Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

It’s official, folks–I finished my second-to-last Battle of the Books book (if only adults could be on teams, right?!). Last night I finished reading Spy School: The Graphic Novel, which my youngest daughter is going to POUNCE on as soon as I finish this review and make it available to her. (We’ve had the same two left for the last few weeks, and since we’re reading the one together, she’s especially antsy for the other one.) Normally I wouldn’t read the graphic novel version of a book that was originally published as a regular novel–at least, not before I read the regular version–but needs must. (I’ll have to see if the regular version is available in audio, but I probably want to wait a bit first; if the details are too fresh in my mind it’s going to feel awfully repetitive.)

At any rate. Spy School GN is a fast read with more popular appeal than serious depth; I’d hand it to a reluctant reader and/or almost any middle grader (except, perhaps, for my son, who isn’t much of a graphic novel fan). In it we have Ben Ripley getting picked to attend the CIA’s Academy of Espionage, albeit under somewhat different circumstances than he is lead to believe. Once there, he tumbles headlong into a jumble of training and real-life spy experiences, with Erica Hale (descendent of Nathan) as his mentor-of-sorts. He’s half bumbler, half walk-on success story, and the action moves swiftly. I had some trouble with the art–as in, I had trouble telling certain characters apart, which was not ideal–but overall Spy School GN is fun, action-packed, and accessible for a wide range of readers. Fluffy, but not romance fluffy, you know? It’s more like a potato chip–not much there from a nutritional standpoint, but a satisfying eating experience while it lasts.

We’ll see what my daughter thinks. In the meantime, I have to decide whether I want to continue with the graphic novels or go with the regular versions. Decisions, decisions…

Some people have the Super Bowl. I have the ALA Youth Media Awards Broadcast.

Seriously, though. I’ve been watching the whole broadcast for years now (instead of just tuning in for the Newberys at the end). And even though it just adds to the TBR pile/list that only gets longer (no matter how much I read), I love seeing what new and exciting books there are to enjoy. I put a few on hold today (that’s all I had space for on my library card) and was immensely pleased to realize that I already had this year’s Newbery medalist on hold. I’d read at least two other award winners and there were quite a few more on my radar, so that’s fun. If you’re reading this in early 2026, you can find the list of winners here; if it’s later than that, you probably just want to google the Youth Media Awards press kit/list of winners for 2026.

In the meantime, I did afternoon recess duty at the elementary school today, and between that and the broadcast, well–it’s a basics kind of day. We’ll see what tomorrow looks like!

Seriously, though. Kevin Henkes’ Still Sal was yet another book that I had a hard time reading because being in Sal’s head was painful. She’s still dealing with the upset of her little sister moving into her room (no more personal space!) when she finds out that she and her best friend are in different classes for first grade. Griffin has Ms. Flowers, who is young and has curly hair and red shoes like Sal; Sal has Ms. McCormick, who is not young and doesn’t do some of the fun things Griffin’s class does. Sal is a big, creative personality, and for a good three quarters of the book, she spins scenarios in her head about Ms. Flowers and herself. True, the book itself only covers a week or two, but I so wanted Sal to move past the Ms. Flowers thing sooner. I suspect, however, that Henkes’ target audience will relate; I also suspect that their empathy for Sal will be more practical than painful. There are more wonderful things about parenthood than I can count, but the sudden ability to hurt for a fictional child on two different levels is not always one of them.

In the meantime, it’s yet another crazy week. Last night was 9th grade course selection; tomorrow night is our PTA’s STEM Night; I think History Fair projects are due next week. I’m so ready for a week of no extra things!

