Now I get to watch the BBC series

Farewell to the East End

by Jennifer Worth


I think I liked this one best.  The first one was new and good, the second one was different and good, and this one was familiar and extra good.

So if you're trying to decide whether to read one of them, just do it.  Read them all.  Out of order if you have to.  They're good enough for that.

Hooked on kid lit

Olivia Kidney and the Secret Beneath the City
by Ellen Potter


Better than the second one, which was pretty darn good!  This one seemed to get almost...serious, for a bit.  And that was weird but maybe kind of okay.

In this episode, Olivia enters art school despite her complete lack of talent; tries to help her friend Franny find the secret to growing (Frannie stopped growing at age seven, so now she's a fourteen-year-old mind in a seven-year-old body); looks for a missing spirit; deals with her annoying ghost, Stella; watches Ansel adjust (not) to having a personal attendant after he fills the lagoon with snapping turtles; attempts to avoid her tactless, visiting mother, on a visit from California; and all the while, prepares for the Principessa's wedding. 

Sound busy?  It is. But some of the pieces fit together in the end.

Shadows of the Workhouse
by Jennifer Worth

Fierce.  And real.  I need to understand where the details came from--was it all relayed first person to the author, or her coworkers?  Did she have to flesh out the stories from historical records?

What's a workhouse?  In 1834 Parliament passed the Poor Law Amendment Act.  Its aim was to care for the ever-growing populations of poor and destitute people--provide a "safety net" to feed the poorest of society.  She writes,

...it was nearly one hundred years ahead of its time, yet the implementation of the high ideals of the reformers went tragically wrong, and the workhouses came to be dreaded as places of shame, suffering, and despair.

Think concentration camp.  Think women and children, brothers and sisters, separated at admission.   Living conditions harsh by design, to prevent the indolent from getting an easy ride at government expense.  Permission to leave for short periods, such as searching for work, had to be specially granted.  Corporal punishment was used for bad behavior, such as complaining.  The willingness to administer corporal punishment was one of the requirements for the master's job. Imagine the sort of person who'd take on such a job.

Don't let my sad description steer you away from the book.  Remember, at the time the stories were told, the workhouses were history.  But "near" history, still present in the minds and nightmares of the older people.  The first part of the book is a description of three of those people, both past and present, and it's gritty but not grim.

The second half of the book is mostly concerned with Sister Monica Joan's hijinks, and really very funny.   But I don't remember there being any midwifery at all, so I was a little disappointed.

Figure out the title, it is amusing

Heaven Is Paved With Oreos
by Catherine Gilbert Murdock

How dare people say this book wasn't as good as the Dairy Queen stories because it didn't feature the same main character?  It was a blast to see DJ the way other people see her.  And it was a treat getting to meet a new person who was having to deal with the stubborn Schwab family and their inability to speak their minds out loud.

But the Schwabs were a subplot--a pleasant subplot, peopled by familiar characters--but the real story was about a girl and her grandmother making the famous seven church pilgrimage to Rome.   I'd never heard of it but it's a real thing, sanctioned by the Vatican, even to this day.  While looking this up I picked up the trivia that Pope John Paul II changed one of the locations, Saint Sebastian Outside-The-Walls, in 2000.  The article didn't say why--maybe because he'd just dedicated the new one and wanted to give it more importance. (grin/sarcasm)

Anyway, I love all these people and I recommend this book to teens and pre-teens alike.  Author
Catherine Gilbert Murdock is like a younger readers' version of Cynthia Voigt.  Complex characters, no easy answers, and plenty (always) to admire.

Some thoughtful thinking

Body Outlaws: Rewriting the Rules of Beauty and Body Image
by Ophira Edut



This is a collection of essays by all sorts of people--thick, thin, brown, pale, female by birth and male by birth.  The male end of the spectrum is a little underrepresented, but I'm not sure if that's a problem, since the body image issues are overrepresented in the female end.  Women just got more to complain about.

