Peachtree Island

May 31, 2010 Children,Fiction

When I was a kid I picked up a lot of books at flea markets and garage sales. One of the ones that I picked up was Mildred Lawrence’s Peachtree Island. It’s a special little book. After I went off to university it disappeared and I have no clue whatever happened to it but I decided I wanted another copy. I trolled eBay for awhile, found one, ordered it and plopped it on my shelf but hadn’t read it. So Sunday morning, when I was up at the unseemly hour of 6am (raccoons fighting in the backyard woke me up again) I needed something simple and comforting to read. Peachtree Island it was.

When the book opens Cissie is on a train on her way to stay with her Uncle Eben. She has a very pretty doll that looks just like her. Cissie is an orphan who has stayed with various aunt’s throughout her life but she’s never really had a real home. She’s a bit tired of always staying with people and is hopeful that her Uncle Eben will give her a forever home. The day that she arrives she overhears Uncle Eben jokingly telling his housekeeper that if she were a boy he’d keep her forever, only she doesn’t realize that it’s a joke. She becomes determined to do everything she can to help out in the peach orchard as well as a boy so that she can stay.

Your perspective changes somewhat as you read childhood favourites as an adult. The characters are still lovely but I found myself paying much closer attention to the setting. Peachtree Island is in Lake Erie so I found myself staring at a map attempting to figure out where it was. (It seems to me the inspiration must come from the islands just north of Port Clinton, Ohio.) As the book follows a full year we get to see the various tasks that needed to be done in a peach orchard and I wonder how the process has changed. I wonder if the chemicals mentioned are still used on peach trees (I doubt it). I wonder if the ice in Lake Erie still gets thick enough for the “magic bridge” that Cissie and Uncle Eben use to visit friends on a small, neighbouring island. It made me reflect on how different childhood was then (the book was published in 1948), when I was a kid and now.

I also remember that this was the book that introduced me to apple butter. It wasn’t a product that I grew up with. My mother never made it nor did any of my aunts or grandparents make it. I could only imagine what it tasted like and when, years later, I had it for the first time I thought of this book. Maybe next fall, after we move into the house where I’ll finally have a kitchen with adequate space for canning, I’ll even make some and think of Cissie and her great big paddle that she used to mix the apple butter.

I Want To Go Home

May 26, 2010 Canadian,Children,Fiction

I’ve made no secret of my love for Gordon Korman but one of my all time favourite novels of his is I Want To Go Home. I’ve been looking to get a copy of it for awhile and when I happened upon one during my birthday thrift store splurging I snapped it up.

Rudy Miller is not your normal camper. First of all, he doesn’t want to be at camp. Secondly he is an unusually bright boy who doesn’t quite live up to the expectations that others set up for him. Thirdly, he’s a loner. All this all together and you have one camper who is determined to not enjoy camp and do whatever he can in his power to leave. He befriends the other camper in his cabin, Mike Webster, and hilarity ensues as they both try to escape from camp. Along the way they maybe also cause a bit of a nervous breakdown for their camp counsellor Chip.

Can we talk about this cover? It’s horrible. I have to assume that the adult on the cover is Chip. Chip is supposedly a university-age man. The man on the cover looks at least 40. Horrible cover. (This is not the cover my old copy had but I can’t find that one anywhere.)

What I love about Gordon Korman is that I found his books amusing when I was a kid and reading them as an adult I still find them just as amusing. Greatly recommended as a read-aloud for kids.

Now I just need to find a copy of No Coins, Please…

The Girl Who Chased the Moon

May 25, 2010 Fiction,Recommend

I am not always the most patient person but I had to exercise a whole lot of patience when waiting to read Sarah Addison Allen’s The Girl Who Chased the Moon. First, I knew I was going to be getting it from the library so that always means a wait (even when I’m on the top of the list during the ordering process). So I waited and waited and then finally I saw those magical words in my library account — “in transit.”

The only problem was that these words appeared just a day before the library system was shutting down for two weeks. The library would be open but our accounts were frozen while they did a system upgrade. No checking in or out and no adding requests to our account. I had hoped that I would get it on that last day but nope, no dice. At one point during those two weeks I actually considered buying it but since it was also during that period that we bought the house I didn’t. (See, I do have restraint.) That “in transit” mocked me for more than two weeks before I got the notice that it was actually there waiting for me.

