Growing up, reading aloud was what my family did together. Maybe some during the day when we were little, but always every evening after supper. Whoever was assigned to be the dishwasher of the evening could dictate the book, and everyone else would gather around to listen, doing crafts or artwork to keep the hands busy while the ears listened. After I went to bed, if I had nightmares, I would creep halfway down the stairs to listen to the comforting sound of my father’s voice, reading aloud to my mother. Though I know they read more, in my mind’s ear, it was always either Hornblower or the Dragonriders of Pern. As a family, though, the series we read over and over again were Swallows and Amazons, the Chronicles of Narnia, and the Lord of the Rings. The last, early enough that I experienced a brief burst in popularity with my fourth-grade classmates, when our teacher read Fellowship aloud to us and I was the only one who knew what happened next. Those memories are why I felt compelled to read this book.
The Reading Promise by Alice Ozma This memoir comes from a young woman who made a promise with her father at about age 9: they would read together every night. At first, they planned to read for 100 nights, but as they reached that goal, they aimed for 1000 and then kept right on going. They read through Alice Ozma’s mother leaving, through her late high school drama evenings and her father’s larangytis, right through until she left for college. Alice Ozma (named, of course, for her father’s favorite storybook heroines) narrates the story. I’d heard a lot about this book, and was slightly disappointed that it spent more time talking about what was going on around the reading than discussing the books they read. There are quotes from the books heading the chapters, and a bibliography at the end, but this is more memoir than reading reflection. It’s enjoyable as a memoir, but I want you, Dear Reader, to be more prepared than I was for the actual content of this book. Ozma paints a glowing portrait of her father, so dedicated to reading to children that he would hide her in a sleeping bag under his desk at work if she claimed to be sick, so that he could still read to his classes at the school library where he worked. More heartbreaking was his early retirement, when his school board decided that library time should be mostly about learning to use computers, with not more than five to ten minutes spent being read to. I wish for every child to have as dedicated a read-toer as Ozma’s father.
Originally posted at http://library-mama.dreamwidth.org .
Five Little Peppers and How They Grew by Margaret Sidney. Read by Bernadette Dunne This book, published in 1881, is a Victorian Sweet Family Struggles through Hard Times novel. (Little Women, featuring a family with older children, was published in 1868.) The Peppers are a family of six. Mrs. Pepper, or Mamsie, is a widow struggling to support her five children with her needlework. As hard as she works, it’s only ever enough to put bread in their mouths, never enough to send them to school. Ben, the oldest at twelve, also works outside the home to bring in some extra cash, while Polly, probably eleven, manages the house, doing the cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the three younger children, Davie, Joel and little Phronsie, the baby at three years old. Despite their poverty, the little brown house in which they live is filled with love and laughter. They have little adventures around things like trying to bake a birthday cake for Mamsie, though they can’t afford white flour, getting measles, and trying to celebrate Christmas with gifts. One or the other of the girls getting lost is a recurring theme, resolved by the little girl being found by a rich man of some variety. In the first incident, little Phronsie is kidnapped by an itinerant organ grinder, left behind in the country, and rescued by thirteen-year-old Jasper King and his dog Prince. This develops into a family friendship that leads to first Polly and then the whole Pepper family moving into the King family mansion. I counted this plot device happening three times over the course of the book, and it’s not really a life message I want my children to absorb – just get lost and find a rich stranger who will rescue you and improve your lot in life. I also found the relentless sentimentality of the writing style to be a bit much. Never a child is mentioned to be doing something but the hand doing it is described as being a chubby little hand, even when the owner of the hand is eleven or twelve. I found that the narrator’s style exaggerated this with her reading style, so that it might not be so cloying if someone else were reading it. However, I was still able to enjoy it, even as the plot got increasingly improbable. When LB gets old enough not to want to hold hands in public, he might not enjoy this series so much. For right now, I’ll enjoy both holding hands and his excitement at finding out that we can get sequels from 
Homemade Soda by Andrew Schloss Once upon a time, my love and I made a batch of ginger ale from scratch for a party, following a 
The Dragon of Cripple Creek by Troy HowellWhy shouldn’t there be dragons in the Wild West? After all, the west had gold and mountains, both good dragon factors. That’s the premise this book is built on. It’s set, though, in the present time. Katlin, aka Kalamity Kat, is crazy about gold. Her family is driving cross country for a new job for her father, leaving her mother behind, comatose in a nursing home. They might be broke, but that doesn’t stop Kat from begging until they stop for a tour at the Mollie Kathleen mine for a tour. There, she falls behind, gets lost, and discovers Ye, an ancient and ailing dragon hiding in the bottom of the mine with his considerable hoard. He’s friendly and eloquent and mostly convinces her to leave the gold behind, as deceased dragons turn into gold. This scene, where he tells her what he needs to regain his health, made my son cry when I told it to him as a bedtime story. Naturally, though, the one little lump of gold that she couldn’t quite part with falls out in front of media cameras when she finds her way out. This leads to a storm threatening to become another gold rush, with lots of pressure on Katlin to reveal the location of the gold in the supposedly played-out mine. In order to protect Ye, Katlin will have to confess the truth to her big brother and gain his support for her plan. There’s a lot of fast action, sadly only a couple of scenes with the dragon, and a whole lot of thinking about ethics. That makes this both fun and surprisingly deep for a book with a premise as light-hearted as dragons in the Wild West.
Smile by Raina Telgemeier. Smile is the true story of a girl navigating middle and high school with the dreaded braces. Already somewhat insecure, Raina is horrified when two of her front teeth get knocked out. The solution is oral surgery, braces, and even headgear at night. How can she even have a chance at looking cool? Along the way, she deals with band, an earthquake, starts to get interested in boys, and navigates the decidedly treacherous waters of friendship. Though it’s solidly set in San Francisco in the early 1990s, anyone who’s experienced middle or high school will find common ground with Raina. Here, the graphic novel format really helped the setting stay in the background while the characters stood out. This is a disarmingly honest story of a journey from insecurity to self-discovery, with braces. It is well deserving of its recent Eisner award. 
