Halloween Dogs – Saturday Story Spotlight

Oct 222011

Welcome to Saturday Story Spotlight, my feature where I discuss books my husband and I are reading with our son, Daniel. These are books that he, we, or all of us particularly enjoy.

Halloween Dogs by Roger Priddy
Published by Priddy Books

It will come as a surprise to nobody who knows him, but Halloween Dogs was one of Daniel’s favorite books for quite some time last year. Not only is it illustrated with actual photos of dogs, but it is sparkly and many of the areas are textured. Although, really, I think it was mostly about the dogs.

Halloween Dogs is more poem than something with a plot, talking about the way these anthropomorphic dogs relate to Halloween. The book is cute and the pages are brightly colored to keep a young child’s attention. That being said, I think Daniel liked it more when he was just a little over a year old. Now that he is over two, it isn’t quite sophisticated enough for him.

Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound*

Source: Personal copy
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.

The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb by Melanie Benjamin – Book Review

Oct 172011

The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb by Melanie Benjamin
Published by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House

In P.T. Barnum’s over-sized world, Lavinia “Vinnie” Bump was both the biggest and the smallest thing around. Born a normal size, both Vinnie and her younger sister Minnie simply stopped growing as young children, Vinnie eventually standing only 32 inches high, and Minnie even smaller. Vinnie, however, was determined never to let her height define her or hold her back and set out to make sure that she had access to nearly everything life could offer.

Melanie Benjamin has a special talent for ferreting out fascinating women who most people would never think to wonder about and bringing their stories to life, first with Alice Liddell, the real Alice behind Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and now with Lavinia Bump. Benjamin’s Lavinia was strong and determined, although fallible and occasionally naive. There were times that her voice seemed a bit too reminiscent of Alice’s in Alice I Have Been, but the women did, at least how Benjamin wrote them, have somewhat similar, at times almost imperial, personalities.

The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb provides a much different perspective of the 1850s and 60s than most readers are probably familiar with, but Benjamin makes both her characters and the time period come to life. Recommended.

Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound*

Source: Personal.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.

Whooo’s That? – Saturday Story Spotlight

Oct 152011

Welcome to Saturday Story Spotlight, my feature where I discuss books my husband and I are reading with our son, Daniel. These are books that he, we, or all of us particularly enjoy.

Whooo’s That by Kay Winters, illustrated by Jeannie Winston
Published by Harcourt Children’s Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Whooo’s That? is a very cute Halloween lift-the-flaps book. Every page other than the last one has one or more jack o’ lanterns that can be flipped down to complete the sentence “Whooo’s that….” Beneath each of the flaps is some sort of Halloween creature, most of which are shown on the last page to be kids out trick or treating.

This is a very cute book with big, easy to manipulate flaps, and even the biggest Halloween beasties are basically adorable. Facing pages rhyme, and everything scans well. It isn’t Daniel’s very favorite Halloween book, but it is a good addition to the rotation.

Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound*

Source: Personal copy
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.

Five Little Pumpkins – Saturday Story Spotlight

Oct 082011

Welcome to Saturday Story Spotlight, my feature where I discuss books my husband and I are reading with our son, Daniel. These are books that he, we, or all of us particularly enjoy.

Five Little Pumpkins, illustrated by Dan Yaccarino
Published by Harper Festival, an imprint of HarperCollins

Five Little Pumpkins, a Halloween classic!

You all probably know the Five Little Pumpkins poem: “Five little pumpkins, sitting on a gate; the first one says “Oh my! It’s getting late!” And so on, and so forth.

This might be one of Daniel’s very favorite books. I think we kept reading it for about six months after Halloween last year. There is a great rhythm and rhyme, and this edition has only a short bit of text on each page, which really keeps the poem moving -and which makes it easy to repeat and memorize, I’m pretty sure Daniel is going to know the whole thing before Halloween. The illustrations are simple with lots of contrast, which makes them great for young children. Oh, and if you weren’t aware, that pumpkin in the back with the down-turned oval eyes is crying. At least according to Daniel.

Five Little Pumpkins is a great Halloween staple for any young child’s library.

Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound*

Source: Personal copy
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.

Teach Your Buffalo to Play Drums – Saturday Story Spotlight

Sep 242011

Welcome to Saturday Story Spotlight, my feature where I discuss books my husband and I are reading with our son, Daniel. These are books that he, we, or all of us particularly enjoy.

Teach Your Buffalo to Play Drums by Audrey Vernick, illustrated by Daniel Jennewein
Published by Balzer + Bray, an imprint of HarperCollins

In 2010, the world’s cutest buffalo ever made his debut in Is Your Buffalo Ready for Kindergarten?. The only thing I didn’t like about the book was the fact that Daniel was only one, and we wouldn’t have any need for it for a long time. Enter the second buffalo book, Teach Your Buffalo to Play Drums.

