Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

Once upon a time, I used to read nonfiction written for adults. Sometimes it took me a long time, true, but somewhere between graduating from high school and having children, my love of history blossomed into the realization that well written nonfiction is nothing like reading a textbook, and so I started to read a much wider variety of book than I did when I was growing up. I even read some after my first child–or two, even?–was born. At my current stage in life, however, I find I lack the concentration (partly because of my chronic lack of sleep, no doubt) to do much reading of adult nonfiction, which is why I’m so grateful that good middle grade nonfiction exists. The best of it is fascinating and well researched while being a much more manageable literary bite, so to speak. And since my son’s Battle of the Books year introduced me to the ‘History Smashers’ series, today I get to review Kate Messner’s History Smashers: Plagues and Pandemics, having finished it on Wednesday.

As author Candace Fleming says in her cover blurb, the History Smasher series is “fun, fast history for kids who want the truth”; there are occasional comic panels, humorous illustrations, and media from the time period, and they’re full of fascinating facts. (Did you know that according to WHO estimates, 1.5 million people died of tuberculosis in 2018? ) In Plagues and Pandemics, Messner covers the Black Death, Smallpox, Cholera, TB, and polio–among others–and finishes up talking about new microbes, the dangers of the anti-vaccination movement, and simple things even kids can do to keep harmful diseases from spreading. (She also debunks the prevalence of plague doctors dressing up in “elaborate outfits that made them look like they couldn’t quite decide what they wanted to be for Halloween–the Grim Reaper or a weird, creepy seagull.” Which made me laugh out loud.)

I’m honestly sad that my younger children didn’t want to read this one, but I can’t say I’m surprised–they inherited their dad’s squeamish genes as opposed to my ghoulish ones. I’m hoping, however, that they’ll be interested in other books in the series; in the meantime, if you have middle graders, take a look at the series yourself. Pick whichever one you or your children is most interested in–and enjoy!

On the homefront, I took my youngest to see her friend (and that friend’s siblings) in a ballet production of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ last night, so tonight I packed her off to bed early. I have hopes of focusing on my garage tomorrow, although finding out that my daughter is taking the ACT not at Taylorsville High School, where she goes, but WEST High–at 7:55 am, no less!–may put a damper on what we accomplish. Have a great weekend, folks!

Clearly I mixed up my days, friends, because I posted yesterday, only today is Wednesday. Summer is hard, you know? And I’ve been chipping away at projects every day, which is a good thing but also distracting. Since I’ve done two reviews for the week already, however, I’ll leave you to your Wednesday. Good luck with all of your projects!

I’ve branched out a bit in my ‘audiobooks I don’t have to fully concentrate on because I’ve read the book already’ category–which exists because there are plenty of chores that take too much concentration for a first-time book experience–and for the last week or so that means I’ve been listening to books by Elizabeth Enright. She wrote lovely books for children from the 30s up through the 60s, and while the Melendy Quartet is thoroughly enjoyable, my favorite is probably the captivating Gone-Away Lake (not to mention its satisfying sequel, Return to Gone-Away). Imagine that, while on your usual summer visit to your cousins, you discovered a deserted lakeside resort community, complete with charming sibling residents and houses full of relics from a bygone era. Wouldn’t it feel like your own secret world? That’s what it feels like to Portia and her cousin Julian, anyway, and for a long time they keep it a secret. Eventually, however, their two worlds collide, and the results are better than either one of them could have imagined. I’m interested to see how my youngest likes it–my parents’ time didn’t seem so hard to imagine for me, but her grandparents’ time might be quite a different story for her–but I can’t help feeling like any child who’s dreamed of a secret hideaway could still be enchanted by this one.

On the household front, I worked on my kitchen and dining room today, focusing on my dining room table, but it wasn’t nearly the project that cleaning out the fridge was yesterday. (That took me an hour and 45 minutes, with two of my children helping for part of the time!) I’m going to have to tackle some stacks of paper tomorrow, and my food storage room is calling my name, but what matters is that I’ve gotten a decent start on my ‘clean and organize my house this summer’ goal, and that is an incredibly good thing. Wish me luck keeping it up!

