#IMWAYR January 29th, 2024

 Welcome! It's #IMWAYR time again, when bloggers share what they have been reading and find out what others have been up to. Kathryn hosts the adult version of this meme at Book Date. Kellee and Ricki at Unleashing Readers host the kidlit rendition. These are fabulous places to start your search for what to read next.

Winter finally arrived and for two weeks we had snow and unusually cold weather. Then it warmed up. One day we had snow all over the ground and by the next afternoon it was almost gone. Now we have low cloud, fog, and rain. I'm not complaining. We need the moisture.

According to Goodreads, I am two books behind schedule. I figure it's a small miracle that I'm only this far behind. Between having a houseguest for a week, and then coming down with a sinus infection, it's amazing I managed to read at all.

Because of the sinus infection I missed a quilting workshop, but luckily had all the information already so I just sewed on my own at home. The workshop taught a relatively easy strategy for creating bargello quilts. I made two cushion covers instead of a quilt. Now that they are finished, it looks like we need a new sofa. 

Titles with a 🍁 indicate this is a Canadian or Indigenous Canadian Author and or Illustrator.

Clicking on the title will take you to the Goodreads page of the book.

PICTURE BOOKS

5 stars

NO! Said Custard the Squirrel by Sergio Ruzzier September 6, 2022

Don't ask me what this book is all about because I'm still trying to figure it out. I really wish my grandkids were here so I could read it to them and we could talk about what they think. 

Custard the Squirrel looks a lot like a duck, but when asked all kinds of questions about his identity by a little rat in a diaper, he consistently replies no. 

Is this a celebration of being who you truly are? Maybe. 

MIDDLE GRADE NOVELS

4 stars

The Portal Keeper The Misewa Saga #4 by David Alexander Robertson October 10, 2023  🍁

"Morgan and Eli are Indigenous children who discover a portal at their foster home to another world, Askī; there they discover talking animal beings who connect them to traditional ways, as well as help them deal with the challenges in the real world. A fantasy for readers aged ten and up, the Misewa Saga (“misewa” is Cree for “all that is”) series reflects stories of the sky and the constellations held within its great canvas."

 Eli, Morgan, and her friend, Emily have located another portal into Aski. They end up in World's End,  a different place than usual, and discover that something terrible is happening to the animal people there. Back in their own world they are horrified to discover what is going on and must come up with a way to save them. 

This is my favourite series by Robertson. I like that we have two queer characters, but it's not all there is. I like the closeness of the two foster children. I like that Eli is coming into his own kind of super power. 

4 stars

The Oceans Between Stars Chronicle of the Dark Star #2 by Kevin Emerson & Kevin T. Collins (Narrator) February 13, 2018

I read the first in this series ages ago and finally got around to reading the next one.
Liam and Phoebe are two teens who barely escaped with their lives when Mars, the planet they were living on, exploded. They are travelling in stasis with JEFF, their panda shaped robotic  assistant, as they try to catch up to the main ship and reunite with their parents. When they finally arrive, they discover their family's starliner has been destroyed.
Phoebe has secrets of her own. In the prelude we learn that her real name is Xela and her family ended up on Mars when their planet of Telos was destroyed in a ball of fire by humans. She and her people want vengeance. At the same time, she and Liam have become close friends. He accepts her when she finally reveals her true self. Unfortunately she is still keeping some dangerous secrets.
I liked so much about this book. I appreciate that nothing about space and time travel is dumbed down for younger readers. I appreciate the connection between what happened on Telos and colonialism here on our real world. It feels realistic that the two children who want to end the conflict between their two peoples, are mostly ignored by the adults around them. 

If I didn't already have so many books to read, I would probably have started on the final book in the trilogy right away. 

MIDDLE GRADE GRAPHIC NOVELS

5 stars

Dear Rosie by Meghan Boehman & Rachael Briner July 11, 2023

This is a profound novel about losing a friend. When a member of close knit group of girls dies suddenly, the remaining girls deal with grief in different ways.
The story is based on the death of one of the authors’ friends. It’s set in the same town as where they grew up. I like that each character is based on one of the local animals of the area. 

