A Word for Wednesday

 "'Do you think that all children's books ought to have funny bits in them?' Miss Honey asked.

'I do,' Matilda said. 'Children are not so serious as grown-ups and they love to laugh.'"

~from Matilda by Roald Dahl~

Let's Bust a Recap : Hope Remains

Man, where to begin with a book like Hope Remains. Not only is it heartbreaking to read about every family's worst nightmare, the particular family in question happen to be friends of mine, and I'll never forget my heart dropping into my stomach when we got the devastating news that little Sawyer had been hit by a car as he pedaled his bike around outside. 

Hope Remains was written by Reppard and Summer Gordon in the wake of the loss of their five year old son. In this part memoir, part Christian apologetic, the Gordons recount every detail of the worst day of their lives with grace and honesty. 

On August 8, 2016, the youngest child of Reppard and Summer Gordon went home to be with Jesus after being hit by a distracted driver. The driver turned out to be someone Reppard and Summer knew, and not only did Summer immediately embrace the driver just minutes after the accident occurred, the Gordons have continued a warm and loving relationship with him in the years since the accident. He even contributed his perspective for Hope Remains and it is powerful to read the account of God's grace and love through the eyes of Sawyer's father, mother, and the young man who was responsible for his death. I think one of the best aspects of this book is the shifting perspectives between these three grieving people. 

But what I appreciated the very most about Hope Remains was the unflinching honesty. The Gordons didn't gloss over their pain in pointing their readers to Christ. The comfort and peace they've found in our Savior was made all the more real and wonderful when you see the absolute depth of their despair through the pages of this book. With no room for worn out clichés or trite platitudes, Summer takes you right inside the experience of introducing yourself at a new Bible study where all the other women are rattling off the names and ages of their children, while Reppard recounts how sick he felt after meeting a new acquaintance and not including Sawyer in his family lineup during the introduction. 

Another aspect of Hope Remains that I really appreciated was how fully developed it was. There was not a single word thrown away. Everything mentioned was fully fleshed out and at no point in reading this book was I left wondering, "Yeah, but did they just say that for effect?" When Summer mentions at the beginning of the book that their marriage had just come through an extremely rocky patch, she circles back around to it later and details the difficulties they faced. Not in a gossipy, salacious way, but in a there's-nothing-outside-of-God's-redemptive-power way. With authority born out of the most personal and tragic of experiences and an urgency produced from an if-God-can-do-this-for-us-He-can-do-it-for-you perspective, Reppard and Summer encourage every reader to turn to Jesus today.

It's a little intimidating when someone you know and love publishes a book and wants to know what you think of it, but I can say with complete sincerity that Hope Remains is well-written and I whole-heartedly recommend it. I've already given this book as a gift, and that's not something I do flippantly. If you have experienced heartache or if you feel like you're drowning and don't know where to turn, Hope Remains. 

Would you share your deepest pain and living nightmare with the world? Do you know the Hope that the Gordons have? Buy a copy of Hope Remains here.

Let's Bust a Recap : The Thirteenth Pearl

Last week in my recap of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, I mentioned that I cut my proverbial reading teeth on The Boxcar Children and Nancy Drew mysteries. When I was a kid, I couldn't get enough Nancy Drew and my grandmother would collect secondhand copies throughout the year. She had a standing agreement with the owner of our local used bookshop in which he called her any time Nancy Drews came in and she got first dibs before he put them out on the shelves. Whenever a birthday or Christmas came around, I got a new stack of Nancy Drews to read which I promptly devoured.

Now I have a niece who has started to read and guess what books she loves. Nancy Drew mysteries. Any time she comes to my house, she is immediately drawn to the shelf with all the faded yellow spines. When she accompanied me to our new home in NC, the first thing we unpacked were the Nancy Drews and she chose The Thirteenth Pearl which we began reading aloud together. 

She left before we could finish it, but I can't start a book and then just quit so I finished it by myself. 

The Thirteenth Pearl is the last of the original 56 Nancy Drew mystery stories published by Grosset & Dunlap. There have been many iterations since then and now there are literally hundreds of Nancy Drew books including the Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew collection which are the ones my niece has been reading on her own. The Thirteenth Pearl was published in 1979 under the familiar pseudonym Carolyn Keene but was actually written by Harriet Stratemeyer Adams. As the Nancy Drew books were first being published, there were a few different authors who wrote them, and it was written into their contracts that they would be paid $125 per book and required to give up all rights to the work and maintain confidentiality. In every book, Nancy Drew is an 18 year old high school graduate and amateur detective who solves crime with the help of her two best friends George and Bess and occasionally her hunky college boyfriend Ned. She lives with her widowed father and their housekeeper Hannah Gruen, and she drives around in a blue convertible. She often gets kidnapped or caught up in some kind of danger before she solves the case. 