Not that complaints are the purpose of the collection--there are a few complaints here and there, but in general, that's not the point.  The point is to tell about your body image problems honestly, with as much insight as you can muster, and if you happen to have found a way to deal with them that you want to share, let's hear it!

All that said, I must admit that a few of the essays don't seem to have anything to do with body image.  There are essays about being fat, thin, and hairy, of course, but also essays about being bisexual.  Is that really a "body" image problem?  There's an essay about a person's reasons for not having premarital sex--where does that fit in?

But they're all short and mostly well-written.  At least a few of them will make you nervous...am you one of the people who look and look away, sorting and discarding members of humanity on the basis of a shallow memory, an unadmitted prejudice, a shudder?

Great collection.

Kid lit but so was Harry Potter

Olivia Kidney and the Exit Academy
by Ellen Potter

Recommended! Anyone under 13 for sure, plus anyone who likes kid lit and can laugh at the ludicrous, but slightly believable, ghost-full world of Olivia Kidney.  It appears that Olivia has always seemed to connect too easily with the spirit world, and this time it's a doozy!

I don't know if there's a reason why the author over-populates Olivia's world with loose ends, ephemeral characters, flotsam and jetsam and suspicious objects of magical purport. Some of these people and things get tidied up at the end, but not very many. I hope they come back in the sequels.

Oh, duh!  Just checked--this book is the SECOND in the series.  The library has the first, Olivia Kidney, and the third, Olivia Kidney and the secret beneath the city. Sounds like a trip is in order.

One weekend escape fiction

Saving Francesca
by Melina Marchetta

When I checked this out of the library, I didn't realize it was the same author as Jellico Road.  I disliked--or failed to like--Jellico Road so much that I stopped partway through and read reviews just to see if there was any point in finishing it.

Unlike it, Saving Francesca was told in chronological order.  Flashbacks and flashforwards are all useful tools in the right time and place,but this was not the time nor the place and, luckily, the author recognized as much.  This is a simple, one person narrative of a girl starting a new school, making new friends, and trying to cope with her mother's depression.   The character of the father threatens to become two-dimensional, but the various family and friends are just foils for the reflection of the growing girl.  But I didn't mind--she's a cool, smartalecky, all-around sharp girl that I enjoyed watching.  not knowing, exactly.  But watching.

Better than food

LA Son
by Roy Choi, Tien Nguyen, and Natasha Phan

I read it for the recipes and was surprised by the story. 

First, about the recipes.  I think I want to own them.  There are dozens I want to try, starting with kimchi and not ending wtih Gumbo, pounded pork schnitzel, and beef cheek tacos.  Dunno about the cheek--I'll probably cheat on that.  The kimchi is going to be weird enough--take a head of Napa cabbage and stuff between the leaves with fish sauce, shrimp, oysters, garlic, onion, and other stinky stuff; let it ferment at room temperature for a couple of days, then refrigerate for a few weeks.  Maybe I'll see if I can buy a jar at the supermarket rather than risk poisoning myself.  Plus I'm not sure if I can find kochukaru, ground Korean chili pepper.  Maybe if I printed out the characters and went to an Asian grocery, comparing my printout to the labels, I could recognize some.

Second, the story.  Mr. Choi's life is a classic story of, "How many times can a person go wrong and still turn out all right?"  Growing up amid a cultural collision, he jumped on every time-wasting brain-draining bandwagon he encountered--drugs, fighting, drinking, gambling, and worst of all, banking!  Yes, he spent a short eternity selling mutual funds.

(That previous paragraph isn't a spoiler--you know he gets to cooking in the end or this book would never have been written.)

You don't hear much about his personal life after the cooking starts, but I'll give him an okay on that one.  He mentions this and apologizes and that's all right.  We'll give him the privacy--he's told an awesome enough already.