YA/ADULT GRAPHIC NOVELS

5 stars

In Limbo by Deb J.J. Lee March 7, 2023

In this gorgeous, debut graphic memoir, Lee shares her story of growing up Korean in America. It's a painful story of trying to fit into a world where you are an outsider.  While her mother was supportive of her desire to create art, she was prone to violence and physically abused Lee. Her father let it happen. As her close friend began to distance herself she became increasingly insecure and depressed. By the time she graduated from high school, she had attempted suicide twice. 

ADULT/YA FICTION

4 stars

Shut Up You're Pretty by Téa Mutonji & Jemeni (Narrator) April 1, 2019  🍁

For me, this Canada Reads title was a window into a world I scarcely new existed. It's a compelling narrative that reads like a collection of short stories with the same main character. It starts with a young Congolese  girl, Loli, shaving her head in order to pass a boy so she can get into Canada. This sets the stage for a gritty exploration of gender, sexualization of girls and women, mental health, and poverty. It's also a story of resilience and overcoming. It isn't for the faint of heart. 

4 stars

The Catch by Mick Herron January 28, 2020

This continues the story of John Bachelor, a character first introduced in the novella, The List. His many screwups have left him in financial straights. When a couple of Dogs (the service's internal security division) from MI5 rough him up and tell him to find one of the retired spies he's supposed to be minding, he thinks he might be able to find his way back into the good graces of the agencies leader. He's wrong of course, but the machinations of all the actors makes for a great read.

CURRENTLY

Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon

Almost Brown: A Mixed-Race Family Memoir by Charlotte Gill

UP NEXT (MAYBE)

Moon of the Turning Leaves by Waubgeshig Rice

READING GOALS 

#MustRead2024 2/25 one on the go

NonFiction 1/25 one on the go

Canadian Authors 3/50

Indigenous Authors 1/25 

Goodreads Reading Challenge: 13/200 

#IMWAYR August 29, 2022

Welcome readers! It's #IMWAYR time again, when bloggers share what they have been reading and find out what others have been up to. Kathryn hosts the adult version of this meme at Book Date. Jen at Teach Mentor Texts and Kellee and Ricki at Unleashing Readers host the kidlit rendition. These are fabulous places to start your search for what to read next.

It has been a very hectic couple of weeks. I gave up on blogging last weekend and contemplated leaving it for this one too. I decided against that because our son, his wife, and their two girls will be arriving Monday and will be here for a week. I fully expect to be exhausted next Sunday and will be desperate to do nothing. 

Because we expected to be away for a couple of weeks early September, we had to get a lot of food preservation accomplished in August. So, on the 16th I purchased 120 pounds of Roma tomatoes. They had to sit and finish ripening for a few days. Since they became ripe enough, I have canned 14 quarts of tomatoes, made 50 odd jars of salsa, 25 pints of tomato sauce and 14 jars of ratatouille. I also made a couple of quarts of dill pickles and a double batch of zucchini fritters to freeze. After all, the garden doesn't stop producing just because we are busy with other things. On Saturday, the 20th, a crew of us juiced another 320 pounds of tomatoes. We ended up with about 110 quarts of tomato juice. Only half of it is ours. 

It is very satisfying going to the cool room in the basement and looking at all the food on the shelves. 

This is our portion of juice cooling. My uncle reminded me of the good old days when we used to go and pick our own tomatoes and juice up to 1000 pounds.
We are a family that loves our red juice. 

In the middle of all that we got the message that we no longer have to be away. 

In addition to all the food processing, we have been trying to get the suite in our basement under control so my cousin can move in. Our last tenant left a huge mess that has taken a lot of work to clean and a lot of stuff to fix. I've painted the kitchen cupboards and my husband made new doors for them. I've done just about all the rest of the cleaning except the linoleum floor that I am leaving for him to look after. I am quite proud because I fixed the toilet all by myself and, after much scrubbing and half a bottle of bleach, got the bowl cleaned out. 

Needless to say, I did not get much reading with my eyes accomplished, but I made up for it listening to some brilliant audiobooks. 

