Book Talk

The big snowstorm was a big flop, giving us quite a lot of rain and very little snow.  Still, we enjoyed the unexpected time off of work and school.  I used some of my free time to read this year's Newberry award winner, The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate, a "story of friendship, bravery, and a courageous fight for freedom."  Ivan is a Silverback Gorilla who has lived for twenty-seven years in a small "attraction" featuring him and Stella, his elephant friend, and several smaller animals.  He tells us his story -- how he came to realize that he needed to find a home and how he made that happen.  The book cover and the online trailer portray the book as being quite sad, and it certainly is in parts.  But I appreciated the more positive side of the tale, that "It's never too late to be what you might have been."  It's that positive message, as well as the unusual use of a gorilla as the narrator, that makes this such a suitable book for middle schoolers.

Tonight Paul and I finished John Dowd's Hogsty Reef, our pre-bedtime read-aloud for the past couple of weeks.   Set in the Turks & Caicos islands, the part-ecology, part-crime solver story intrigued us both with it's many references to sailing, snorkeling, diving, and reefs, all set in an area where we had actually been snorkeling.  We were sorry to see it end and may have to get a copy of his other "eco-adventure," Abalone Summer.

 I had to get up in the middle of the night last night to finish Iain Lawrence's griping Dickens-like story The Convicts.   This fast-moving tale of Tom, a young boy in London in the early 19th century, was not really pleasant to read since it vividly described the plight of poor urchin boys during that grim period of history.  But it certainly was a page-turner, and at about 4:00 a.m. I turned the last page, vowing not to start the sequel until the summer when I had more time to be "captured by a book."  But this afternoon I looked for the sequel at school only to find that someone had checked it out, and by 9:00 this evening I had bought it for my Kindle.  I'm still hoping to hold off downloading it for a while since I really need to catch up on my sleep!