The Uncertain Places by Lisa Goldstein This book comes with great recommendations – blurbs by de Lint, Beagle, Le Guin, and more. It’s the 1970s in Berkley, a great time to be in college. Our narrator Will’s best friend Ben brings Will to his girlfriend’s house with him. The Feierabend family – Maddie and her sisters Livvy and Rose – live with their mother, Sylvia, in a crazy house with large and stylistically incompatible sections added on to each other. Will and Livvy fall in love, and only after things are serious between them does Will realize that the strange things that happen in and around the house are real and dangerous. A long-ago Feierabend made a bargain with the Fae – eternal prosperity for the family in exchange for seven years of the life of a daughter in each generation. The Faerie here are definitely the ambiguous, untrustworthy kind, neither all good nor all bad. When Livvy falls asleep and can’t be woken up, Will is the only one willing to do whatever it takes to get her back, even if it means confronting the Queen of Faerie. That could be the end of a satisfying story right there, but, like Into the Woods, it goes on from there. Does Livvy’s family really want to end the curse? How does one partner rescuing another change the dynamic of their relationship? How much are people willing to do for Luck, and is it worth having? I found myself looking for my parents in Will and Livvy, a young couple in college in close to the same era, which was an extra level of interest for me. But there is plenty to recommend the book without that hook, with familiar plot elements twisted together into something new, unexpected, both beautiful and frightening. 
Odd and the Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman. Read by the author. Let us now praise Neil Gaiman, for not only can he write well for adults and for children, for the page and for the screen, but he is also an excellent book narrator. In this short tale, only two discs long, we meet our hero, young Odd. He’s a young Viking lad, lame in one leg, with a dead father, a Scottish mother, and an overbearing, somewhat abusive stepfather. When, one year, winter doesn’t end and tempers in his little house begin to fray, he runs away to the woods. There he meets a sly fox, a slow but friendly bear, and a somewhat fierce eagle. During the night with them in his father’s old woodcutting hut, he hears them talk and learns that they are gods, trapped in animal form and exiled by the Frost Giants to Midgard. Odd decides that it’s up to him to get the gods back to Asgard and the Frost Giants out, which will both save the gods and stop the endless winter. The Norse mythology is solid, Odd an engaging and scrappy hero, and the interactions between the gods priceless. The print version, which I haven’t looked at, is illustrated by Brett Helquist, so there are delights to be had in either version. 
Starcrossed by Elizabeth C. Bunce We first meet our main character as she is running for her life. She’s wounded, and her partner in crime was left behind. She has the letters they were being paid to steal, in a language she can identify but not read. Soon she has found a new place as a lady’s maid for Lady Merista Nemair, a young noblewoman about to have her coming-of-age ceremony in a remote mountain estate. Even here, though, she is not safe. An old friend of Merista’s father appears and, knowing Celyn’s past, blackmails her in digging up dark secrets about the Nemair. Of course there are plenty, secrets that would have sweet Merista burned before the Inquisition and her parents up for treason. Celyn/Digger’s previous life has taught her strict rules about not getting involved, but the more she learns, the more deeply complicated things get and the more tightly she’s tangled up in things. This is a fast-moving story, mostly tightly contained in a snow-bound fortress. The ability to do magic is central to the story – Celyn can see magical ability but doesn’t have any of her own, and those who use it are all followers of the outlawed god Sar (six deities from a former pantheon of seven having been recently outlawed, leaving only Celys, the mother goddess.) But, because Celyn can’t use it herself and those who do hide it carefully, we learn only small things before the end, such as that wearing silver suppresses magic. This book has a lot going for it – winning characters, solid writing, detailed setting, and a tightly wound and carefully constructed plot. It looked to me like sequel possible, not promised, so I’ll hope.
Crab Cab by Yukiko Kido This is part of the Flip-a-Word series. Each book focuses on about three “sound families”, or words that use similar sounds. In this book, it was groups of short rhyming words, ending with “ot” and “ab”. Each section begins with a few words, one to a page – “hot”, “snot”, “pot”, “tot”. The pages are die-cut to make it more obvious that most of the word stays the same from page to page, and Kido makes us of die cuts in the illustrations, too, for a bit of extra fun. Then the words are combined to make silly, mostly two-word phrases – “snot pot” and “crab cab”. The illustrations are bright, rounded shapes that look digitally done. Easy words for new readers, no tricky plot, still fun. 
The Knitter’s Almanac by Elizabeth Zimmerman Just in case there is a knitter reading my blog who hasn’t heard of Elizabeth Zimmerman… well, this seems pretty darn unlikely. But just in case. Elizabeth Zimmerman’s books take homey, personality-filled writing applied to quite revolutionary ideas about making knitting just challenging enough but as easy as possible. Of course you can design your own sweater. Of course you’ll enjoy making a shawl, and you’ll naturally come up with some embellishments to make it pretty along the way… that kind of thing. The Knitter’s Almanac features her thoughts and activities for each month of the year, with a selection of projects. Each is talked through in detail in the main body of the chapter, and followed with “pithy” short directions at the end of the chapter. There are some famous patterns in this book, including the Pi shawl and February’s baby sweater. I read the new commemorative edition, which features a lovely introduction by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee and an adult-sized version of the famous baby sweater, February Lady. Never mind that at my current rate of knitting it would take me twelve years rather than twelve months to get through all the projects here – this is a book that every self-respecting knitter should own. 
alibrarymama 