I will do my best to respond to everyone's posts this week, but I'm not guaranteeing it will happen for the first few days. 

Hope you are all enjoying the end of summer. The weather the last couple of days has been a bit cooler. This hint of autumn has been much appreciated. 

Titles with a 🍁 indicate this is a Canadian or Indigenous Canadian Author and or Illustrator.

Clicking on the title will take you to the Goodreads page of the book.

MG NOVELS

Me Three by Susan Juby & Justin Miller (Narrator) March 22, 2022  🍁

Rodney, his sister, and their mother have moved to a new town in a new state to start a new life. The two children start school using their mother's maiden name because of sexual abuse allegations made against their father. 

This epistolatory novel introduces us to Rodney and his family and they struggle to come to terms with what has happened and make new friends. At first Rodney thinks that the allegations must be false, but over time he comes to understand that they are true and that his father is not the man Rodney thought he was. 

I liked Rodney even if he seemed a bit young for his age. I appreciate that we see the ramifications on children when their parents are held accountable for their unscrupulous actions. I liked the complexity in Rodney's new friends even if some of their adventures terrified the bejeezus out of me. 

All the other Susan Juby books I've read have been set in Canada, so I was a bit disconcerted, and wondered why this one is set in the USA. I appreciated that one of Rodney's friends has a mother living here in BC Canada. 

The Fort by Gordon Korman June 28, 2022  🍁

I am really enjoying Korman's work these days. The Fort is the story of a group of boys who discover an underground bunker. It was built in the 1980's by a now deceased, local capitalist. They end up selling the pure silver cutlery to purchase food and fix one of their group's phone.
A couple of older bullies figure they have money and end up harassing them to get them to let them in on what is going on.
The tale unfolds through each of their voices. I appreciate how the character of each of these boys has been developed. They all have important stories that reveal the kinds of challenges that real boys today are liable to connect to. Ultimately, the important thing is how they are there for each other.

Playing the Cards You're Dealt by Varian Johnson & Dion Graham (Narrator) October 5, 2021

Anthony, (Ant) idolizes his father and want desperately to impress him. Now that he is ten and in grade five, he plans to do this by winning the next spades tournament. His older brother, his father and his grandfather have been winners of this card game year after year. Unfortunately, a lot of things get in the way of this. He and his best friend and spades partner, Jamal, end up estranged. Ant pairs up with Shirley, a new girl in school and still hopes to win. But his father's behaviour becomes increasingly erratic and strange until Ant's mother makes him leave. 

Varian Johnson has created another endearing character in Ant. My heart aches for him as he struggles to figure out how to become his own man in the middle of his father's failures. 

The Stone Child by David Alexander Robertson & Brefny Caribou (Narrator) August 2, 2022  🍁

There are two individual, but linked adventures in this novel. It begins as Morgan wakes to finds Eli near death at the base of the great tree. His soul has been stolen. To save him she has to call on everyone she trusts. She brings her best friend, Emily, from the everyday world to Misewa. Together with Arik, they travel into the dangerous North Woods, to search for Eli's soul. They are helped by an unexpected saviour. On their return home Eli realizes that another soul has been trapped inside the tree. In order to set it free, they have to destroy their portal to Misewa. 

The second part of the story involves their search for a new portal and Morgan connecting to her grandmother and deceased mother. 

I liked this a lot. My adrenalin ratcheted up while reading of their terrifying experiences in the North Woods. (At least there were no spiders.) I liked the romance that is blossoming between Emily and Morgan. I liked that the children are appreciating their foster parents more and in turn, the foster parents are doing their best for the children.  

I can hardly wait to find out what will happen to them all when they visit Misewa in the next book. 

Wings (Bromeliad Trilogy #3) by Terry Pratchett & Stephen Briggs (Narrator) January 1, 1990

I love this series so much that I've listened to each book twice. 

This quote from a wiki page explains the series much better than I can: "The main theme in the trilogy is the struggle of challenging society's accepted beliefs in the face of new information. This theme recurs through the books and includes changes in the scientific establishment, political establishment, religious beliefs, accepted history and family values of the nomes."