I missed Friday, I know. Summer with the kiddos home (or at places they need schlepping to) is complicated, okay? But last night I finished listening to Alan Gratz’s Ban This Book, and let me tell you what–it was fantastic. Amy Anne is a lovely character who has trouble speaking up; even when she discovers that her favorite book (From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler) has been removed from her elementary school library’s shelves and goes to the school board meeting at her librarian’s request, she can’t bring herself to stand up and give the speech she worked over so painstakingly. Her parents buy her her very own copy, and she supposes that’s the (unhappy) end of it. When other kids in her class start talking about some of the other books on the removed list, however, Amy Anne lends her new copy to one of them and borrows a copy of a different book that she wants to read for the first time–which somehow leads to Amy Anne running a secret ‘banned books library’ out of her locker. More books start appearing on the ‘remove’ list, however, and when Amy Anne is given a second chance to speak up, she’s determined to do it.

I loved Amy Anne’s mantra, given to her by her school librarian–“Nobody has the right to tell you what books you can and can’t read except your parents.” My parents had no idea what was in some of the books I was reading in junior high, but they instilled enough principles in me that I eventually started to be more discriminating in what I chose; I rarely tell my own children they can’t read something. (I do tell them things like ‘Let’s talk about what’s in that one before/after you read it’, or ‘I don’t think you’ll actually like that one, but it’s up to you’, or ‘I think that one’s written for older readers–it might embarrass you at this stage of your life.’) I occasionally read books and return them to the library without passing them on, but my attitude there runs along the lines of ‘if they find this one on their own, whatever, but I’m not going to put it into their hands myself.’ (Because it’s my job as a parent to feed them real food, so to speak–they’ll find enough junk food on their own.) As long as, say, Fifty Shades of Grey doesn’t end up in my kids’ school libraries, I’m pretty anti-censorship.

I also loved, however, that the so-called villain of the piece isn’t vilified in the end–Amy Anne herself comes to see her as a good but misguided person, and the way she deals with her at the end is masterful. Amy Anne’s parents sometimes drive me crazy–I have strong opinions about treating kids fairly–but they ultimately come through for her in a big way. And while there’s a serious PTA accounting no-no in the last third of the book, it works out nicely for the plot, so I’m not inclined to quibble. (The accountant-by-profession state PTA treasurer most certainly would, though.)

At the end of the day, you should absolutely read Ban This Book. And while I didn’t actually like all the books on the removed list–you may recall my scathing review of Harriet the Spy–you could read those too, if you wanted.

I’M certainly not going to stop you.

I can’t even remember when I started reading Shiny Misfits–suffice it to say that it was quite some time ago and I was definitely looking for a graphic novel to gift one of my girls at the time. I must have found a better option, however, because I got not-very-far into it before stalling and setting it aside. Last week, in an effort to pare down my ‘currently reading’ list on Goodreads, I picked it up again, and I finished it Monday night while waiting for my hubby to come to bed.

I was unimpressed.

So here’s the thing. The premise for Misfits has a LOT going on–Bay Ann is a vegetarian (or possibly vegan) main character of color (Middle Eastern, I think?) with cerebral palsy whose parents are divorced. She wins her school talent show with her dance routine (she can’t do stairs easily but CAN tap dance, apparently), but the boy she either hates or has a crush on–her attitude towards him was too inconsistent for me to make sense of–ends up in the spotlight instead. And since Bay Ann is obsessed with going viral (pretty much to the exclusion of all else), she now must find a way to beat him.

I did start out rooting for Bay Ann; she wants to be seen for her talents, not her disability, and I respect that. By the time I was 2/3 of the way through the book, however, I was over her. Her obsession with going viral is so unbelievably unhealthy that her parents’ failure to address the situation is disturbing, and her increasing brattiness towards those parents is only exceeded by her callous and cavalier treatment of her two loyal best friends. By the time she has her epiphany and starts trying to atone, I found it hard to care.

To be fair, that epiphany is a solid one–complete with a grand gesture–but she’d already lost me by then; I was glad but no longer significantly invested. Add to that a mother who is either an on-the-spectrum tiger mother or a caricature, a father who sleeps on the couch in his own house for reasons that aren’t ever fully explained, and a teacher whose disengagement, while hilarious, is unavoidably terrifying, and there just isn’t enough character authenticity for me to emotionally engage with (or be invested in) the story. I suppose I’ll pass it on and see what my 11-year-old thinks, but I wouldn’t rush out to get this one.