Finally I had it my hands. I started it immediately but had to set it aside for this pesky thing called “work.” Hmph. Work always gets in the way of good books.

Emily shows up in Mullaby because she has no where else to go. After her mother dies Emily moves to Mullaby, a place she’s never been ,to live with her grandfather, a giant of a man that she’s never met. She hopes that in going there people will stop expecting her to live up to her mother’s reputation. Little does she know that she’ll end up living down her mother’s reputation in her home town. Julia moved back to Mullaby after her father’s death determined to stay just long enough to get all his stuff in order before selling his restaurant and moving away to open her own bakery. Everyone loves Julia’s cakes, but one person in particular likes both her and her cakes. He just might have something to do with why she bakes them in the first place.

I was a bit concerned about this third book from Sarah Addison Allen. I knew going into it that there would be a twist because there were twists in the first two books. I had found the twist and climax of her second book too similar to the one in her first book and if this one was similar I might have needed to give up her books even though I really, really love her worlds. Thankfully all that worrying was for nothing. Yes, there was a twist and yes I did guess a little of it a bit before but it was good and not too similar to the other ones. I’m so happy about that because as I said, I love the world that Sarah Addison Allen creates. The changing wallpaper was neat (though not as neat as the books that appeared in The Sugar Queen). The mystery of the lights was kind of easy to figure out but that was sort of the point I think.

I loved Julia. I really did. I think she might be my favourite character from Sarah Addison Allen’s books. She was flawed but she was also very strong. I liked that. And I liked how she and Emily both discover that you can go home again, even if you were never there in the first place.

The only problem now is waiting for Sarah Addison Allen to write another book.

Rowed Trip

May 21, 2010 Biography/Memoir,Canadian,Non-Fiction

This had been a week and then some. The hard drive on my Mac died. *poof* And erm, perhaps I should confess that I suck at doing backups? Surprisingly I really didn’t lose much that can’t be recovered seeing as Lee and I PDF and email each other important documents. I lost a few iPhone photos that I had downloaded but not yet backed up. Nothing big. Thank goodness. Of course after getting my new hard drive it took two hours for me to get email to work with my ISP. But it works! Woohoo! And then I spent last night on the couch pretty much convinced that I had caught the flu. Thankfully it does not appear to be the flu as I’m feeling much better today but I sure as heck wasn’t too healthy last night. I’m behind in everything, including blogging so maybe I should just get talking about books and stop rambling.

Awhile ago I had fun digging into the memoir category on my library’s catalogue and I pulled a bunch of books into a save for later list. I’m periodically pulling books from that list and adding them to my request list. That how I found Rowed Trip: From Scotland to Syria by Oar by Colin Angus and Julie Angus.

I really wanted to love this book. It’s the type of book that, in general, I mightily enjoy. I love stories about people undertaking the kind of journey that I would never attempt. I love reading about their experiences. I do.

But I didn’t love this book.

Colin and Julie alternate chapters and each chapter covers a country. Colin wrote about Scotland, Julie about England and so on. I really liked how they set it up. I was interested in their journey. My problem was that I never really felt connected to either of them. Just when I’d start to get into their story they’d be off and talking about the engineering of varies locks or the history of something of other. That’s not to say that this all wasn’t interesting, but it wasn’t about the and I was reading it to get their story.

You see, when I read about a journey like this I’m mostly interested in the people. Yes, the places they are going through are interesting in their own ways but I’m a people person. I want to know what people where thinking. How their day was. How they felt about various experiences.

This book just skims the surface of that. It’s not a memoir the way I like a memoir to be. When I read a memoir I like to feel a bit like I’m sitting around being let in on something. With this book I always felt like I was being kept at arms distance.

All that said, I have a friend who would probably be really interested in this book, including the engineering of various locks, and I’m going to pass along the recommendation to him. It’s not a bad book, it’s just not my preferred breed of memoir. I’m also planning on putting Julie Angus’s book Rowboat in A Hurricane on my request list. I didn’t love this book but I’m sure as heck interested in how they rowed across the Atlantic, and yes they really did encounter hurricanes. And cyclones. Even if I’m held off at arm’s length in that book I think it’ll be a story worth reading.

