Deb Nance
I've always been curious about what life was like for people living behind what we used to call the Iron Curtain. Who better to take me there than master historical fiction author Ruta Sepetys? Romania in 1989? It's a place I'd never want to go. Power outages. Food shortages. Waiting in lines for basic necessities. Lies from the government. And—probably the most disturbing—being watched constantly by those around you for any violations of government rules (and there were many).
Reading this book makes me appreciate the simple pleasures of my life—a canned drink, a snack—as well as the things we take for granted—consistent electricity, freedom to come and go as I like.
Ruta Sepetys is a thorough researcher who has the ability to put me into a setting vastly different from my own.
Shahrzad learns about a king who lost his beloved wife and child and turned vindictive, making laws that would cause all his people to become as unhappy as he was.
Shahrzad goes to the king and tells him stories—perhaps ten, perhaps a hundred and one, perhaps a thousand and one—and the king listens to the stories and the king thinks about the stories and, slowly, the king starts to see himself and his kingdom and his people differently.
This is an intriguing new version of Tales from 1001 Nights that confirms readers' deepest beliefs: stories can change the world.
Dat is in a new school in a new place and everyone around him speaks gibberish, but Dat does not. He feels all alone until, suddenly, a person appeared on the playground with him. They couldn't really talk together at first, but they could play. School is hard without knowing gibberish, and the school bus ride is lonely until the person appears again and begins to teach Dat words. And pretty soon Dat and Julie are friends and are filled with words to share together.
This story felt so fresh and new and I loved the way Julie boldly befriended Dat and how that friendship benefited them both. The illustrations beautifully carry the parts of the story that are hard to communicate in words.
Ah, we have Hannah. Surprisingly, though she's quite a small person, she works as an Executive Protection Agent, a fancy phrase for a bodyguard. And who is she set to protect? Jack Stapleton. Yes, that's The Jack Stapleton. Actor. Movie star. Drop-dead gorgeous. Jack's being stalked, and it's Hannah's job to watch over him. But Jack doesn't want to upset his mom who is sick, so Hannah must pretend to be Jack's girlfriend. Even though, as she's been told over and over, she's ordinary, and no one will believe it of her.
A few possible spoilers below. You have been warned...
Oh, the lovely snappy talk between Hannah and Jack. That's a delight. But it's more than just the rom-com elements and the setting on a real Texas ranch and the glow a movie star brings to a story. It's Hannah as a bit of a superhero. Hannah's told she's just a regular girl, nothing special, and, in a way, that's the truth. But she is also extraordinary in some wonderful ways, and it's Jack who helps her discover that.
And, goodness, who was expecting great life wisdom in a rom-com? It's there, trust me, and it's lovely.
Let me conclude with a thank you to the author for the scene with Hannah and the cows. In fact, a thank you to the author for the whole book. I needed it.
Really liked this quote:
“You can't make people love you. But you can give the love you long for out to the world. You can be the love you wish you had. That's the way to be okay. Because giving love to other people is a way of giving it to yourself.”
And this one:
“And, in the end, do you ever truly know for sure if you're lovable?
What a question.
You don't. You can't. Of course not.
Life never hands out the answers like that.
But maybe that's not even the right question.
Maybe love isn't a judgment you render—but a chance you take. Maybe it's something you choose to do—over and over.
For yourself. And for everyone else.
Because love isn't like fame. It's not something other people bestow on you. It's not something that comes from outside.
Love is something you do.
Love is something you generate.
And loving other people really does turn out, in the end, to be a genuine way of loving yourself.”
Llewellyn doesn't like to feel sad or angry or embarrassed or lonely, and he comes up with a plan to deal with his feelings: he hides his feelings in a jar and puts them away so he won't be bothered with them.
It isn't long before he finds that he needs to hide not only the bad feelings, but also he has to hide feelings of excitement and joy, too.
And then he has no more room for jars...
A lovely little story that offers help in sorting out feelings for kids...and, maybe, for grownups, too. And who among us couldn't use a little more of that these days?
A coup takes place, and the president of Mexico, the hope of the country, is executed. Petra Luna's father is conscripted into the Mexican military, the federales, shortly after Petra's mother dies in childbirth. Petra makes a promise to her father that she would take care of her younger brother and sister and her grandmother, and this is a promise she intends to keep. Then the federales sweep into her village and destroy her town, and Petra must lead her family to safety.
