sunday september 09
When my book club decided to read Gordon Korman’s newest novel, Schooled, for its September meeting, I wasn’t too excited. I thought it would be another depressing book about bullying and peer pressure. But boy was I wrong! The book turned out to be very funny and has a great message about being true to yourself. Now I can’t wait to discuss the book at our next meeting.
Schooled is the story of thirteen-year-old Cap Anderson, a boy who is being raised and home schooled by his hippie grandmother, Rain, on an alternative farm commune. Unfortunately for Cap, Rain falls from a tree branch while picking plums and breaks her hip. Cap must move into a foster home and attend middle school while Rain recovers from her injury.
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friday july 06
Looking for a nostalgic, humorous, summertime story? Then I highly recommend reading (or listening to) Richard Peck’s
A Long Way from Chicago. Every August, for six years, Joey and Mary Alice Dowdel leave the big city of Chicago to stay for a week with their grandmother in a small town in Illinois. Their visit is always eventful!
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wednesday june 06
If you’ve driven north of Cincinnati on I-75 all the way up to Monroe, you may have noticed a grain silo topped by a little red horse on the side of the highway. Written very plainly on the side of this silo is the Bible reference, “John 3:3.” A photograph of this simple expression of faith is one of many beautiful and thought-provoking photographs in the new book, Bible Road: Signs of Faith in the American Landscape.
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wednesday april 25
The Secret of Priest's Grotto is a fascinating and unique story of Holocaust survival. A small group of Jews attempts to outwit the Nazis by hiding in a vast network of horizontal Gypsum caves beneath the western Ukrainian countryside. The challenge facing the Jews is twofold. They must avoid capture by the Nazis and their allies, and they must also survive the cold, dark, and damp underground conditions of the caves. As the authors point out, the survivors of Priest’s Grotto hold the unofficial world record for time spent underground—they lived there for almost a year! The story of how they accomplish this amazing feat makes for a dramatic tale, to say the least.
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saturday april 07
When my copy of A Drowned Maiden's Hair: A Melodrama came in, the cover immediately intrigued me. Two girls are standing on a misty seashore—one in a white dress facing the reader and the other with her back to us, looking out to sea. I began to read and was immediately captivated by the story.
Maud Flynn, a girl of eleven, is living in a cruel orphan asylum in the year 1909. She is a troublemaker with a hard life, but by some miracle Maud is adopted by the wealthy Hawthorne sisters. (Of course, the reader suspects this is too good to be true.)
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