We have fallen a bit behind in the Mr. Lemoncello series but enjoyed a little catching up by listening to Mr Lemoncello’s Great Library Race over the last couple of weeks. Non-fiction! Research! Private jets! Bookmobiles that speed you around town while you look for clues! Such a fun series.
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Every now and then, for years, TW has asked me if there are any more Seraphina books.. I dutifully look, even though there just never are any… and suddenly, there was! It’s not really a Seraphina book, but it’s a book about one of Seraphina’s sister. Turns out, Tess of the Road is the 2018 Cybils YA Speculative Fiction winner.
We listened to it on audio, as we did the Seraphina books, and liked it a lot, maybe more than I liked the Seraphina books. I hope there’s a sequel.
When JMP came for Grandma Camp, way back in January, I checked out some audiobooks to listen to in the car… he wasn’t at all interested, to put it mildly, but TW and I enjoyed listening to Everything on a Waffle. It was a little grim but definitely fun to listen to.
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JMP is trying to figure out this whole reading thing. It doesn’t come naturally to him and he is easily frustrated so… The Grandmas are on a mission to make reading fun and that led to me reading three children’s books last weekend.
Hi! Fly Guy, we listened to on audio as we drove from Kingsland, GA to pick up Momal at the JAX airport. It was quick and fun. I think I’ll grab a couple of these in print – they seem to be pretty easy to read and if we can get hooked on a series, that’s half the battle.
If You Take a Mouse to the Movies – we have a free version that came from a kids meal many years ago and I thought it would be fun to read and then do some activities based on the book or that were natural extensions from the book. Natural extensions are what “if this then that” is all about right? It was fun and I spent the weekend asking Pippin what happens if you do X.
Because it’s Christmas season and we’d been involved in Christmas ornament making and Christmas decorating because that’s what happens if you take a mouse to the movies… we listened to an audio version of The Gingerbread Man, which Pippin had already listened to in school, while making some Christmas ornaments so that we could think about baking cookies. (Turns out Pippin had never had gingerbread so we changed our cookie plans to gingerbread cookie plans.) It was a fine version but I found myself wishing I’d chosen differently and read one of our many print versions to him. No big deal, maybe I’ll pull out a bunch of versions and we’ll have a Gingerbread Man/Boy/Baby marathon and compare the differences and similarities another time (maybe when we read a House is a House for Me and build gingerbread houses.)
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It’s been a long time since we listened to a #1 Ladies Detective Agency book. Our darn library has significantly reduced the number of audiobooks available (even on digital versions) so I was pretty pleased to see that one of their new e-Book services had The House of Unexpected Sisters. It was fun to listen to, mostly on our drive to WDW, and I enjoyed it a lot more than I have some of the other books recently published in the series.
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We did it… we finished an Overdrive audiobook before it was viciously yanked from my account by the library’s annoying rule about NO renewals of Overdrive books. Hmph. Anyway, we listened to To Die But Once and yippee, Maisie Dobbs.
In the (very long) epilogue I started feeling some anxiety about how Maisie Dobbs and Maggie Hope are crossing streams. I keep picturing Maisie as the woman in the Maggie Hope books who oversees the Prime Minister’s special project, (what is her name? It isn’t Maisie Dobbs, that’s for sure.)… and the picture just doesn’t work. I might have to just be very careful not to read the two series really close together. (Big problem since there’s a Maggie Hope book waiting for us at the library and because I’m about to reserve the next Maisie Dobbs. Ugh.)
Woot, we finished an audiobook! Right after we finished the last audiobook, which was MONTHS ago (or at the very least, weeks ago) I didn’t have another one waiting for us so I just grabbed something we hadn’t read that also looked like we wouldn’t hate it.
So, I ended up with Young Jane Young.
I didn’t hate it but didn’t love it. I liked parts of it quite a bit. I did not like the “choose your own adventure” section at the end. TW apparently didn’t enjoy the book at all.
I have absolutely no idea how When, (on audio!), landed in my library bag. It doesn’t seem to be a Cybil from any recent year that I was just now getting to. It’s not queer YA. I just, I have no idea. Anyway. It was different. Maddie has a “talent/gift/curse/?” that I haven’t seen in a book before. (Or in real life, thank goodness.)
I liked most of the characters. I didn’t love the ending, though. How her talent/gift/curse/? evolved into something different there at the end when she talked to Aiden at the end (when it never had before?) … that made no sense. We could have done without that. Blah.
We listened to The Girl Who Drank the Moon on audio and I thought it was going to be a walk in the park. Some cute little creation type story about witches and swamp monsters and dragons. And it was all of that. It was also a cautionary tale about adoption, among other things.
I enjoyed it and think part of that is because I listened to the audio rather than reading the print version.
(Interestingly, I thought this was a Cybil but it’s not — it’s a Newberry. I wonder why it didn’t make it the Cybils. Odd. Seems very Cybil-like.)
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We listened to Marriage of a Thousand Lies on audio. The first few minutes of the book were pretty darn depressing. Turns out the whole thing is pretty darn depressing but it’s also pretty darn good.
We don’t get a lot of decent lesbian literary fiction. We get lesbian chick lit, or lesbian erotica, or lesbian poetry, or token lesbian characters in mainstream fiction, and a ton of GAY fiction of all types, and we’re event seeing more trans fiction of all types. But literary lesbian fiction? GOOD literary lesbian fiction? Sooooo rare. Marriage of a Thousand Lies is worth reading for that reason alone. But prepare yourself for the depressing, frustrating, and not at all happy ending.
I very much hope SJ Sindu writes more books. I’ll read them.
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