Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

It’s seriously been a week, folks. Starting with my two teenagers leaving all their bathroom stuff in Clearfield after staying over last Sunday night (including prescriptions, retainers, and braces elastics), DESPITE my pointing out to them that mid-Memorial Day, when no cousins were over and nothing much was going on, would be a good time to pack that stuff up–yeah, I was frustrated. We had our four day last-week-of-school, including random PTA things, a birthday party, and 5th grade graduation (not a huge deal, but still a thing), and then last weekend my oldest babysat and ended up having a really rough weekend, a hailstorm necessitated bailing water out of the girls’ bedroom’s window well, and my hubby and I taught Sunday School. Yesterday I drove my odd-numbered children all over creation to all the things–I’m pretty sure I had at least three bouts of home-for-20-minutes-only-to-leave-again–which brings us to today. There are still errands, but (thankfully!) fewer of them.

In the meantime, I finished I Funny: A Middle School Story–by James Patterson and Chris Grabenstein–yesterday, and sadly, I was unimpressed. I know I’m not the target audience, but I read a great deal of middle grade fiction. Middle grade can (and frequently does) inspire an incredible range of emotions; at its best, it’s full of depth, feels, and awesomeness. (Can you tell my kids are home for the summer and my concentration for this review is a bit off?) I Funny, by contrast, was full of a LOT of jokes, a Roald Dahl sort of family, and some very notable gaps. It isn’t fair to give away key plot points, but multiple key bits of relationship development between Jamie and multiple other people were just–missing. As in, wait. How did we get HERE? And whoa, how did a whole bunch of people switch from one distinct emotion to another completely different and distinct emotion without any actual cause? Add to that the contrast between, on the one hand, the tone of the book and Jamie’s character and, on the other hand, Jamie’s backstory, and you get a book that makes wild and nonsensical leaps from one emotional place to another. Now–to be fair–I can see more than a few middle school boys accepting those leaps and enjoying the book; once again, it’s full of jokes, the underdog triumphs (although with less effort than a good underdog movie portrays), and that age group often finds emotions baffling anyway. That said, however, there are better books out there. My son says he’s interested, so I’ll let you know what he thinks, but I’d stick to interested or reluctant readers for this one.*

*To give credit where it’s due, however, I did really enjoy Jamie’s constantly changing back-of-his-wheelchair bumper stickers.