Category: Reviews

Book Review: Kira-Kira

On By cherylmahoneyIn Historical Fiction, Reviews, Young Adult1 Comment

Continuing the pattern of last year, I’m making a good run through the Newbery winners.  I picked Kira-Kira by Cynthia Kadohata in part because it also serves my diversity challenge, centering on a Japanese-American family living in Georgia in the 1950s.  There was some exploration of that dynamic…but it was also the most unrelentingly depressing Newbery I’ve read yet!

The narrator is Katie Takeshima, but the story really centers around her beloved older sister Lynn.  Lynn is brilliant, loving, a force in the family and full of dreams for her future.  You can already see where this is going, can’t you?  Lynn is one of those too good to live characters, and sure enough—as the book goes on Lynn is vaguely and sporadically ill…then less sporadically…then fatally.

I don’t like stories about children dying.  I’m just going to put that out there, and admit that this makes it harder for me to judge if this was a good story about a child (well, teenager) dying.  I especially hate stories about children dying in slow, lingering ways, which this definitely was.  I love The Bridge to Terabithia, but that’s not a book about death—it’s a book that contains a death.  Kira-Kira is largely focused on Lynn’s slow decline and death, and how Katie handles it. Continue reading “Book Review: Kira-Kira” →

Book Review: The Girl from Everywhere

On By cherylmahoneyIn Fantasy, ReviewsLeave a comment

I love a good premise.  I love good characters, but I usually pick up books because something in the premise grabs me—so how could I resist The Girl from Everywhere by Heidi Heilig?  It’s a fantasy of traveling to anywhere a map records—in the present or the past, real or imagined.

For sixteen-year-old Nix, this is normal.  She’s lived her whole life aboard her father’s sailing ship, as he sails them into history.  But he’s on a quest to the one place he can’t seem to reach: Hawaii, 1868, the time and place when Nix was born—and her mother died.  Her father hopes to find the perfect map to change the past, while Nix fears what that will mean for her life—and even for her existence.

The book takes us through several times and places, and while I almost always wind up wanting more with this kind of premise, I liked the places we got to visit and how well they were brought to life.  The magic is fascinating, especially as more rules and details emerge around just how this fantastical travel works.

From the good premise the torch was picked up by good characters.  Nix is likable and tough with vulnerabilities she keeps carefully hidden.  She’s cautious about commitments, sometimes impulsive, and struggles with complicated choices, sometimes making questionable ones.  She’s also smart and creative and game for adventure. Continue reading “Book Review: The Girl from Everywhere” →

Book Review: Remembering Lucy Maud Montgomery

On By cherylmahoneyIn Reviews1 Comment

I kicked off my L. M. Montgomery-related reading challenge this year with a book that’s sat on my shelf unread for a while (I love when challenges get me to read unread books I own!): Remembering Lucy Maud Montgomery, edited by Alexandra Heilbron.

I’ve seen it said elsewhere that Montgomery’s novels reflect the sunnier side of her personality (with their pastoral scenes, romances and happy endings), while her journal was her grumble book for her darker pains and worries (especially in the last few years).  This book tries to fill in a third side, the face people around her knew.  It’s a series of interviews with people who knew her, about what they remember.

This book is a brilliant idea that came thirty years too late.  Montgomery died in 1942, and the book was published in 2001, nearly 60 years later.  Since Montgomery was herself in her sixties when she died, simple math and the human lifespan indicates that people interviewed must have been much, much younger than she was.

Despite that, the book starts out relatively strong, interviewing relatives who, though children at the time, seem to have some genuine insights into who she was and how she related to their family.  One fun note, among the relatives’ interviews and elsewhere, is that she routinely talked to herself, while she was plotting out stories and shaping dialogue.  She mentions in her journal that she thinks stories out before writing them down, but doesn’t describe speaking them aloud.  The best relatives’ interviews are from a series of nieces and nephews, though there was one from her granddaughter, who had surprisingly little to add. Continue reading “Book Review: Remembering Lucy Maud Montgomery” →

Book Review: Mansfield Park

On By cherylmahoneyIn Historical Fiction, Reviews1 Comment

I recently reread (via audiobook) Mansfield Park by Jane Austen, one of my favorite Austen novels–although it rather surprises me that it is a favorite!  As sometimes happens, rereading gave me a few more insights.

Our heroine is Fanny Price, a penniless child taken in by her wealthy aunt and uncle, Sir and Lady Bertram at Mansfield Park.  She grows up beside her cousins, becoming particularly close with Edmund.  As all the young people reach adulthood, Austen takes us through courtships and scandals of the Bertram family and their possibly questionable friends Mr. and Miss Crawford.

It’s a bit difficult to summarize Austen, because it’s not really a plot-driven book.  I freely admit that Mansfield Park meanders–or perhaps I should say it strolls along a country lane.  The book is a long series of incidents of family life, all of which last longer than they would in a modern novel and often only vaguely build upon each other.  And yet–it’s just such a pleasant read!  I like an exciting story too, but sometimes a country stroll is very appealing. Continue reading “Book Review: Mansfield Park” →

Book Review: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion

On By cherylmahoneyIn Reviews1 Comment

Most of the books I read now I pick up on reserve at the library, but I love it when I just stumble on a really good book.  I was at the library a few weeks ago and had nothing to fill the nonfiction slot in my regular reading.  So I looked up Gretchen Rubin’s Better Than Before (a favorite) in the online card catalog, then went to that shelf to see what else I could find there.  And so I found Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion.  A book exploring why we end up on opposite sides of the political spectrum?  Yes, please!

And it was fascinating.  Haidt brings together psychology and sociology to look at how morality works, and how different people and groups can have very different concepts of what is right and wrong.  He expands on a few major premises:

A) Different groups around the world have strikingly different moral systems.  Much of this comes down to whether morality is based purely on whether an action causes harm or not (it’s almost never just that).  Everyone agrees it’s wrong to hurt others, but after that there’s divergences in whether something can be wrong, and for everyone, even if it causes no direct harm. Continue reading “Book Review: The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion” →