriage by Anne Tyler

★★★★★

"He wished he had inhabited more of his life, used it better, filled it fuller."

This is the first book that I have read by Anne Tyler.  It is a wonderful and compelling novel about the marriage gone horribly wrong of two people and the effects that it has across three generations.  Michael and Pauline are young when they meet at Michael's mother's grocery store in the early 1940s.  Michael is smitten at first site, but from the beginning, it is evident that the two are not well-suited to be together. They have a short courtship before rushing off to a hasty marriage due to Michael returning from the war.

Throughout the next sixty years, Michael and Pauline suffer through an unhappy marriage.  They are both relatively decent people, but they just don't work well together.  Each chapter focuses on a short time in their lives and is filled with rich detail and insight into themselves and their relationship.  As the years pass, we also get a glimpse at how their actions effect their children and grandchildren.

I thought this book was extremely well-written and did a great job of writing about realistic characters and realistic situations throughout an ordinary life.  It wasn't all that fun to read and was actually pretty depressing, but that wasn't what the book was about.  It was heartbreaking to read at times, but was able to cause the reader to relate to each of the characters in different ways.  I loved the descriptions of the time periods and way of life during different time periods.  The vivid detail works well with the chapters.  The book spans many decades, but does so in a way that readers don't see the character throughout every event in their lives and instead focuses on specific periods with long gaps in between.  I really thought that this worked well in this book and it is one that I will remember for a long time.  I will definitely be looking at more books by this author.

I read this book as a buddy reads on goodreads.com for the month of March with some fellow goodreads members.  It was a great discussion book for us!!  You can view (and join!) our discussion here.

All the Stars in the Heavens by Adriana Trigiani (audio)

★★★★ 1/2

"Everything was the same.  Nothing had changed.  Everything but the snow."

I was first introduced to Adriana Trigiani a little over two years ago when I read The Shoemaker's Wife.  I really enjoyed that book and I loved this one too.  I was a bit spectacle to start it - it got somewhat mixed reviews from what I've seen and there has been a lot a negative feedback due to the fact that Loretta Young's daughter-in-law publicly claimed that the birth of Loretta's daughter, Judy Lewis, had been a result of date rape by Clark Gable and that they did not have an affair that had been previously assumed.  I believe that this happened in 2015 - shortly before the book came out.  Since this is a fictional account of the characters and their lives, I am going to base my review of the book on that and not the accuracy of the events - which I am assume that the author did not know about when the book was being written.

This novel was the story of two women - the famous movie star of the 1930s and 1940s, Loretta Young, and her secretary, Alda Ducci.  They novel covered several decades of their always intertwining lives.  I would have liked to see a little more character development of both women, but what really draw me into the novel was the writing of the setting and the time period - primarily Hollywood in the 1930s.  I'm not sure if I would have gotten this as much if I had read the book instead of listening to the audio version, but what I loved most about the novel was the energy.  From Loretta's life at home with her sisters and mother to the set of Call of the Wild, I could almost feel as if I were there.  The sections focusing on Loretta were also a very interesting contrast to that of Alda - who was involved in show business, but in a much more simple and mostly removed way.

I felt for both women, who had their own set of life-long struggles and burdens to bare.  And when Judy Lewis was born, I felt for her as well.  Even though I understood the circumstances, I felt that it was unfair that she wasn't even given the option to know her father, especially when she grew older.  Gable seemed to love Loretta (to an extent) and Judy, but - as the book states many times - he didn't know how to love them.  And he knew nothing about how to be a good father or husband, despite the fact that he was married several times.  Despite what was true and what wasn't, I really enjoyed this book: the energy, the setting, the characters, and the tragic love stories that I kept cheering on even though I ultimately knew the outcome.  

And now to go watch some old Hollywood movies :)