This book, based on the true story of the author's great-grandmother, is a story of danger and courage, of adventure and terror, and I kept reading along, and reading along, curious and fearful to find out what happens next.
I'm looking forward to the sequel to the story, The Other Side of the River, set to be published in September.
The Great War has ended and France is worn and weary. The return of the Tour de France is proposed, and many get on board with the idea. It's a true Tour de France; the route takes bicyclists all around the border of France. Many roads and even complete towns have been destroyed in the war, and the bicyclists are not well prepared for the long race, but the 1919 Tour de France provides an opportunity for the French people to rally around their favorite riders and to celebrate France.
We first meet Nana as the lead in an operetta at the Théâtre des Variétés. Everyone in Paris is talking about her, and we see right away that though Nana cannot act or sing, there is something about Nana that draws men to her. In every case, the men drawn to her lose everything in their attempts to keep her for themselves. As the novel continues, Nana goes from being a street prostitute to a high-priced call girl supported by rich men, by men of position and power. But Nana is easily bored, and she runs through the money of a man and discards him. Eventually she brings many men to ruin, and she ends up dying a horrible death.
Nana, like many women I have known, depends on her beauty and sex appeal to get along in life. She treats people like objects to be bought and thrown away; Nana is truly an awful human being.
I can't say I enjoyed reading this book. I was happiest reading the last pages in which Nana's corpse is gruesomely described, and even then I couldn't really take satisfaction in seeing a terrible end for this woman who was treated so badly as a child and as a young woman and who was never really loved for herself.
Nana is a picture of a world I have never visited before, a world I would rather not visit again, a world I wish did not exist.
“Some Americans want to visit France. Some want to live in France. I want to be French.”
William Alexander, in his late 50s, decides to become fluent in French. He tries every strategy he's seen or heard about, and he researches new strategies and tries them, too.
In the end, he learns some French, but he's far from fluent. Still, he has progressed and he has hope that he will continue to progress.
And all is told in delightful ways that made this old French learner smile.
A bit of my takeaway from the book:
“When I want to say something in French, I think of what I want to say in English and then convert that into French. But such translation, I'd previously been told by David Birdsong, is self-limiting. You must remove the mental middleman of translation, for your brain cannot translate back and forth fast enough to keep up with a conversation. To achieve fluency, you need to speak—and think—like a bilingual, to switch languages, not translate between them.”
“(N)ot only does the ability to acquire a second language become greatly diminished after adolescence, but the degradation continues linearly. That is, with each year, each decade, that I didn't get around to learning French, the goalposts have moved further away.”
And my favorite:
‘Where do I go from here? Even if I want to continue pursuing French—and I'm not at all sure that I do—I don't know how much more time and money I'm willing to devote to this Sisyphean task. I figure that I've spent 900 hours—nearly double the 480 hours that the Foreign Service Institute estimates is required to achieve basic conversational ability—studying French. And that's not counting the hundreds of hours spent watching French movies and television and listening to French radio, not casually, but actively, trying to decipher what I was hearing. What else could I have done with those hours? Well, in just the first forty I could've built that garden shed I've needed for years. Then I could've finally gotten around to reading Proust. Tutored a struggling local student. I could have learned golf! There is a golf course right across the street from me. That's what older guys do, not French. Why didn't I use the time to learn golf instead? As proof that God has a sense of humor (as well as a peerless sense of timing), I'd returned from France to find the current issue of the New Yorker opened to an essay by Larry David, of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm fame. Reflecting on his failure to achieve even mediocrity in golf despite half a lifetime of trying, he writes that he has finally come to accept that “I was never going to be good. Never. Think what I could've done with all that time. Learned French.”'
Georges Perec liked to try things in his writing. Experiments. Could he write a novel without the letter “e,” for example? Could he make a memoir consisting only of sentences that begin “I remember,” he wondered? How about a 1200-word palidrome?
An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris is another of Perec's experiments. He spent three days at Place Saint-Sulpice recording everything he saw—buses, people, pigeons, and more—and the result is this little fifty-ish page book. Perec was in search of the “infraordinary,” which he defined as “what happens when nothing happens.”
I'd say he found it.
So, is this a book you need to read? Barbara, who complained last night at book club at the slowness of The Wind in the Willows? Barbara should skip this one. But if you are like me and get an odd sense of pleasure from quirky books? Yep, spend the seven bucks on a used copy somewhere and take a close look at this one.