Two audio duds were followed by a winner on paper

The Midwife; a Memoir of Birth, Joy and Hard Times
by Jennifer Worth

So good.  I read it so fast it hurt, but I'm going to re-read the last couple of chapters just to prolong the pain.  According to Goodreads it's the first in a trilogy but I'm not sure the library has the second two.   so I'll probably stop here and watch the rest on Netflix.

The episodes were amusing, sad, happy, warm, and painful.  The only thing I missed was a little insight into the narrator's heart.  I mean, she talked about the smells and filth so well that I could smell them and see them, feeling a little vomitous myself, and she got the people in a snapshot--perfect!  And at times, her love and joy, puzzlement and pain showed clearly in her narrator's voice... but all this was reaction to the exterior and I didn't get a glimpse into an interior narrative--a true first-person journey.  I ask too much.

second dud in a row

Naked
by David Sedaris

Abandoned this on audiobook.  It was just too icky.  Did he smother a matchstick's worth of memoirs with a can of roofing tar?   Because if one-tenth of this book is true, he should be locked up in a loony bin and not allowed to pollute the gene pool.  But if it's pretty much all made up, then why read it?  It's like a useless pollution of family stories so unbelievable that they could be true, spiced up with gross humor that isn't very funny.

So if it's true, then it's not a truth I care to be acquainted with.  And if it's made-up, why bother?
I didn't.

Picture posted to remind me never to pick up author again

One For the Money by Janet Evanovich
Audiobook version. Abandoned circa Chapter 3.

I might have gotten farther on paper, but not much farther. 
It's awful. No--it's not good enough to be awful. It's inane. And stupid.

I started off expecting a detective novel, a mistake which I don't blame anyone for except myself. The book started off with a brief description of the heroine's previous encounters with a neighborhood scumbag. He was interesting to read about, and she had a "one-hour-stand" with him and then got mad because he never called her.  How she handled her rancor was vaguely amusing.
And then the book jumps to now. Having lost her job and failing to find more than temp work, she has her car repossessed and goes to supper with her family. Her mom suggests she get a filing clerk job with her cousin Vinnie, a bail-bondsman.


I was about to quit there, but hmmm...bail bondsman and maybe some mob connections...might get better. She goes in, finds that the job is taken, but meets Vinnie's secretary who says she should try instead for the job of skip tracer.  Skip tracing pays 10% of the bond and there's a case available right now--10 grand to pick up a murder suspect who's skipped out on a $100,000 bond.  Incidentally he is her old neighborhood scumbag acquaintance, now a cop. 

So, with no training, no experience, no fighting skills, and no clue, she jumps on it.  She figures she'll just pop over to his mother's house, ask where he's gone, call the cops to pick him up, and head to McDonald's for a well-deserved late breakfast.

As another reviewer said, she's a marshmallow.

On her first try, without any effort at all, she manages to find him. She loses him immediately, but it doesn't matter.  I've lost interest. This is just stupid.

I went back and looked at other people's reviews. A quarter of them (for example the brainy Stephanie Meyer of Twilight fame) said Evanovich was a great author and it was a great book. Equally as many said it was crap and cited the same reasons I did. They also noted that the only interesting characters were dropped half-way through. All the more reason for me to cut my losses early.

if I'd paid money for this, I'd be PO'ed.

Good action reading

Crown of Midnight
by Sarah J. Maas

Not as unexpected as the first but still pretty good. Still hard to put down--expect the unexpected!  I'm looking forward to the next.

So what advice can I give, if you're thinking about starting this series?  I can say it's way on top of the average YA fantasy.  I can say the author is free with the blood and gore and gives her star players injuries that would level an Ajax.  They do get knocked out from time to time, but like the Energizer bunny, they keep on kicking back.

The relationships are complicated--love and hate and utter confusion being common states of interaction between any given pair of characters at any given time. The villain is the only mystery--you know who he is, but you don't know why or what he's up to. The good guys don't know what he's up to either, and that one fact, to me, makes a perfect story.  You know only as much as the protagonists know....