Birthday Magic

May 15, 2010 sometimes I ramble

We tend not to passively celebrate birthdays around here. We do birthday weekends or upon occasion, birthday weeks. Celebrations are rarely limited to one day. That isn’t to say that we go absolutely nuts but we celebrate by doing things we enjoy and generally eating as much yummy food as possible.

Each year my mother sends me a bit of money for my birthday. Not a lot but enough to have a little bit of fun with. I frequently use it to buy books. If there is something newly released I’ll buy a new book but most often I’ll use it as an excuse to have a shopping spree in a second hand bookstore.

Two years ago, shortly before I moved to Ottawa, I went on a shopping spree at Cheap Thrills in Montreal. I was looking for Viragos and oh did I find them. I walked out of there with 14 of those beauties for only about $60. That was a score.

I couldn’t tell you what I did with my birthday money last year. I was too distracted by my birthday present, which was a biggie. No, I’m not talking about the Sony Reader, though that was huge and we maybe had a bit of a chat about how that was perhaps a bit much for my birthday (his argument was that it was my 30th so he was allowed to go big). The big gift was that he actually flew my best friend, whom I’ve known for more than 20 years) in for the long weekend. (Yes, indeed he scored major points with that one.)

This year there were not going to be big surprises. Yesterday we took the day off of work and went to Montreal. I did a teeny bit of shopping but mostly we walked around and just revisited a place I really love before meeting up with friends and filling ourselves full of yummy food. It was a great day.

Since I didn’t get a cake yesterday I had pretty much full say on whatever cake I wanted to buy today. I’ve been wanting to try the lemon thyme cake at Thyme and Again so we were heading into Westboro (we live just outside it). Right by Thyme and Again is a St. Vincent de Paul thrift store and I’ve had some great success finding children’s chapter books there in past. I lost all my favourites along my travels and I’m replacing them.  Today was no exception.

Birthday Books!

There’s Francesca Lia Block’s I Was a Teenage Fairy. I’ve never read Block and I was sure that someone was going to come force one on me soon. Ally Carter’s Cross My Heart and Hope to Spy, which I listened to on audio from the library and really wanted a copy of.  I Want to Go Home is one of my favourite Gordon Korman books. I read my version to pieces as a kid. This one doesn’t have the same cover I had but I’ll adjust. I had to pick up The Celery Stalks at Midnight by James Howe because one can never have too much of Bunnicula in the house. (I had on a previous visit picked up Howliday Inn at the same store.) And finally Scott Young’s Boy on Defence is the only one from his triology that I didn’t own. (They are must-haves for young hockey fans.)

But the biggest score of all was not mine. Lee found it. He remembered that time that I bought all the Viragos. He couldn’t remember what they were called but he was pretty sure that he knew what the dark green covers looked like. So while I was hoping around in the children’s books he presented me with this book and asked if it was one of them.

The Brontes Went to Woolworths

Yes, that is the Virago edition of Rachel Ferguson’s The Brontes Went to Woolworths. I’ve wanted a copy of it ever since Danielle read it years ago. My library didn’t have it and when I searched for it on eBay back then I darned near had a heart attack over the price. At the time if you could find a copy under $100 you were lucky. Bloomsbury has since re-released it and prices have come down a bit but it can still be really hard to find a this particular Virago edition. I got it for $1 CAD.

Lee had no idea that he not only found me a Virago but one that I considered to be the Holy Grail of Viragos. Needless to say it now has a home with me and I was left wondering if Lee was born with a horse shoe up his butt.

Or maybe it was just birthday magic. After we left the thrift store we went to a store we had recently noticed in a different part of town. We have our eye out for a small retro formica-topped table, like each set of our grandparents used to have. We thought that this place seemed like the type that might have it. They didn’t but I left with a treasure anyway. I’m moving away from plastic in my kitchen and moving in the direction of Pyrex. Last summer I got a set of the primary coloured stacking mixing bowls at a flea market. Today I stored these, for a whopping $30. (I paid twice that for the bowls I bought last summer.)