I finished Shannon Hale’s (and LeUyen Pham’s) Friends Forever last night, and let me tell you what–it’s going to be a while before I read another graphic novel that focuses on the junior high experience. I don’t want to relive the wishing a boy would like me, the worrying about having someone to sit with, the uncertainty of the friendships–nope nope nope. Add that to Shannon’s undiagnosed anxiety and OCD, her awkward relationships with her siblings and parents, the mall Santa, and the talent agent–ugh. Friends Forever is moving and realistic and chockful of feels, but I’m 46. I’m done with most of those feelings, and I’d most definitely like to STAY done. (As for the feelings I’m not done with? I’m a parent of more than one child with anxiety, and I’d prefer to escape those worries when I read, not exacerbate them.)

Interestingly enough, Shannon’s parent and sibling relationships bugged me more in this third book as well. I really just wanted to be a fly on the wall so I could evaluate them myself, rather than only seeing them through Shannon’s point of view. (Of course, that’s very much the parent in me, so I doubt my girls will care.) Ultimately, this is a well done graphic novel that middle graders will likely appreciate–I just didn’t enjoy sharing Shannon Hale’s experiences. That isn’t a reflection on her, however, but a reflection on junior high itself.

Once was enough.

I was going to make an effort to finish a book today, friends, but instead, my fantastic neighbor called to say she was heading to the dump, and did we have anything to add to her load? So she and I loaded up the old bunk bed plus a bunch of trimmed branches from the pine tree, at which point I had to switch laundry and head to Costco. After Costco I could have read over lunch, only my 16-year-old missed her bus and so I picked her up and then had to head out to pick up my youngest, so I pretty much ate in the car (and, just a little bit, standing up in my kitchen). Once we got home I worked on dinner, went on my walk, and then finished making dinner and did dishes. And THEN I took my youngest to dance, dropped off a due library book, and did my Duolingo in the car outside the dance teacher’s house. Good times! When I got home I had clean sheets to put on my bed and the youngest to tuck in, and–you get the idea.

On the other hand, I’ve been trying use up some oatmeal (I ended up with extra), and since we’d already had oatmeal pancakes, I made this Brownie Baked Oatmeal for dinner last night. I didn’t make it vegan, because we’re not vegan and I wanted to use up actual milk anyway, but other than that I sort of followed the recipe. (By sort of I mean I left out the pecans, because I prefer my oldest alive, and I didn’t add coconut, because my youngest would have flat out revolted. Oh, and I made do with regular yogurt, because we didn’t have Greek.) It would have been great with coconut, but oh, well. As it was, it made for a pretty chocolatey dinner that was much healthier than you might have thought; if you want to feed your family oatmeal and some of them are picky about it, it’s worth making.

And now the exercise bike and then the shower are calling my name. Goodnight all!

I didn’t manage to post yesterday–it was our January PTA meeting, and that (plus conversations afterwards) absorbed most of the morning–but I did manage to finish reading Planet Omar: Incredible Rescue Mission aloud to my soon-to-be-11-year-old. It’s a fun series to read aloud, especially when your kiddo is right next to you enjoying the art (which runs the gamut from illustrations of the action to embellishments of single words to enhance the storytelling). It’s also a fun series, period–Omar and his friends and family are likable and entertaining, and their thought processes are appreciatable (yes, I know it’s not a word, but I’m over it) by kids and adults alike. (In different ways, of course. And clearly it’s a parentheses sort of day.)

In Incredible Rescue Mission, Omar and his friends are horrified to find their fantastic teacher replaced by a cranky sub, who says she’ll be their teacher for the rest of the year. Omar’s sure Mrs. Hutchinson has been abducted by aliens, and while one of his friends thinks that’s a crazy idea, they still decide to investigate the possibility. Only when Omar and his family take a trip to Pakistan for a relative’s wedding, that means their investigation is on hold–right?

Both my girlie and I could see the real solution to Mrs. Hutchinson’s disappearance, but in some ways that only added to the fun. The ‘Planet Omar’ books do a fantastic job of telling entertaining stories about a regular kid and his family, who just happen to be both British and Pakistani. We need more books for kids that focus on how much we have in common, no matter our ancestry. Yay for ‘Planet Omar’!

