Sick Day Reading on a Beautiful Day

Thursday, May 1 (rabbit rabbit rabbit).  Sunrise today was at 5:52, sunset will be at 8:22- Woo HOO; all that daylight!

P-Patch hens dust bathing in the warm dirt

It's going to be HOT today- amazing how quickly the weather changes around here.  It was cold last Thursday (see last post) and it may be a record breaker today, mid-80s!  Last Saturday I spent a couple of hours weeding out along the big rosemary bush at the edge of the house - you might remember that I mentioned that it had blossomed and I didn't see any bees in it.  Well, they found it!  You can hear the bees humming in and around it, honey and bumble, the branches bouncing when the bumbles leave one and move to another.  You know what was really cool?  Weeding and feeling bees fly into me, boomp, and then careening off back into the bushes.

What a week for books!  I had lunch with my friend Colleen, a rep for Penguin children's books, last Friday and she generously shared 4 new YA books with me.  I've wolfed down two of them, am halfway through the third and have the fourth on the bedside table.  On that Friday, a warm and sunny one, I was in the middle of Mink River, by Brian Doyle, and put it down for an hour (reading in a local bar) to dabble in Althea and Oliver, by Cristina Moracho.

And then, I woke up on Saturday with an awful sore throat and stayed home on Monday, sick, sick sick .  Ah, but I love being sick if I don't have to work.  Those long hours reading and sleeping, sweating and cooling, books, socks and kleenex discovered, pushed down to the foot of the bed, under the blankets.

Sick day books:

Reading Mink River on a ferry in a cloudbirst

Mink River is a book for adults, a song of a book, about a small Oregon coastal town and the people who live and love in it.  It isn't a book for hurrying through, you have to settle in with it, moving through it like the river moves between its banks to the ocean.  Like Ken Kesey and his Sometimes a Great Notion,  Mr. Doyle knows his Oregon landscape, weather and people.  I miss the people in this book already, and I am more homesick for Port Orford than I have been in a while.  The sequel, The Plover, is on my bedside table, too.  (Mink River: Oregon State University Press.  Plover: Macmillan.)

Pennyroyal Academy, by M. A. Larson, is more a middle grade novel than YA but it was great!  A fairy tale variation on the whole  princess theme, Pennyroyal Academy is a training school for young women (and one boy) who want to become Princesses, bold, courageous women (and, now, one boy) who battle dragons and witches.  Princess is not just a title at Pennyroyal, it is a way of life and a military role.  Those who become Princess are brave and strong, enduring months of training under a Fairy Drillsergeant. 

Evie, our hero, is a young woman with no memory, wrapped in a dress of spider webs, who has just escaped a witch and is heading toward Pennyroyal Academy accompanied by a young man who is off to become a knight. Her journey to Princess is athwart in horror and terror.

Great action, horrible jealousy, a little romance, Pennyroyal Academy will be a hit with the 10 and ups and moms who are really tired of the standard fairy princess world - if Paper Bag Princess, by Robert Munsch was in your stack of read alouds, this is the book for you.  (Pennyroyal Academy:  Penguin.  Available 10/14.  $16.99.) (Paper Bag Princess:  Available now.  $6.95.  Paperback.)

Probably not the cover! On my way to work after a sick day.

And the last book to keep me company on what was, from the window, anyway, an amazingly beautiful, warm and breezy day, was one I only just started before I faded into a very slightly feverish nap, Dove Arising, by Karen Bao.  You all know I love science fiction, real science fiction where you can believe that what is happening can happen and Dove Arising is one of these books.  The author is very young (I think Colleen said she was 17 when she started writing this book) and quite talented.  Dove Arising is the story of Phaet (pronounced Fate) Theta, a young gardener on the Moon, colonized by scientists to lower the chance of conflict due to religious controversy.  Phaet's family is broken up when her mother gets arrested and she joins the military to try and provide a better life for her siblings.  It's at that point she discovers that everything she thought she knew about her world is wrong.