Oops.  The author missed the ball on that last one.  There's a little bit of a hint that Celaena is holding something back.
So she's not perfect.

5 stars may be pushing

My Life Next Door
by Huntley Fitzpatrick

It starts out slowly, a teenage version of a "cozy" without the mystery.  (Other than the usual teen mystery: does he like me?  Do I make the first move?  Will he see me again?  When?  Where?

That part was fun, but you knew it wouldn't be all. The author introduced a cast of characters including "the mom", a bigoted, frustrated woman approaching middle age without ever accomplishing anything except winning public office more-or-less by default.  "Clay," a smooth as snake political adviser who decides, "your Mama has got what it takes; she's gonna go far."  "Best friend," a girl with an even more messed up family than Samantha's.  "Best friend's brother," druggie alcoholic determined to ruin his life one small step after another.  And "the Garretts," the family next door that just didn't fit in the neighborhood.

At the end this got so tense I had to steal an hour of precious reading time to keep on listening to it. If I had a paper copy, I'd be re-reading those parts right now; instead, I'll just cue them up to listen to them later in the car.

I hate the author for making me care so much that it hurt. A little over half-way through, she tossed in a "little did I know" line that sets your heart on edge.  Wondering...worrying.... 

Was the painful twist anything I imagined?  Not, not in my wildest.  Was it as bad as I expected?
Not telling.

Tolkien is my favorite author but

Bilbo's Last Song
by J. R. R. Tolkien

It's not fair to count this as a book, however, it's bound and cataloged as one so I will.  I agree with another reader who said there was no reason to bind it separately except to make a little extra money off the legacy of a dead genius.  But since it's in the kids' section, I'll let them have it.

Just a little poem composed by Bilbo on his way to the grey havens, illustrated with drawings from his big adventure.  I enjoyed the drawings.  People said it was a farewell to the friends and places of Middle Earth, but that is not true.  There is only one line of farewell and its as generic as a greeting card.

Impossible

The impossible has become reality.  Today--after a huge crack appeared in my one-year-old car's windshield--

I

MADE

BREAD

After so many failures in a lifetime of disaster--remember the "no knead bread, so easy a third-grader can make it"?  Remember the many failures of sticky disaster?  Last week I ran across a recipe that called for exactly four ingredients--flour, yeast, salt and water--and specifically said, do not knead.

And despite my mistakes like leaving it to rise for an extra hour and accidentally dumping a pile of loose flour into the baking pan and covering the second rise with a damp paper towel which the dough stuck to like glue...
I baked it and...
it looks, smells, and tastes...

like bread.

Too many stretches of unbelief can ruin the best of mysteries

Dead Scared
by Sharon Bolton


I couldn't stop reading, I'll give her that.  But...I couldn't stop being annoyed at the shifts in perspective, POV, and even person--

An-noy-ing!

She wrote a good, shallow thriller. I read--I enjoyed--I felt cheated at the end. Three thumbs down.

A little bit of life well lived

World Gone Beautiful
by Linda Buturian

How can you love a book and (kind of) hate the author?  Is dislike the better word?  No--too harsh.  Let's just say I didn't cozy up to her.  She was clearly her, not me...but a beautiful writer all the same.

I loved her farm, her fields, her mud and her friends.  The story behind the farm is that four families of quite normal people got together and bought a farmhouse and some acreage; worked as somewhat more than neighbors but much less than a "commune".  (Commune has too many negative connotations these days--bearded hippies and free love and trying to survive on mung bean sprouts.)

Somehow, through hard work and love for the land, they made it.  I could see myself doing the same thing.  I loved her beautiful, beautiful world.  And the kids--I would have enjoyed reading more about the kids.

So this is a free-flowing record of a few years of living on the Rum River, living with the land despite jobs and long commutes and stories to write and sell.   It's a life out in the open.  And that's just right.