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Comments Off on Finally! Finally!
The weather has turned, folks! There was SNOW yesterday–not that it stuck here, but it sure did in other places–after most of last week being in the 70s. (Which is insulting in October, in my opinion.) It’s brisk and gorgeous and wonderful and I LOVE IT.
In other news, I don’t really know WHAT happened on the 21st, but I didn’t post yesterday because after speaking in church and enjoying the company of a RI friend who currently lives in Utah County, I still had all my exercising to do after the kiddos went to bed. By the time I was done with that, my brain was switched off for the night; on the other hand, I finished reading Laurel Snyder’s Seven Stories Up to my 13-year-old before she went to bed, and so I figured I’d just review it today. It was–different–than I was expecting. I didn’t realize that my girlie is not a huge fan of the ‘finding yourself back in time’ plot until we’d already started it (I brought it to Virginia and we started it there, so she couldn’t really ask for other options). By the time we got back to Utah she was invested enough to finish it with me, however, and so together we followed Annie’s journey back in time.
The setting was really quite interesting–a fancy hotel in the late 30s, where Molly (Annie’s grandmother) is just a girl and locked away by herself on doctor’s orders. (She’s an asthmatic who suffered a bad bout of influenza a year or two previously, and hey, the medical practices of the 1930s.) Molly’s loneliness is the catalyst for an adventure that changes hearts and alters lives, but what if Annie can’t get back home to her own life?
I quite liked this book–it was completely enjoyable–and yet I didn’t actually LOVE it. Perhaps the problem was the length; I would have enjoyed a longer, more fleshed out story because history is my happy place, and yet the length and the briskness of the pace probably works better for the book’s intended audience. This is younger middle grade, definitely, and yet it touches on enough historical topics that it has real value for that audience. I guess what I’m saying is don’t expect an immersive experience, but do expect an enjoyable story?
Hmmm. Let me know what YOU think.