(Okay, that was totally cheesy and an unimpressive ending, but my family’s watching a sports thing five feet away, and concentrating has become a challenge. Bottom line? Try out the series–it’s totally worth your time.)

Years ago, when I was reading All Thirteen: The Incredible Cave Rescue of the Thai Boys’ Soccer Team aloud with my second girlie, she (and to a lesser extent my husband, who was in the room and–apparently–listening) begged me not to leave those boys in the cave while she went off to whichever church camp was coming up. We therefore read something like 90 pages in one night to finish it up (me butchering Thai names the whole way, I’m sure), which left my voice slightly the worse for wear. Now that girlie is 16, and while she still enjoys reading with me (which makes my heart happy), she’s as busy as only a junior in high school can be. We started reading Kate O’Shaughnessy’s The Wrong Way Home together months ago, but she’s been so busy she hasn’t felt up to reading in quite some time. I’m just grateful for Christmas break, because we both made the effort to read more than once while she was out of school, and on Monday night we staged another reading marathon to finish before the break was over. (She went back today, but last night she worked and had dance.) Some 70-odd pages later, we’re done with The Wrong Way Home, and if we do manage to start something else before the school year is over, it’s going to be much, much shorter–or perhaps a collection of short stories.

In the meantime, O’Shaughnessy’s novel makes for the third of 2025’s five Newberys that I’ve managed to finish before 2026’s get announced. (I suppose I could theoretically manage another one before the ALA Broadcast on the 26th, but that’s extremely unlikely to happen.) All three have been excellent but distinct from each other; The Wrong Way Home is contemporary, unlike most of Across So Many Seas, and the nature of Fern’s conflict is entirely different from Magnolia Wu’s. Fern’s mother has just taken Fern from the Ranch–an off-the-grid community in New York lead by the magnetic Dr. Ben, where they’ve lived for half of Fern’s life–across the country to Driftaway Beach, California, and Fern is horrified. How could her mother have taken them away from their home? She wants nothing so much as to get back to the Ranch and Dr. Ben, but since she doesn’t know its address or his last name, that’s going to be a difficult thing to manage. As she perseveres toward her goal, however, the outside world begins to seem not quite so awful of a place, and she begins to listen to what her mother is telling her about the ‘home’ they left behind. Is going back still truly what she wants?

I have to say, O’Shaughnessy does an impressive job with Fern’s painful journey from unquestioning belief to a broadening view of the world. The characters around her feel fully drawn and real and her dilemma emotionally fraught, which makes for a powerful (although frequently uncomfortable) read. The ending, however, is both compelling and satisfying; overall, The Wrong Way Home is an unforgettable reading experience.

You’ll have to tell me what you think of it.

In the meantime, the kiddos are back in school and I’ve run my errands and taken my walk for the day. I have PTA business tomorrow and Friday–I had it this morning as well–so wish me luck with my chores for the week!

I usually have fun with the ‘Baby-sitters Little Sister’ graphic novels, although they’re short and fast enough reads that I usually don’t bother reviewing them; I finished Karen’s Prize over the weekend, however, and parts of it annoyed me so much that I decided I needed at least a short post to review it.

Here’s the thing. It’s completely within Karen’s character to get carried away with winning a spelling bee and then practicing more to win more and getting even more carried away; she’s the kind of big personality that doesn’t necessarily realize when it’s crossing the line into obnoxious and/or show-offy behavior. (Which is pretty much the plot right there, so my brief summary is taken care of!) What seriously annoyed me were the multiple scenes in which Karen is downright rude and the adult(s) in the room look at her or each other with distressed/sad faces–and say NOTHING. Sure, there are instances where the behavior is riding the line and interfering might be problematic, but there is more than one instance where it’s over the line and the adults are looking all sad about it, like there’s somehow nothing to be done when a mild mention of being gracious or not being a sore winner hasn’t sufficed. She’s in second grade, and she’s got 4 parents plus a teacher. It’s squarely the fault of the adults in her life that her behavior gets so bad and goes on for so long.

