Reading Roundup
What’s on my nightstand? The Lucky Ones, by Stephanie Greene.
I enjoyed this book, but I wish I’d been allowed to critique it before it was published; I have questions I wish it had answered.
Just now, I read the blurb for the book on the HarperCollins website, and while it seems to go with the title, neither seem to fit the book especially well. The jacket copy mentions the “privileged family,” and that is the best connection I can make to “lucky.”
None of that matters to me, though, because of what this book does right: it nails the struggle and competition between a twelve-year-old girl and her fourteen-year-old sister. I should know: I was that twelve-year-old girl.
Cecile (12) and Natalie (14) spend the summer with two younger siblings and their parents at Granddad’s house on the island. It’s what they do every summer, except this year is different because suddenly Natalie would rather flirt with a visiting boy than play the games she and Cecile have always played.
Cecile’s feeling and responses are honestly drawn. Perhaps that’s because Stephanie Green is the middle of five kids. There’s an older brother who is off working in Canada during this summer, so Cecile is also the middle of five kids.
Write what you know!
Your turn. What are you reading?
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, by Ellen Ruppel Shell
, by Elizabeth Strout.
Becca Wrote,
I finally finished listening to The Book Thief. Now I’ve bought the book. It is an amazing novel and the language resounds. I needed to own it so that I can go back and read (I can’t really re-read them) some of the passages. I’m sure I will read the whole book, but not just now, but I really recommend listening to the audio version. The language is meant to be heard, I think, and it is very well narrated.
I just finished reading Douglas Adams’ The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, which I found on a friend’s bookshelf and borrowed. It is a delight in a British, Douglas Adams, Monty Pythonesque way. Adams is a wonderful observer and gently funny reporter of the human condition. His situations aren’t real, but his characters’ responses to them are.
Link | May 31st, 2009 at 9:23 am