Wings is a companion book to Diggers in that it takes place at the same time. While the main group of Nomes are trying to deal with humans invading the quarry, this small group sneaks aboard an airplane and flies to NASA. With the help of 'the thing,' they end up contacting their spaceship, and returning to the quarry just in time to save the rest of the Nomes. 

Like the other novels in the series, this book is chock full of humour and rich commentary by the Nomes that ends up showing us ourselves. 

Some of the humour comes from how the Nomes think about the world: 

'What was that thing, Thing?’ said Masklin.
The Thing extended one of its sensors.
‘A long-necked turtle.’
‘Oh.’
The turtle swam peacefully away.
‘Lucky, really,’ said Gurder.
‘What?’ said Angalo.
‘It having a long neck like that and being called a long-necked turtle. It’d be really awkward having a name like that if it had a short neck.'

Some of it comes from how they see us:

 

'I don't think humans want to know things that disturb them.'

Nomes live ten times faster than humans. They're harder to see than a high- speed mouse. That's one reason why most humans hardly ever see them. The other is that humans are very good at not seeing things they know aren't there. And, since sensible humans know that there are no such things as people four inches high, a nome who doesn't want to be seen probably won't be seen.
  

"The other humans around it are trying to explain to it what a planet is."

"Doesn't it know?"
"Many humans don't. Mistervicepresident is one of them."

This series is deeply subversive. Don't let the book banners know anything about it. 

YA & ADULT FICTION

Huntress by Malinda Lo & Emily Woo Zeller (Narrator) April 5, 2011

I was wowed by this fantasy novel. It's jam packed full of action and romance. "Kaede and Taisin, two seventeen-year-old girls, are picked to go on a dangerous and unheard-of journey to Tanlili, the city of the Fairy Queen. Taisin is a sage, thrumming with magic, and Kaede is of the earth, without a speck of the otherworldly." They travel with the Prince and a small group of guards. 

If the sequel, Ash, had been available, I would have started it right away. 

Homicide and Halo-Halo by Mia P. Manansala & Danice Cabanela (Narrator) February 8, 2022

I kind of fell in love with Lila Macapagal and her aunties in Arsenic and Adobo, the first in Manansala's Tita Rosie's Kitchen Mystery series. They are cosy mysteries steeped in Filipino culture. Also, the food descriptions have me salivating nearly all the way through it.  

In this one, Lila, a former beauty queen herself, is roped into being one of the judges for this year's pageant. Then someone murders one of them and Lila's cousin, Bernadette becomes the prime suspect. Lila and the Filipino aunties (AKA the gossip brigade) get to work to clear her name.

Yolk by Mary H.K. Choi March 2, 2021

So many people have praised this book that I think I went into it with unreasonable expectations. I enjoyed it well enough, but it was loaded with too much relationship angst for me. It's the story of two Korean American sisters who grew up in Texas but now live in New York. June, the older, successful sister has cancer. Jayne, the younger one is a student struggling to deal with an eating disorder and feelings of inadequacy. While the relationship between the two siblings is fraught with all kinds of tension and squabbling, it isn't the angst that arises from this that bothered me.
It's the angst that is embedded in Jayne's relationships with men that was hard for me to deal with. I expect that this is because I am more of an age to these girl's parents and after 46 years of marriage have figured out that you just have to try and be as honest and upfront as you can. Also, if someone is a jerk, you either leave or kick them out. 

CURRENTLY

The Vanishing Half by Britt Bennett June 2, 2020

Stories of Métis Women: Tales My Kookum Told Me by Bailey Oster et al August 6, 2021  🍁

UP NEXT

I've had these books on my up next list for a number of weeks now.  I do mean to get to them but have to admit that they are merely suggestions.

Barry Squires, Full Tilt by Heather Smith  🍁

Cub by Cynthia L. Copeland, 

READING GOALS

#MustReadFiction 19/24

#MustReadNonFiction 13/18 one in progress

Canadian Authors 52/100 

Canada Reads shortlist 5/5 

Indigenous Authors 13/25 one in progress

2022 Big Book Summer Challenge 7

Goodreads Reading Challenge: 201/250