My other, smaller beef is the unevenness of her friends’ behavior. They’re so loyal at the beginning, and while it makes sense that Karen’s continued obnoxiousness wears on them, the shift to upset is very unevenly portrayed. I’m honestly not sure how my youngest is going to feel about this one, but it was a highly frustrating read for me.

In the meantime, it’s the last day of Christmas break and three of my children have plans with friends, which is going to involve some chauffeuring on my part; my hope is that they’ll have fun and get worn out enough that they’ll sleep early and well tonight. Cross your fingers for me!

That’s the anniversary we hit yesterday, folks. My in-laws are out of town, so our kiddos weren’t staying with them, but we did go out to dinner! When we got home, I sat down at the puzzle table to work on it and ended up staying long enough to finish Save Me a Seat, by Sarah Weeks and Gina Varadarajan. It’s one of the few Battle of the Books titles left for my youngest and me to read, so she should be happy that I’m ready to pass it on.

I have to say, I do have some mixed feelings about it, although it was objectively quite a good book. I was certainly made fun of in elementary school, and I hate being laughed at–a trait more than one of my children shares with me. (My much-older brother also teased me quite a bit, which likely contributed to the problem.) I therefore don’t enjoy reading about kids being mean to other kids, and since Save Me a Seat involves both a bully and–for the first half of the book–a bully-ish attitude on Ravi’s part, I was dreading it. In fact, I’m not entirely sure I would have been able to push through it if I hadn’t discovered that the entire book occurs over the course of a week; the fact that none of it was drawn out helped a lot. I did just hurt for Joe, though–having a bully, Auditory Processing Disorder, AND somewhat clueless parents is a lot for a kid. By contrast, I wanted to smack Ravi for much of the first half of the book, because when your attitude is both arrogant and casually cruel, it’s hard for me to feel sympathy for you. Weeks and Varadarajan do a fantastic job of both making Ravi three-dimensional from the beginning and portraying his growth as a character, however, and so even when I wanted to smack him, I still (mostly) liked him. The unique hook of telling an intertwined story of two characters who don’t actually talk to each other until after the book ends is clever and provides interesting possibilities, but it does mean that despite a friendship between them being the clear destination of the story, that friendship isn’t a present character I can emotionally invest in. Overall, it really is quite a good book, and I’m grateful for the experience of reading it; on the other hand, I’m not sure it has a lot of re-read appeal for me.

Do with that what you will.

After an exhausting day yesterday, I should have been able to sleep in, right? Yeah, that’d be a no. I woke up at 5:30 and couldn’t manage to get back to sleep; after laying there, doing my daily word puzzles, looking a few things up on my phone, and remaining (most frustratingly) awake, I finally got up and settled down in my fluffy bathrobe to finish another graphic novel. (Okay, READ a graphic novel. I started it long enough ago and got so few pages into it, I ended up just restarting it.) I’ve been looking at my Goodreads list of books I started and then got distracted and never finished, and the second ‘Racc Pack’ novel–Prince and the Pawper–seemed both the shortest and the easiest to grab in the dark.

Thankfully, it was both a quick read and a fun one, in an elementary-school-fluff kind of way. The raccoon brothers (one of whom looks suspiciously like a possum) are back, this time agog at the news of a racoon being featured at a local Pet Expo. Determined to figure out how Prince the Raccoon has gotten humans to love him, they sneak in; the rest is indeed a retelling of The Prince and the Pauper. There’s more depth to this than your average cheesy graphic novel (although Raina Telgemeier it most certainly is not), so if you’ve got a reluctant reader who likes graphic novels but doesn’t want to engage with the more ‘coming of age’ type, this is a good pick. (Or if you’ve got a graphic novel-obsessed child who wants as many as she can get her hands on.)

Anyway. I did manage to doze back off for a while, but I’m not ruling out a possible afternoon nap today. In the meantime, I have errands to run, so I’ve got to go make myself presentable. Signing off!