On the home front, I may finally have to make the major Walmart run I’ve been avoiding. May the odds be ever in my favor…

This morning–the first official morning of summer vacation–my 16-year-old had to be at the high school at 6 AM for Dance Company’s ‘beginning of summer hike’. And because she doesn’t like to be late (among–ahem!–other reasons), I’ve been up since 5:30. (In case you’re wondering, the high school is a max of 15 minutes away.) On the other hand, since I was definitively too awake to go back to sleep when I got home after dropping her off, I had a quiet hour (plus) to myself in which to work on my puzzle and finish listening to Katherine Center’s The Bright Side of Disaster, one of her earliest novels. (It was first published the year my oldest was born, which tracks with the use of 411 and the phone book.) And while I love Katherine Center–she’s funny, she brings the feels, and her characters are beautifully relatable–I have to confess that this one drove me a little crazy.

First, the premise–we have very pregnant Jenny, whose live-in almost husband is clearly a loser; when he takes off at around the 25% point, my only complaint was that he hung around that long. She (of course) goes into labor the next day, and a decent chunk of the novel is taken up with the all-encompassing life change that is first-time motherhood–the sleep deprivation, the rocky road to breast-feeding successfully, and sheer terror of OH NO I’M RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS BABY. Jenny’s parenting choices don’t always make her life easier, but then, who knows what I would have done in her place; I had a husband who loved (loves) kids with me from day 1. (And don’t get me wrong, she’s a careful and loving mother–she’s just more willing to leap to attention and be a bit of a human pacifier than I was.) Eventually, through the haze, she starts having more frequent run-ins with her nice guy neighbor, and (after many conversations, not to mention dinners together while he’s painting her garage), they finally have a fantastic first date just before the loser shows up again. How she deals with him for the next hour of the audiobook is what REALLY drove me crazy, because there were some definite bad choices there. (TALK, Jenny. He claimed to actually want to talk when he first came back, and if you’d talked then, you might have spared all of us the majority of the loser reprise.) Ultimately, of course, she comes to her senses, but by then, is her chance with her neighbor gone forever?

I mean, of course not, but still. How that works out is pretty good, but not as satisfying as in her subsequent books. (Her subsequent books also have fewer f-bombs, which I appreciate.) There’s some unevenness with Jenny’s female friends in this one as well, so that while Bright Side is definitely not a waste of your time, I wouldn’t necessarily rush to put it at the top of your reading list.

In the meantime, my nephew who’s just home from his mission spoke in church on Sunday, and my oldest got set apart as a missionary, so she’s official! I hope all your weekends were lovely…

Yeah, I know, I missed yesterday. But it was my youngest’s last day of elementary school, and therefore MY last day of being an elementary school parent. They did a clap out for parents at the school, and then some of the parents hosted a ‘Peace out 5th Grade’ party at a nearby park; I spent a bit of time there, but I also had to pick up our PTA check from Twisted Sugar and hit the bank with our treasurer one last time. My son’s last day of junior high also meant his very last day of piano lessons, for which I picked him up from an end of school party. My oldest had her last day as an elementary school para, and my second oldest is now a senior.

How did all of this happen?

First of all, I do apologize for the two missed posts. Since Thursday, however, here’s how my week has gone:

Thursday afternoon: Popsicles with our new principal. I was at the school from 4:25 until just after 7.

Friday: Volunteer appreciation breakfast. I had to have a breakfast casserole baked and at the school before 9, not to mention collecting all of the necessary paper products from the closet, and my oldest threw up half the night, so I also had to take my youngest to school and then go back and get her the backpack she forgot. Piano lessons in the afternoon.

Saturday: Family chores and activities (I’m the slavedriver), Costco run, and my niece’s high school graduation open house in Layton.

Sunday: My daughter’s farewell talk in church and brunch afterwards. By the time we’d cleaned up the church pavilion and gotten everything back inside our house, it was after 1, and we had stragglers at the house until after 3. We had lots of support, we felt loved–and we were tired.

Monday: Left for Clearfield family graves slightly after 8 and were in Clearfield all day. Hustled the kids out the door to be home by 7:30-ish since it was a school night.

Yesterday: Kitchen recovery, washing of bedding because it’s too warm for our winter comforter, and kindergarten graduation. Made chicken for dinner.

