Juvenile
Book 53 of 52: From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg
Hello from the shiny new version of Book a Week with Jen! Do you like it? I do. Since I’m going to keep the site going into the new year, it was time to make it look decent (and functional on mobile). I’ve also added a subscription option, so you can get an email the second a new post drops. I hope you sign up! To celebrate this new look, I come with an old book, but a classic: From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg. It’s about Claudia and Jamie Kincaid, siblings who run away from their home in Greenwich, Conn. to live in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. By using their savings (including winnings from card games Jamie cheated on), and doing things like sleeping in one of the museum beds, and bathing in a now gone fountain from…
Book 45 of 52: Hoot by Carl Hiassen
Another boat, another Carl Hiassen book. Hiassen’s Stormy Weather was book five in this series, from alllllll the way back in January. I snapped a picture of it from the back of a boat speeding off to Dry Tortugas National Park. In that review, I mentioned that Hiassen’s work was ripe for a TV series or movie, especially since he hadn’t had that many. One was a 2006 movie version of his 2002 middle grade novel Hoot. It starred a lot famous people, including Brie Larson, Luke Wilson and…Jimmy Buffett, but wasn’t well received. Hopefully the upcoming Apple TV+ series Bad Monkey, starring Vince Vaughn and Ashley Nicole Black, will fare better. So when I saw a copy of Hoot in a Little Free Library, I figured why not, and took it with me on vacation. That picture is from Miller’s Ferry to Put-in-Bay, Ohio (when I got on the boat, I…
Book 38 of 52: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
As I’ve mentioned before, I have a subscription to Libro.fm, which lets listeners buy audiobooks through an independent bookstore. With a subscription, I pay a monthly fee for one audiobook a month (plus I get discounts on additional audiobooks should I choose to buy more). Generally, one a month enough for me, but in July I found myself with a week between finishing a book and my new credit going live. So I turned to the Libby app, which I access for free through my library, and decided why not: I’ll give The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis a whirl. If I read any of the Chronicles of Narnia as a child, I don’t remember. As a four hour audiobook, it didn’t seem like a huge investment of time. And…eh? It was fine. Maybe I wasn’t in the mood for a Christian allegory, especially not right…
Book 19 of 52: Gone Crazy in Alabama by Rita Williams-Garcia
After reading Rita Williams-Garcia’s One Crazy Summer last year, and the sequel P.S. Be Eleven for book 7 of 52 this year, of course I was going to read Gone Crazy in Alabama, the third book in the trilogy about sisters Delphine, Vonetta and Fern and their adventures in Brooklyn, Oakland and Alabama in the late 1960s. In this book, they spend the summer in Alabama with their grandmother, Big Ma, who previously lived with them in Brooklyn after their mother left and moved to Oakland (hence the previous Oakland trip). After their father re-married, she moved back to Alabama to live with her mother, Ma Charles. They in turn live across the creek from Miss Trotter, Ma Charles’ half sister, and the two are trapped in a bitter feud. Why? The book goes into all that of course – along with the usual “city girls in the country” doing things…
Book 15 of 52: Wishtree by Katherine Applegate
As I wrote last time, I picked book 14 of 52 because I wanted a book small enough to fit in my bag during a trip to New York City. I picked Wishtree by Katherine Applegate for book 15 of 52, also for convenience: as a member of Libro.fm, I get one credit for one audiobook per month. I had four days until my next credit went live. What to listen to until then? Wishtree is about three hours long, and available for free as an audiobook through my library. And thus I found another great title because it happened to be the right book at the right time. Wishtree is a middle grade book about a tree (and birds and skunks and spiders) that can talk. This isn’t relevant at first because they don’t talk to people, but the fact that it’s a wish tree is. I thought this was made…
Book 7 of 52: P.S. Be Eleven by Rita Williams-Garcia
In 2014, Slate ran a piece about how adults shouldn’t read young adult fiction. The subhead said that readers who do should be “embarrassed when what you’re reading is written for children.” I know that writers don’t always chose their headlines or subheads, but the writer dug in deep in the text of the piece, chastising “fellow grownups” that “at the risk of sounding snobbish and joyless or old, we are better than this.” Well, yes, she sure did sound like all of those things! I’ve linked to the piece but am not naming the writer because she got the backlash she deserved for shaming other people’s reading habits (and she’s reporting now, not writing commentary, which is probably a good thing for all parties involved). I don’t read a lot of YA or middle grade books, but I read a lot, and I’m not going to exclude something that…