In Teach Your Buffalo to Play Drums, the buffalo is still the most adorable thing ever, but now he’s trying to free his inner-musician and play drums. It isn’t easy to get a buffalo to hold drum sticks, but if you help him out, he can find a way to do it.

Okay, admittedly I bought Teach Your Buffalo to Play Drums more for me than for Daniel. It is a really cute book, one that a parent could read multiple times without getting sick of it. It is, however, a bit more than Daniel’s two year old attention span can handle; we have yet to actually get through the whole thing. He loves the part we have read, though, and it is a book that can continue to grow with him.

Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound*

Source: Personal copy
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.

My Name is Mary Sutter by Robin Oliveira – Book Review

Aug 312011

My Name is Mary Sutter by Robin Oliveira
Published by Penguin (Non-Classics)

The best midwife in Albany – better, even, than her mother – all Mary Sutter wants is to be a surgeon. Unfortunately, the local medical school wants nothing to do with a female surgeon. When war breaks out, suddenly one of the things that the Union needs most is medical personnel. Although even Civil War is not enough to make Mary suddenly accepted as a doctor, she does have the opportunity to work as a nurse, which she seems as a stepping stone. Leaving for DC to take care of wounded soldiers, also gives Mary the excuse to leave behind a painful personal matter at home.

Oliveira suffuses My Name is Mary Sutter with a great deal of fascinating historical detail. The mid-19th century birthing and surgery scenes are horrifically realistic. Unfortunately, Mary herself was not the most engaging of characters. She was strong, she was interesting, but she didn’t capture me. The writing was strong and it was always easy to pick the book up, but it was also just as easy to put it down, primarily due to a lack of feeling for Mary.

Although I failed to connect with My Name is Mary Sutter as deeply as I had hoped, it was still a strong debut novel, and worth reading for those interested in nursing and medical care during the Civil War.

Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound*

Source: personal copy.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.

Embassytown by China Mieville – Thoughts

Aug 302011

Embassytown by China Mieville
Published by Del Ray, an imprint of Random House

I struggled with Embassytown when reading, and I’ve struggled over the past months thinking about it for a review. In lieu of a formal review, I am simply going to add a few of the thoughts that linger after all this time. For some context, here is the description from Indiebound:

In the far future, humans have colonized a distant planet, home to the enigmatic Ariekei, sentient beings famed for a language unique in the universe, one that only a few altered human ambassadors can speak.

Avice Benner Cho, a human colonist, has returned to Embassytown after years of deep-space adventure. She cannot speak the Ariekei tongue, but she is an indelible part of it, having long ago been made a figure of speech, a living simile in their language.

When distant political machinations deliver a new ambassador to Arieka, the fragile equilibrium between humans and aliens is violently upset. Catastrophe looms, and Avice is torn between competing loyalties—to a husband she no longer loves, to a system she no longer trusts, and to her place in a language she cannot speak yet speaks through her.

The linguistics pieces were very interesting, perhaps the most intriguing part of the story. The interplay of language and truth, inability of the Ariekei to lie, or even express abstract concepts unless they had previously been made concrete was consistently interesting.
The descriptions of the more science fiction elements of the story, such as the complexities of space travel, the interstellar political systems, and the systems that kept humans alive on the Ariekei world fell flat for me. They seemed neither interesting, nor well enough explained. I am not sure if Mieville has other works set in this universe in which these things are better explained, but it didn’t work for me here.
I found Avice to be a thoroughly uninteresting and unsympathetic character. I didn’t care who she was with or what she did, and the rest of the plot was not compelling enough counteract that.
My other two experiences with Mieville have both been in audio, narrated by John Lee. I think that audio might be the best way for me to experience Mieville, because talented narrators like John Lee carry me on past these pieces that would otherwise bog me down.

Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound*

Source: personal copy.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone – Audiobook Thoughts

Aug 122011

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling, narrated by Jim Dale
Published in audio by Listening Library, published in print by Scholastic

Synopsis:

What more is there to say about Harry Potter, particularly the first book in the series? Harry is terribly mistreated by his relatives and has a generally miserable life, until he finds out he is a wizard. The discovery is slightly bittersweet when Harry finds out that his parents were brutally murdered by the now-disappeared evil wizard Voldemort.

Thoughts on the story:

It may be that I’ve finally just read this series too many times. I’m starting to see things that don’t quite line up throughout (I blame Michelle for pointing out inconsistencies in book 7 when we watched the movie). I was also struck on this reread at just how ridiculous the opening scene with the Dudleys really is. They might as well have been tying Harry to a railroad track and twirling their mustaches. Honestly, it sort of annoyed me a little. Eventually I was able to get back into the book, but it took longer than usual.

