Monday Books - Books for Everyone

              Visit Jen at Teach MentorTexts and Kellee and Ricki at UnleashingReaders to discover books you'll love!        tweet #IMWAYR

      Be sure to check out my 2nd post today with a terrific giveaway!

for adults

             I read this for my book group. It is a favorite of one of the group, and she insisted that all of us had to read it. I'm so glad she did. It is a book about life, about cooking (with recipes!), a memoir of a time that in her twenties, a brain aneurysm almost killed her. She didn't die, and that isn't giving anything away, but she learned to live a different way because of her illness. I imagine we can all learn from her and imagine that many of you will love her story. In the midst of recovery, here is one part of the learning she shared, about a phrase we have all heard, perhaps lived by: "'What would you do if you could do anything?' wasn't it at all. Instead, I should have been asking myself something else all along: 'What would you do if you could do nothing?' That, for me, for a lot of us, I imagine, was the real question." And finally, there is more to the title "Stir" than cooking. Look for it!

                                                             for young adults

            Thanks to NetGalley for the arc. It's a chance auto breakdown that keeps high school valedictorian Lance from a weekend with friends and without parents. He's been waiting for this time with girlfriend Miriam for a long time. It's days before graduation, Lance has a full scholarship to Oregon State University to study Business, but he still auditioned for a music school in Seattle. If he dumps his car, Lance can return home in time to party with his girlfriend, but the old Buick is all Lance has left from his dad who left a while ago. It's teenage growing up, thrown into a strange rural area of drinkers at the only local bar in town, and from which he gets this new nickname, "Wildman". There was lots of drinking, lots of crazy in the bar and in a wooded area as well as in the odd places the car ended up being repaired. Yes, there was more than one. It ends up the way you might guess, Lance takes that "other" path, keeps the car, rejects his girl for another. He's become someone new, and so far, someone he likes. I suspect more than one teen about to leap away into life from high school will like this.

        When I was in high school many years ago, I came to the band room for practice only to find an empty chair in the room and people crying. One of the band members had died in a car wreck the night before. He was older, was not a friend, but he was the first young person connected to me to die in a tragic way. I still remember that time, how the shock of it colored the rest of our year together. This book connects me to that time, and although my tragedy was not the shock of someone committing murder or being murdered, it has stayed part of my life.
       Allan Wolf based this story on his own experience, and although fiction, he has intertwined the memories into a wonder of a fiction story. We meet Christopher Goodman, the teen who is killed, a nice boy who dresses a bit different, is always polite, sometimes interesting, and plays the trombone. And we meet the others who tell the story, hearing it bit by bit from each one, boys and girls, young people talking quite a lot about themselves as they relate to the others, pure teendom. It's poignant and thoughtful, a story that may have teens and all of us who read it question how what we say and do affects our lives. Sometimes that's a good thing, and sometimes it is not. I enjoyed it very much. 

Picture Books for A Variety of Ages

          Although there are many picture books I love, I can't own them all, but this is one that I had to own. It's simply wonderful, as some of you have already shared. I will not tell too much of this story, want you to experience it yourself if you haven’t already. It, with the illustrations, is one to savor again and again. It’s historical, it’s loving, and while it holds great tension, it ends just right. 

            Another bear book to love, this time a young one and an even younger one,  sister or brother and sister or brother?  The poetic text simply shows all the wonderful places they can “be” and together. It will make a book of support for a graduate, but also a read aloud for writing favorite places to be by young writers. love “We have places to be tall” and “places to be small”. Liwska’s illustrations are softly loving watercolors, fitting the words beautifully.

Next: I finished March, Book Three from my "Must Read List" late tonight, will review next week. I'm choosing My Name Is Maria Isabel, an older book by Alma Flor Ida next, and will get to another one I'm sure.  

Here is the link for the Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards if you haven't already seen it.