Month: February 2017

HOW DID I FORGET TO PUT UP A POST FOR THIS AMAZING BOOK?

Elan Mastai has written the perfect time travel book. Wait, scratch that. He has written the perfect book. What could become an overwhelmingly scientific account of time travel is instead a great book filled with laughter and crying and “oh god this is so good wait what’s happening I CAN’T PUT THIS BOOK DOWN” feelings. I read this book in 100 page increments, finding it physically painful to put down. I am so glad that a late-night chance encounter with Elan lead to me reading this book.

Run, don’t walk, to your nearest bookstore and PICK UP THIS BOOK IMMEDIATELY!  And then cancel all of your appointments because you won’t want to stop reading.

Growing up, my parents read Goodnight Moon to me.  And then when my brother was born, I read it to him.  So that book, as well as so many of Margaret Wise Brown’s books, were so important to me and definitely kickstarted my love of reading from a young age.  When I learned that there was a new biography of her, I got incredibly excited.  I needed to read that immediately!

I greatly enjoyed reading this book.  Margaret’s life was fascinating and I loved getting to know her and those around her.  I didn’t realize how much of a trailblazer she was in children’s literature.  Before reading the book, I knew that she was important and had written an insane number of books, but I didn’t know that she was at the forefront of writing children’s books as we know them today.  Also, in these dark political times, it was refreshing to hear about all of the people in Margaret’s life who were working to educate women and find places for women in the greater society.

Many times, I would run over to my roommates and read passages out loud just because I had to share what I was learning.  Amy Gary really seemed to know her subject and wrote about her in such a way that made me feel like I was there with her, experiencing things as Margaret experienced them.

I picked up this book at Heartland Fall Forum because of its awesome cover (because, to be honest, I still very much decide what to read because of its cover) and decided to read it after I saw it on the February Indie Next List.

This is quite a short book but it took me forever to read, which is always a sign to me that I just couldn’t get into the book.  Looking back, I believe that I was too young for this book (which I don’t usually feel) because I didn’t feel connected to anything that was happening in the book.  Kitamura’s writing was nice but I found the story to be lacking.   I feel like there were a couple different plot lines that were set up and then never came to fruition.  I didn’t dislike this book but I also didn’t really enjoy it.  I’m pretty lukewarm on the whole situation.

This tiny little book has taken some time to digest.  It follows three different characters (or groups of characters) as they deal with grief and reading it post-election, for me, was a lot mentally.  While I am not experiencing the type of grief that the characters are talking about, my mind is lost and confused and it was nice to get lost in characters that are feeling similarly.  I have heard from some people that they were able to binge read this book in one sitting, which is what I was expecting to be able to do seeing as it is only 114 pages long.  But, in reality, this book took me a while to read.  I would have to put it down and absorb what was happening.  I needed to give myself time to sit and be with the poetic passages I had just read.  Poetry is not something that I read often so it took me longer to absorb and appreciate some of the passages in this book than it would have a book written all in prose.  All of that, though, is what made me really enjoy this book.  It made me stop and think and, when I read something for the third time and still didn’t really understand what was happening, it made me realize that the confusion and worry that I was feeling was exactly how I was supposed to be feeling.  Grief is not a feeling that makes sense.  It doesn’t fit into tiny, perfect boxes.

Porter creates some beautiful characters and, even when I knew that I mentally needed a break and needed to put the book down, I would read 10 pages more without even realizing it.  Going in, I was not expecting to really enjoy this book, but it was a delightful surprise.