Thoughts on the audio production:

I’ve listened to the rest of the series in audio narrated by Jim Dale before and been impressed, but at times during Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone I distinctly heard Dale make mouth noises, such as lip smacking, which sort of disgusted me and turned me off.

Overall:

I was all excited about going through the series again, but now I’m feeling sort of blah about it. Anyone up for convincingme?

Buy this book from:
Powells: Audio | Print*
Indiebound: Audio | Print*

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And now from a brief word from our friends over at Audiobook Jukebox:

Are you a blogger who reviews audiobooks? Whether you review them regularly, occasionally, or exclusively, there’s a new place to find free review copies for your perusal. The site is called Audiobook Jukebox and we’ve recently started a new program called Solid Gold Reviewers.

The idea is to have a place where audiobook publishers can offer titles for review and reviewers can select those titles which interest them the most. At the beginning of this month, 9 publishers helped us get started by offering 42 titles and over 100 copies for review. I’d like to invite you to check out the guidelines and then take a look at the titles listed.

soundbytes picture I hope you’ll see something interesting to listen to and review. If not, check back next month (we already have some additional publishers who’ve said they’ll contribute). If we all participate, more publishers will contribute more of the audio we love. In turn, we’ll have the chance to tell others about more great listens!

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I’m launching a brand-new meme every Friday! I encourage you to review any audiobooks you review on Fridays and include the link here. If you have reviewed an audiobook earlier in the week, please feel free to link that review as well. Thanks to Pam for creating the button.

Source: library.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.

13 Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson – Book Review

Aug 042011

13 Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson
Published by HarperTeen, an imprint of HarperCollins

Ginny’s Aunt Peg has always been incredibly fun, so when Ginny receives 13 blue envelopes from Peg and instructions to fly to Europe, she knows there is something special in store for her. Made all the more special by the fact that Peg has recently died, and must have created all these instructions for Ginny before she passed away. If there is one thing that the envelopes guarantee, it is an adventure.

Maureen Johnson is just such a fun, engaging writer, and 13 Little Blue Envelopes is no exception. Ginny is an adorable, loveable heroine. She has doubts and flaws like any realistic human being, but she manages not to be an overly obnoxious teen, even while she was asserting her independence from the adults in her life. Ginny’s adventure, too, is great fun, and Johnson keeps the story rolling along, while at the same time allowing Ginny some introspection.

All in all, great fun, and I’m intrigued to check out The Last Little Blue Envelope for the conclusion of Ginny’s story.

Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound*

Source: Personal copy.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.

The Tea Rose by Jennifer Donnelly – Book Review

Aug 032011

The Tea Rose by Jennifer Donnelly
Published by St. Martin’s Griffin, an imprint of Macmillan

This is the first book in the Rose series.

Fiona Finnegan may be a poor Irish girl living in Whitechapel, but she has big plans with her sweetheart, Joe Bristow. Together, they are determined to save enough money to marry and open a shop of their own, something that can take them away from a neighborhood where Jack the Ripper roams the streets after dark. When Joe takes a better paying job, it pains them to be apart, but seems a means to an end, until three tragedies rip Fiona’s life asunder and she is forced to face life on her own, with only her young brother by her side.

The Tea Rose is not a short book, and it is just the first in a trilogy of equally long books. Thus it is only to be expected that there is quite a bit of initial set up and characterization. This resulted, however, in a slow first 100 pages or so. Fiona was engaging the entire time, but her poor-but-getting-by family and her dreams of a future with Joe went a bit longer than would be optimal. Around page 100, though, things begin happening, and Fiona really begins to show her mettle and the story takes flight. Fiona is a strong character, without being too overly modern. She is certainly bold and willing to break out of societal molds, but never comes across as anachronistic.

Once it gets going, The Tea Rose is completely engaging late 19th-century historical fiction, an epic that captures the imagination. I cannot wait to read the rest of the series.

Buy this book from:
Powells | Indiebound*

If you are already a fan of this series, the third book, The Wild Rose, was just released by Hyperion Books. Buy it from:

Powells | Indiebound*

Source: personal copy.
* These links are all affiliate links. If you buy your book here I’ll make a very small amount of money that goes towards hosting, giveaways, etc.

Older Entries Newer Entries

Devourer of Books

Halloween Dogs – Saturday Story Spotlight

The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb by Melanie Benjamin – Book Review

Whooo’s That? – Saturday Story Spotlight

Five Little Pumpkins – Saturday Story Spotlight

Teach Your Buffalo to Play Drums – Saturday Story Spotlight

My Name is Mary Sutter by Robin Oliveira – Book Review

Embassytown by China Mieville – Thoughts

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone – Audiobook Thoughts

13 Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson – Book Review

The Tea Rose by Jennifer Donnelly – Book Review

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