Today so Far: Fourth load of wash in the washer, third in the dryer, dishwasher again full of clean dishes. Dinner in the crockpot, errands at two libraries and the grocery store/pharmacy completed, lunch mostly consumed. Not bad for 1:15, right?

Now. My oldest daughter got a free copy of Gennifer Choldenko’s The Tenth Mistake of Hank Hooperman in her prize bag after her team won the 5th grade Battle of the Books competition. She’s been wanting me to read it ever since finishing it herself, and since my not-much-of-a-reader son gave it 10 stars, I moved it up my list. (I actually had a copy checked out from the library when she won hers.) I listened to much of the last third of it Saturday night, including while shaving my legs in the shower, and oh, I cried! After getting past the crisis point I went to bed and finished it up on Sunday night, but as I’ve said, life has been a bit busy for a review until today.

Hank Hooperman and his little sister, Boo, have been waiting for days for their mother to come home when their landlord threatens eviction. Worried about making a mistake but trying to pick the best of a handful of bad options, Hank uses their mother’s bus pass to get the two of them to the house of a woman listed as emergency contact on some of their paperwork; from there, the changes start to snowball. A temporary school, new friends, their own social workers, friendly neighbors, and the ever-present question of where they’re going to end up keeps Hank’s mind spinning. Can he avoid making any serious mistakes so that he and Boo can stay together, find their mom, and be a family again?

Seriously, folks–ALL the feels. (Including a fair bit of anger towards Hank and Boo’s mother.) You will root for Hank until the very last page, and then hug your family more tightly than usual before bed. DO NOT miss this one.

That, my friends, is what I appear to have. The funny thing is that it’s an individual sort of virus. A stuffy nose–a very stuffy nose–and a lot of dripping and some sneezing at the outset, and now, while I’m still stuffy, I’m also exhausted. I feel like I could take naps all the livelong day, and yet when I try to go to bed at night, nothing seems to make it easier for my to breathe through my nose. Ugh! And of course I have PTA stuff tomorrow and Friday, as well as my oldest daughter’s mission farewell and gathering on Sunday. It just appears to be that kind of week, I guess.

(Which is why, incidentally, we’re having cornbread and a smoothie tonight. I just wanted easy.)

I was really hoping to escape the cold that appears to be moving through my house, but no such luck–it got me. Which is why, instead of going to bed early last night, I sat and finished a puzzle and listened to my audiobook while my nose dripped and dripped and dripped; when I finally did go to bed, falling asleep was still hard because I couldn’t breathe through my nose. Which (again) is why a)I’m extra tired today and b)I was able to finish listening to Katherine Center’s The Love Haters this morning. (I got through quite a chunk of it when I was, you know, not sleeping last night.) And while I would vastly prefer NOT to be taking cold medicine every four hours and keeping Kleenex in business, I am glad to have finished Love Haters before its due date. It always stinks when you have to wait for an audiobook to cycle through other people’s holds before you can finish it.

Katherine Center, in a lot of ways, does for contemporary romances what Julia Quinn does for regencies; both combine witty banter with solid stories in ways that make their books compulsively readable. (Julia Quinn is spicier than I’d prefer while Center does drop the occasional F-Bomb, but they both have completely likable characters, and nowadays that is not exactly a given.) In Love Haters, for example, Center gives us Katie, whose already fraught relationship with her body turns positively antagonistic when her musician boyfriend gets famous and internet trolls start taking shots at her. She can’t swim and doesn’t even own a swimsuit, but when her company starts an extremely aggressive series of layoffs, she avoids mentioning that in order to get an assignment in Florida that might just save her job. Enter Hutch, the Coast Guard rescue swimmer starring in the recruiting video she’s filming, and his dog George Bailey, who falls in love with Katie at first sight. (You read that right, by the way–the dog is definitely the first character in the book to fall in love.) With the help of splinters, more than one phobia, and a hurricane, the right people end up together and personal growth is achieved, which is a nice thing to vicariously experience when you’re mouth-breathingly miserable. If you need an enjoyable read in your life right now, you should definitely give this one a try.

In other news, we’ve been planning my daughter’s farewell brunch, which is this Sunday, so cross your fingers that we’ll all be more or less well by then…