Sam and Sadie become friends when they are just kids and Sam is in the hospital for one of his many surgeries after a terrible car accident. Gaming is what they have in common, and so together they game. As time goes on, Sadie decides to program games, and Sam is on board to help her.
Sam and Sadie have several rifts and drift apart, but they gradually resolve their issues and become friends again. And always there is the game design to bring them together...
I loved Sam and Sadie and all the other characters in this book, characters that are delightful and yet also deeply flawed, and I loved the beautiful storytelling, with intricate twists and turns in the plot. And the games are an added bonus, games that sound like they are as much fun playing as it is to read a good book.
P.S. Just so you know, I'm not a gamer and I know nothing about gaming or game design, but that took nothing away from my enjoyment of this great read.
“A Lazy Genius is a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't.”
There you go.
That's the heart of this book. The philosophy behind The Lazy Genius Kitchen reminds me of my pediatrician who told me, “You as mom know your child best. Trust your gut.” That's what this book does: this book encourages us as cooks, at whatever skill level we fall, to trust our gut when it comes to knowing what we like to eat, to knowing how much trouble we want to go to in our cooking, to knowing what things we need in our kitchen to get the desired result. This book is a confidence builder, and it relies on doing a few simple things to clear out the clutter that has accumulated in our cooking brains from all the other books we've read and shows we've watched and advice we have been given.
Well worth the couple of hours I spent with this little book.
Marie Curie discovered several new elements including radium, and the uses for the new elements helped the world. She was first in her class when she graduated from the Sorbonne with a degree in physics, and she later earned a second degree from the prestigious institution. She was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize, and she became the first person to win two Nobel Prizes. She was the first female professor at the Sorbonne.
In second grade (which I only attended for six weeks), my teacher came up with projects for me to keep me busy, and one kind of project I did was to do research. One of my first subjects for research was a report on Marie Curie. Since then I've always had a fondness for this amazing scientist.
Piglette wants to make the perfect birthday surprise for Madame Paradee, so he arranges with the owner of a post patisserie in Paris to bake the most amazing cake anyone has ever seen. When Piglette presents her cake to Madame Paradee, things do not turn out as planned, and Piglette learns that instead of trying to make things simply perfect it is sometimes better to make things perfectly simple.
The sister of Marcel, the night watchman, vanished fifty years ago in the Musée du Louvre, and Marcel suspects that his sister found a way to disappear into a painting.
Cecile works as a docent at the Louvre, but she is dissatisfied with her job.
Marcel enlists Cecile to help him find his missing sister.
There are also cats who change back and forth into humans and one of the cats is intent on killing a small white cat. There's a painting restorer who is drawn into the story of the missing sister and talking paintings and even a strangely philosophical spider.
A completely original story with a large number of characters who are not very happy living on earth.
Hugo the pigeon is a park warden who cares for a park in Paris and the people who visit it. There is one set of windows that never opens, and Hugo tries and tries to get the Somebody who lives there to come out and play. One day Hugo gets hurt and Somebody emerges from her apartment to save Hugo's life and nurse Hugo back to life.
A child begs his parents for a cat, and they finally relent after he makes promises to care for it and to read for twenty minutes every day. The cat, Max, turns out to tear up things and seems unfriendly, and the family is on the verge of returning him to the animal shelter when the boy decides to follow through on his promises and read, this time to the cat. And the cat responds to the reading by calming down and cuddling up to the boy.
A completely satisfying tale.
Lalouche was a postman in Paris until he was put out of a job by new technology. He decided to try boxing to support himself, despite his small size, and the other, bigger, more experienced boxers were startled to find themselves losing to this small man who was nimble and speed and strength on his side. Despite his series of wins, Lalouche found his way back to the post office when the new technology did not work out, and he managed to find an apartment with an amazing view of the city.
A beautifully illustrated fictional story.
Journalist Joseph Rouletabille, along with his friend Sainclair (narrator of the tale), is sent to investigate an attack on a young woman, Mathilde Stangerson, daughter of the owner, at the Château du Glandier. Oddly, Stangerson was attacked with the doors locked on the inside. So who did it?
One of the 1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up.
Read for Paris in July 2022.
Joan Blakely's charmed life as the daughter of a super-model and a high-end artist came to an end when her father died during 9/11. She impulsively married Casey and went to work in a museum to dull the pain of the loss. When Casey announced he was leaving her to be with his five-year-old twins he fathered with an assistant at work, Joan took off for Paris to hand-deliver a work of art. And then the art went missing...
A tiny better than the cover might lead you to believe.