Dove Arising was fun and thought provoking, filled with political machinations and really nasty people willing to hurt someone to get ahead.  It is fast-paced, humorous, and I loved the military training scenes a lot; I think this could be a great book for both sexes.  I am hoping there will be a sequel but it ends in such a way that it feels okay to wait.  (Dove Arising: Viking.  Due August 2014.  $17.99.)

It's going to be a good year for books if just these few titles are anything to go by. 

The Good Life? Simple Life? Hmmm...

Rene' and sister, Keeli, at G'pa and G'ma's

Sunrise was at 7:57, sunset at 4:33 pm.

Ugh- I hate not sleeping through the night, especially when I have to get up so early to go to work. 1:30 am wake-up call.  I just roll around remembering rep appointments that crept up, an upcoming interview, learning how to use more of the POS at the store, health issues, freezing weather and an uncovered daphne plant.  The daphne plant I could take care of RIGHT NOW, although it may have been too late. Thankfully, D can sleep through the light so I can read myself back to sleep. The hard part is finding something that won't make me want to keep reading until the alarm goes off.

The choice of the early morning read was Chickens in the Road, not a particularly good choice because it took two hours to finally realize that my eyelids were heavy enough to stay shut. One and a half hours later, the alarm goes off and I spring (well, in my head I spring) out of bed, grabbing CITR and my glasses and head off to grab coffee and a few more minutes with it before I hit the road for the bus and ferry rides that are nothing more than free reading time.

I have ALWAYS wanted to live on a farm.  We lived with my grandparents when I was very young.  A few acres filled with horses, rhubarb, tansy ragwort and summers full of canning jars, plastic jugs of drinking water (the well water had arsenic in it), feral cats, and running through the creek (crick if you are a Kirkpatrick from Spencer Creek) looking for frogs.  There were two barns, one for the horses and one for the tack, and electric fences buzzed in the night.  Grandma had grape arbors and a small vegetable garden.  We lived there for a few years until Mom could afford to move to town.

The effects of  "the house" (everyone in the clan knows that when you say "the house" you mean Grandma's little white house even though she's been gone a few years) have stayed with me all this time and I have only just, only this year, realized that I am way too old to actually leave my city ways and move to a farm and do all those farm things. That realization has made me kind of sad.  How could I suddenly be too old?

Thankfully, people actually DO make changes in their lives, at ages far earlier than 50-something, uprooting themselves and family and moving to the way outback to wrestle with chickens and snow, foxes and old orchards, learning to can beans without botulism and how to butcher a hog and then they WRITE about it!  Thank God for books and their writers! 

Chickens in the Road was great!  Suzanne McMinn was 42 and a popular romance writer, when she decided to move to West Virginia with her partner, 52, somewhere she could have chickens that could walk in the road.  Well, she got the chickens, and then goats, a cow, an uncooperative neighbor, snow, snow and more snow, and then mud, all mixed up with her children, an kind of odd partner (what was his problem?), and all the people who make up a rural community.

CITR is mostly a slice of life look at what it takes to live way out in the country.  She was lucky enough to have lived in West Virginia before, so she knew some people and had a safety net of sorts.  She'd done some canning and wasn't shy about asking for help, what she doesn't have is a very helpful partner or any real money.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, I learned a lot, it was entertaining, and there are recipes for the food and crafts she mentions in the back.  (HarperOne.  Available now.  Hardcover, $28.99.)

But, one book about living a sustainable life, about supporting yourself with what you make with your own two hands, just isn't enough and I happened to have a copy of Bootstrapper, by Mardi Jo Link, on the shelf, too. 

Mardi Jo's life starts to unravel after her marriage falls apart, leaving her deep in debt on a farm in northern Michigan.  Deciding to stick it out with her 3 boys, she faces foreclosure, a bad well, feral chickens, and wins a zucchini contest that keeps the family in bread.  Over the course of the year she eventually begins to dig herself out of the depression and the money pit she's found herself drowning in, finding joy and love in the mud and defrosted remains of their only meat, getting creative with her few resources.  Her boys are the real heroes, here, although she deserves a lot of credit for raising them.  They are strong and caring boys, able and careful, willing to go along with the idea of the farm. 

