Category: Blog

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA
By Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Knopf, 1988

Category: Adult Fiction

I read this over the Christmas holidays. I didn’t want to, really, but my friend Dawn has this Book Discussion Group and I like to hang out with the cool women who are in it. And since they won’t let me in unless I read the book, I put aside my piles of middle grade and young adult novels and my piles of research tomes and, for the first time in a long time, read an honest-to-goodness adult novel.

I read LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA fifteen years ago too, back when I had no husband and no children. It was astounding how differently I responded to the book this time around. The touching love story I remember was nowhere to be found; in its place I found a pitiful delusion. (I am referring to Florentino Ariza’s half-century of pining for Fermina Diaz here. And yes, I know that the delusion sort of-kind of worked out in the end. But still.) These reactions gave me a lot to think about: what I think about love and relationships … both now and when I was twenty-three.

Another reason I enjoy Dawn’s book group, by the way, is that they always pick books that have been made into movies. Once the book has been discussed, a field trip to the local theatre is planned. Someday soon, when we can find LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA at a second-run theatre, or can rent it, we will get together to watch the screen adaptation. I told you these women were cool!

MOKIE AND BIK
Written by Wendy Orr
Illustrated by Jonathan Bean
Henry Holt, 2007

Category: Elementary Fiction

I planned to tell you about MOKIE AND BIK today, even before I discovered that someone else had the same idea.

So I will send you instead to the blog of writer Linda Urban, where you can see why I simply had to buy the book in the first place.

And then I’ll send you to the blog of writer and poet Kelly Fineman, where you can read an in depth review of MOKIE AND BIK.

And I may as well say, since I had planned to anyway, that I found MOKIE AND BIK quite a fun book to read aloud, what with all the delicious made-up and mixed-up words. I read it to my three fiskies in one sitting: the wordplay kept my older two interested, and the wholly unexpected (and heretofore unimagined) drama of children living on a boat enchanted my younger.

Thanks for the tip, Linda. And thanks for doing the hard part, Kelly.

THE AURORA COUNTY ALL-STARS
By Deborah Wiles
Harcourt, 2007

Category: Middle-grade Fiction

I read and fell in love with EACH LITTLE BIRD THAT SINGS ages ago, and although I haven’t yet managed to read the first book in Wiles’s Aurora County trilogy (LOVE, RUBY LAVENDER), I couldn’t resist this third book when I saw it at the bookstore. The comfortable summer-day cover art, created by Marla Frazee, comes complete with slouchy baseball players and a pink tutu-sporting pug, the perfect combination for bridging the gender gap in my house. (The boys are nine and baseball is King. The girl is six and tutus—especially pink ones—are in.)

“Mr. Norwood Rhinehard Beauregard Boyd left behind a collection of black-and-white photographs, a library filled with musty books, and an ancient, pug-nosed, white dog named Eudora Welty. Later, when the long mystery that was Norwood Boyd unraveled and summer revealed its secrets, some folks would say it was the note that changed House’s life forever. Others would say it was the dog. But it was neither the note nor the dog.

It was the pageant.”

House Jackson wants no part of the dastardly pageant. First of all, he and his baseball team, the Aurora County All-Stars, have but one game a year: the fourth of July showdown with the Raleigh Redbugs. They can’t be dancing when they should be practicing! Secondly, the pageant is being directed by the one-and-only Frances Shotz … the girl who broke House’s pitching elbow last summer. Although House’s insights are occasionally mature beyond his years, I came to love him the same way I loved Comfort Snowberger in EACH LITTLE BIRD THAT SINGS, which is to say, completely. When his moment of truth comes, he steps into it boldly, becomes “more than he had been” and wins my heart.