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.