Blue Pyrex Cinderlla Bowls!

There were a couple of different Cinderella bowl sets that I would have been happy with but these were definitely in my top three.

It’s been a very lucky birthday weekend.

Happy Birthday To Me

May 14, 2010 sometimes I ramble

I love birthdays, don’t you? And ok, it’s not just the cake. It’s also because you can ask people do things and they kind of feel obligated to do them because hey, it’s your birthday.

Luckily for all of you I’m a particularly nice birthday queen and I’m asking for something that doesn’t cost you anything except a few minutes of your time.

What I’d really, really like for my birthday involves books, of course. What kind of book blogger would I be if it didn’t? All you have to do is go to this BlogHer post and leave a comment telling everyone what book has had the greatest impact on your life (or you know, what books since it’s hard to pick just one). You can even sign in with your Facebook account. For every comment left on that BlogHer post BookRenter will donate a book, via First Book, to Head Start.

You comment, they dontate a book and I have even more of a reason to celebrate my birthday. Every body wins!

And if you have an extra few minutes read through some of the comments. I’ve been padding my reading list with some of the suggestions over there. So much fun!

Casting Off

May 12, 2010 Fiction,Women

I’m not sure how Nicole Dickson’s Casting Off made it onto my request list. I’m going to guess that someone blogged about it and my brain went, “Knitting book! Shiny! Must have!”

I get a lot of books that way.

Casting Off follows Rebecca as she travels to a tiny Irish island with her daughter Rowan to research a book about the knitted ganseys the island is known for. Rebecca’s best friend from college grew up on the island and going there is a bit like going home, something that Rebecca has been without for too long. She goes from place to place, never wanting to feel confined or trapped. She sees moving about as the ultimate freedom after having been in a relationship with a controlling man. But as Rowan gets older she starts to question if she could keep moving. She needs to figure out how to settle down.

Casting Off is one of those books where you know there was a Big Event that happened somewhere in the main characters past. It’s one of those formative events that shapes the person that you are. In Rebecca’s case it’s what makes her earn for freedom for herself while being totally overprotective and emotionally smothering her daughter. The author drops hints and makes enough references that you have a pretty decent idea of what happened, and of course everyone on the island knows what happens and they make hints about it too. It gets a tad irritating because it kind of feels like the author is dragging it out (for which they clearly have a purpose but still) while you just want to tell at them to get on with it and tell you already.

Rowan starts making friends, most notably the island grouch Sean Morahan. He’s really a miserable old man, who carries around the guilt of the loss of his family and the knowledge that he could have been a different kind of man and father. He speaks to no one except to growl at them.He meets his match when he takes a shot at Rowan on her first night in the village. He certainly did not expect to be sassed back by a 6-year old, even if he did deserve it.

Casting Off probably won’t make my list of favourite reads for the year but it did accomplish two things. One, it made me really interested in ganseys. Secondly, it felt positively decadent to lounge in bed one evening during the middle of buying a house stress and just read. And yes, I’ll admit that I bawled toward the end. I blame the stress.

Savor the Moment

May 10, 2010 Fiction,Romance

Ok, I’ll admit it. I’ve become addicted to Nora Robert’s Bride Quartet series. It all started off innocently enough. The first book, Vision in White, was on the express shelf at the library and I figured why not. I downloaded the second book, Bed of Roses, to my Sony Reader when I had the flu and was being kept up all night coughing. It was only natural that I downloaded Savor the Moment the day it came out, right? Actually I didn’t really mean to do it that day but I knew it was coming out soon and it turned out to be release day and I justified the purchase by saying clearly I was meant to buy it that day.

[Oh but what a TIME I had trying to download it. First it was in the Sony e-book store but only available for purchase in the USA. Sony, why the heck are you showing me books I can't buy? I mean really, that's just mean. Also, I can't seem to buy much of anything at all from the Sony store right now and it's really darned annoying. I couldn't get it on the Kindle for iPhone because, well, I'm not sure. I suspect with both the Sony and the Kindle stores is has something do with the new agency model and they've yet to figured out all the rights for Canada. I was finally able to get a copy with Kobo to which I have to say thank you Kobo. I know I didn't always say flattering things about you back when you were Shortcovers but you redeemed yourself, though I could do with a few less emails.]