In The Thirteenth Pearl, Nancy is trying to find a rare and valuable pearl that has been stolen which leads her all the way to Japan tracking an international ring of jewel thieves. The book takes an odd turn when Nancy finds herself in the midst of a creepy pearl-worshiping cult, but she, of course, solves the case and catches the bad guys. 

I was pleasantly surprised in reading this book how well-researched it was, and also by the positive depiction of Japanese people and culture. My grandfather served in WWII, and I grew up with a somewhat negative image of the Japanese. After my brother and sister-in-law lived in Japan, and now that I have a Japanese niece, I became a lot more sensitive about this issue and started intentionally adding Japanese literature to my collection. This book has aged surprisingly well given that it was written and published in the '70s, and I'm looking forward to sharing it with my niece one day. 

Nancy Drew has become a cultural icon and is cited as a formative influence by a number of high powered women including Supreme Court Justices and former First Ladies. This collection will always be special to me because of the gift of love they were from my grandmother, but rereading them as an adult is proving to be a rewarding experience in its own right. Definitely would recommend a Nancy Drew book for your daughter or niece or neighborhood kid or even you if you're looking for something quick to bust you out of a reading slump or to kickstart a reading life that's gone stale. 

What books sparked a love for reading in you?

~a 10 year old Hannah reading The Secret of the Old Clock~

A Word for Wednesday

 "Ya need some girlfriends, hon, 'cause they're furever.

Without a vow.

A clutch of women's the most tender, most tough place on Earth."

~from Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owen~

~shoutout to my clutch of women~

Let's Bust a Recap : The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

Well, we're halfway through June and I'm somehow just now recapping a book I read in the middle of March. So as you can see, things are going real well over here. 

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie by Alan Bradley was published in 2009 after he won the Debut Dagger Award in 2007 for submitting the first chapter and a brief synopsis of the book. His win sparked a bidding war, he sold the publishing rights in three different countries, and then he spent the next several months developing that first chapter into a full-length novel which was published well after he was 70 years old. After the smashing success of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, he continued to write more Flavia de Luce mysteries turning it into a ten-book series over the next ten years. Amazing, right?

And guess what. It's my favorite book of 2021 so far. (Well, in all honesty, it's now tied for first with another book I read more recently, but that's neither here nor there. And you'll just have to stick around to find out what the other front-runner is.)

In The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, we meet 11 year old Flavia de Luce, the youngest of three sisters who live at their country estate Buckshaw in the 1950s with their widowed father. When a red-headed stranger turns up dead in their cucumber patch and their father is hauled in as a suspect, Flavia decides to take matters into her own hands, hops on her trusty bicycle Gladys, and single-handedly solves the case. 

I loved everything about this "delightfully old-fashioned mystery" and about Flavia herself. An aspiring chemist with her own fully-equipped laboratory at Buckshaw, Flavia is whip-smart, laugh-out-loud funny, and a mischievous little prankster. Bradley's writing style has been described as reminiscent of the Golden Age of crime writing. As a reader who cut my teeth on The Boxcar Children and Nancy Drew, falling into Flavia's world was utterly charming and somehow nostalgic of what drew me to a love of reading in the first place. I ended up using The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie to check off the "book that reminds you of childhood" slot in The Unread Shelf's 2021 Unread Book Bingo. 

Ten out of ten, would recommend. Flavia de Luce is a riot, and I can't wait for my next visit with her.

What books made you love reading? Have you read any of the Flavia de Luce mysteries? 

A Tuesday Confession

I went back to Florida a couple weekends ago for a visit.

Naturally, I made sure to visit my favorite secondhand bookshops while I was there.

Remember how at the beginning of the year, I confessed that I own over 500 unread books? 

And that I was going to try to get that number down some this year?

I came home from Florida with 30 new-to-me books.

Thirty. 

Three-zero. 

Three sets of ten. 

My unread number is now over 560. 

I have a problem.

Let's Bust a Recap : I'll Be There For You

Look familiar? Chances are, if you've been online, walked through the checkout line of your local grocers, or simply occupy space on this planet, you've seen the news that the cast of Friends got back together for a reunion special. 