Very good, funny, but not overly rah-rah!  It's hard being a single mom with three kids and she doesn't slack on the pity parties.  She is realistic about how difficult this kind of life can be.  (Knopf.  Available now.  Hardcover, $24.95.)


My other favorite book about living on a farm is Farm City, by Novella Carpenter.  This one has been out for a while and I still sell it to the people on the island who are thinking about getting chickens and starting a garden.  Novella moved to Ghost City from the Seattle area, a rundown neighborhood near Oakland, and started a farm. She started with chickens and bees and eventually expanded it from her house and yard into the abandoned lot next door.  The pig might have been a breaking point for any other partner, but obviously, Novella chose the right one (partner, not pig.  Well, maybe the pig, too).  She decided that if she's going to eat meat, she needs to raise and then slaughter the pig.  Chasing around fancy restaurant dumpsters for leftovers to feed the pig is funny, learning what goes into getting a pig ready for food is fascinating.  The part about the effects of live animals on kids in the neighborhood is amazing and surprising.  Give it a try, you'll want a beehive next!  (Penguin Books.  Available now.  $16.00.) 

One of the best things about my job is that I get to open the "white box". My heart does a little leap, I get all excitable when I see it sitting next to my desk. In the white box are advanced reading copies from publishers, the books that aren't yet published, that they want us to know about. ABA (American Booksellers Association) member bookstores get these white boxes sent to them once a month and it's like a little birthday party every time.

One of the last boxes was opened in the presence of another children's bookseller, whose name is also Rene, and it was full of KID'S BOOKS! Books of all types are cool, but the YA box really thrills me- One of the best things in this box was a pink and white galley of Sarah Dessen's new book, Along for the Ride. I swooped in and pulled it out of the box, distracting Rene with clever dialogue about the other (almost as good as Sarah's) books that she might really enjoy. In my head, I was yelling, "MINE, MINE, MINE, MINE, MINE!"

Since then, many of us have shared the book and it is beginning to fray along the edges. I know there are at least two meal time mistakes coloring the pages and the cover is starting to curl. I love seeing how ARCs and bound manuscripts age as they get read and passed to the next person who would enjoy them. I often keep the ARCs I love up next to the finished copies of the book because all my memories of the story are in the reading copy.

I think Along for the Ride is Sarah Dessen's best book so far! She writes amazing stories about people who are just like us. Reading her books can let you see your life from the outside, giving you a little perspective on stuff.

She has written books about domestic abuse, teenage pregnancy, absent parents, crushes, pretty much everything you'd want to know about. In Along for the Ride, we meet Auden, her professor mother's perfect child, studious, serious, unable to sleep, wandering in the dark waiting for the next day to come and go. Auden decides to spend the summer away from her mother this year, going to live with her father, his young wife, and their new baby to see if she can separate herself from her regular, normal, life.

The moment Auden arrives in the little beach town, she begins to doubt whether this was a good idea. The baby won't stop screaming, her very young stepmother can't sleep and has no idea what to do, and her father is clueless about everything, putting his needs above all else. What is a girl to do? Well, Auden, being an insomniac and at loose ends, walks the streets of her little town all night, getting familiar with the locals, making a few friends, working at a little boutique, and getting to know Eli, another insomniac. Together, Eli and Auden prowl the town working away at their problems: Auden didn't have much of a childhood, she never learned to ride a bike, and Eli feels great guilt about the death of a friend.


Sarah's books have great characters and great plots, they deal with all kinds of relationships between teens and adults, they are funny and hopeful, and we can't recommend them highly enough. I would suggest a month's worth of Sarah Dessen books for this summer's reading. She has eight (nine?) or so books out, now, just enough to keep one occupied for a bit. Although you may want to whip through them all in a week you should savor them, read something else between, because she doesn't always write a book a year! She takes her time writing each one so it may be a while before the next comes in.

All of Sarah Dessen's books are published by Viking Books. Everything is in paperback now except for Along for the Ride which is $19.99. You adults out there who love a good story with great relationships will thoroughly enjoy Sarah's books. They make for very good Mother-Daughter book group fodder, lots of discussion points without the teenage angsty stuff that most adults seem unable to deal with.