Welcome readers! It's #IMWAYR time again, when bloggers share what they have been reading and find out what others have beouten 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.
Life is as back to normal as it gets around here. The living room has been cleaned of all grandchildren related clutter. It has been replaced by wood flooring. My partner is refurbishing the stairwell to the front door and basement. The carpet was removed a while ago and now he has replaced the banisters and is putting hardwood flooring on the steps and foyer entrance to the house. It looks gorgeous.
My neighbour gave me some chartreuse patterned fabric she had planned to sew up for her granddaughters (who are now in their late teens.) So I am working on matching dresses for the granddaughters. I have some similar fabric in a teal green that I will use to make something for the grandson.
So far I have harvested about 25 pounds of raspberries from the patch and there are probably another 5 pounds left before I cut out those canes. Meanwhile the new canes are flowering in anticipation for the late summer harvest. Aside from making raspberry wine, I'm not sure what I will do with all these berries. Maybe I will just make more wine.
Clicking on the title will take you to the Goodreads page of the book.
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| 4 stars |
Mommy's Hometown by Hope Lim & Jaime Kim (Illustrator) April 12, 2022
After listening to his mothers stories about growing up in a rural countryside, a young boy is surprised by the large city that has replaced it. What I found most fascinating about this book is that other than the Korean characters on the buildings, this could be a large city anywhere in the world.
The digitally created illustrations are rich in colour and light. While the differences between the two landscapes are vast, the river continues to run through it all, and the boy and his mother are still able to explore it and find treasures.
MG NOVELS
Right from the get go this book is hair raising. A young mother and her baby are shot by soldiers when they try to escape. The group are subject to horrifying conditions. Then they are tortured to force them to sign false confessions.
A few of them are released and helped by Brigid, who cooks for the Red Army. They manage to incapacitate the soldiers at the house with drug laced linzer cookies, and rescue the remaining captives.
A note by the author at the end of the book reveals more information about the people this book is based on, and more about the actual death camps created by the Russians after the war.
A clan of four inch nomes is forced to leave their dangerous forest home before they all end up dead. One of them, Masklin, devises a plan to try and save them. They sneak aboard a truck and end up in a department store where they are introduced to a colony of other nomes. These other nomes have developed a rich and layered society based on the goings on of the store. They believe it was created especially for them. The nomes from outside bring a sacred 'thing.' When it is surrounded by electricity, it begins to talk to them. They discover that the store is soon to be demolished. Masklin comes up with a plan for how to save them all. It just depends on a crew of nomes figuring out how to drive a delivery truck.
Set in Joseon Dynasty Korea in 1758, this is based on the true story of Crown Prince Sado, an untouchable serial killer.
The worst thing about finishing this book is that June Hur's next novel isn’t scheduled for release until 2024.
I liked this well enough. It's just that after finishing up a couple of nonfiction titles that went deep into their subjects (An Elegant Defence by Mat Richtel and Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake) I wanted more. I suspect I would have appreciated this better if I had read it first. It is a very readable, fairly comprehensive, overview of how our body works and the history behind how we have come to know what we do about it.
I'm hoping to get to these two next week. Other than that, I brought a lot of books home from the library this week!