I wasn’t sure that I’d like Savor the Moment. To put it simply, I found Laurel to be quite an angry person in the A Bed Of Roses. I didn’t see myself sympathizing with her and generally wanting her to have the big happy ending. And Del? After the way he ripped on Jack for dating Emma I wasn’t sure how he’d make the mental leap to getting involved with Laurel. I just really wasn’t sure that it would work. It did…mostly. I’m still not sure that anyone would be as comfortable (and encouraging) about hearing about her friend’s sex life with her brother as Parker was, though I understand why she was pleased about them getting together. Also on the Parker front, Parker gets a bit of action. Kind of. It’s an obvious lead-in to the last book Happily Ever After, which let’s be honest, I’ll probably download on the first day it’s available.

It’s a fun series and if you are looking for something to read in the sunshine this summer I recommend it.

Never Tell Our Business To Strangers

May 4, 2010 Biography/Memoir,Non-Fiction

I’m not really sure how Jennifer Mascia’s book, Never Tell Our Business to Strangers appeared on my radar. Maybe it was an email. Or it could have been in my feeds. I figured that a memoir of a childhood on the lam with your parents could be interesting. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the book I read.

Mascia grew up on the lam, she just didn’t know it. It was just the tip of the iceberg of things that she did not know about her family. Her father was a charismatic man. People loved him and respected him, but they also sometimes feared him. Growing up she thought that Frank and Johnny were the same name because her mother called her father Johnny at home and Frank in public. At one point she was told that she could stop using a last name that they had been using. She watched her father get arrested as a child. She had much older sisters and brothers had she hadn’t met for years. They moved frequently. They burned through credit cards using false social security numbers.

It was only as an adult that Mascia really learned what everyone in her family already knew. Her father had done time in jail for murder before she was born. He was connected to New York city mobsters (though not a “made man” himself). Her mother knew and did not tell her. Her mother didn’t tell her a lot of things. But after her father’s death and as her mother battled cancer Mascia finds out some more truths about her father from her mother, things that not even their family knew.

When I started reading Never Tell Our Business to Strangers I though that it was going to be about her life on the lam. It wasn’t. I felt a little…mislead. It’s not so much about life on the run or life on the edges of the mob but more a memoir of extended adolescence and finding out who your parents really are. It’s not a bad memoir, it just wasn’t what I thought it would be (or what it was advertised to be) and that skewed my opinion of it. While I got through the book fairly quickly it was in part because I was waiting rather impatiently for the book that was advertised to begin. It didn’t and I found that really frustrating.

And that colours my whole opinion of the book. Can I say it was good? Not really. It wasn’t particularly bad either. Sure it could have been edited down and it felt like it dragged toward the end. And you don’t always feel the greatest sympathy for the author, but that’s in part because she’s both honest and raw in regards to her emotions and actions. She just simply isn’t always likable. She’s complex, as are the people in her life. As such, they aren’t always likable.

Never Tell Our Business to Strangers wasn’t the book I thought it was going to be, and not in a good way. I hate it when that happens.

Books Make A Difference

May 3, 2010 BlogHer,Events

As (most of) you know I write about books on BlogHer.com. BlogHer and BookRenter are teaming up to get books into the hands of children in low-income communities. And you can help.

All you have to do is go to this post and leave a comment sharing the book that’s had the greatest impact on your life. (Note: Yes, you have to be a member to comment on BlogHer.com. It’s free. Or you can log in with your Facebook account.) Or, you can post about the campaign on your own blog and add a link to the post in Mr. Linky. For each comment on the BlogHer post and for each post added to Mr. Linky between May 3-28 BookRenter will donate a book via First Books to Head Start, a federal program for preschool children from low-income families to help them prepare for kindergarten.

I launched the campaign on BlogHer this morning but I’m sharing it here because I believe that this community believes that books do make a difference. Without them this community would not exist. At some point in our lives someone put a book into our hands and turned us into readers. We can help a few more future readers get their hands on the books they need to get started. That’s worth a comment don’t you think?