But wait a minute, Hannah, isn't this a book blog? Why are you subjecting us to more coverage of the Friends reunion? 

Well, as it turns out: I've had this book about Friends sitting on my shelf for the last few years. With the news that the reunion special would be airing at the end of May, I decided it was the perfect time to pick it up and read it. So that's what I did.

To start out, I wouldn't call myself the show's biggest fan. I certainly didn't watch it during its original run which started when I was about seven years old. But between having roommates who are big fans and own all the DVDs, watching reruns late at night in hotel rooms while falling asleep, and the advent of Netflix, I admit I've seen all ten seasons from beginning to end more than just once. Friends has been described as "comfort food TV", and that resonates. Nothing on the show is particularly heavy or dramatic and you're bound to laugh at some point watching any given episode. 

I'll Be There For You: The One about Friends by Kelsey Miller was published in October of 2018 and one of my (real-life) friends got it for me for my birthday that year. Despite thinking it would be a fun behind-the-scenes look at the world's #1 hit comedy show, it sat on my shelf untouched until last month. When I finally did get around to reading it, it turned out to be a 50/50 book for me. What I mean is, it was about 50% interesting and 50% one big eye-roll. 

I enjoyed reading about the creation of the show, how the cast came together, the different tidbits of how the show almost ended but then got renewed, how the cast bonded and advocated for each other, and what the actors went on to do after the show ended. All that nerdy, behind-the-scenes stuff appeals to me, and I enjoy biographical trivia like that. I think it probably has something to do with having a brother who lives in Hollywood and is part of the entertainment industry. 

But the rest of it was just one big defense of the author's personal enjoyment of the show through a 2018 lens of political correctness. Is it okay to like something that wasn't racially diverse, had homophobic/fat-shaming/slut-shaming/whatever-shaming jokes? And why does the show's popularity still continue when all that stuff is in there? Here's one for you: I don't care. The show is funny, and I don't need some 30-something year old's permission to laugh at it. 

I enjoyed the actual reunion special (streamed on HBO Max) much more than I enjoyed the book (although James Corden could have stayed at home, just sayin'). While I find it absolutely ridiculous that these six people were paid upwards of $2.5 million dollars each to go hang out on the set of their old show, I was still one of the millions of people sitting in my living room watching it so what can I really say? 

All in all, the book, much like the show, is something I can take or leave. 

But enough of all this, what's your favorite episode? Joey putting Little Women in the freezer because Beth's death is just too much for him will always crack me up.

Let's Bust a Recap : The Irresistible Blueberry Bakeshop & Café

I picked up The Irresistible Blueberry Bakeshop & Café in mid-February just after we decided to sell our house and move to NC. I was looking for a sweet, romantic novel that would be entertaining but not too stressful. Something I could read in the midst of packing boxes and getting our house listed that wouldn't be all-consuming but would keep me coming back for more when I needed a break. 

It didn't quite hit the mark, but it was okay, I guess. I originally bought this book because on the very front cover there's a little blurb from prolific author James Patterson saying anyone who liked The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society would "devour" The Irresistible Blueberry Bakeshop & Café. 

Hi. That's me. Guernsey was my favorite book of 2018.

James Patterson lied. 

I have no idea if he's ever read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, and I also don't know if he actually read The Irresistible Blueberry Bakeshop & Café, but to even mention the two in the same sentence is criminal and led to a somewhat disappointing experience for me. 

In this 2013 debut novel from Mary Simses, we meet Ellen Branford, a high-powered Manhattan attorney who is on a quest to fulfill her grandmother's dying wish: delivering a letter to her grandmother's childhood sweetheart in Beacon, Maine. What Ellen anticipates being a quick 24-hour trip turns complicated when she nearly drowns in the ocean and is rescued by the hunky town carpenter. 

Do you see where this is going? Because literally by the third page, I knew exactly where it was going and I was 100% correct. This book was made to be a Hallmark movie, and, as it turns out, it is one.

I was interested in Ellen's discoveries about her grandmother's childhood in Maine....but the author didn't develop that part of the story very much.

My mouth was watering over the tasty food descriptions....but no recipes were included in the book.

The glimpses of small town, coastal Maine were evocative and beautiful....but Simses didn't fully establish the world she was trying to create on the page. She basically stuck to Ellen and her far-fetched interactions with Hunky Carpenter Guy and that's really all you get. 

As for the rest of it, Ellen was extremely unlikeable and not believable as a character at all. For somehow being this hotshot New York lawyer, she couldn't make the simplest decisions, she constantly questioned herself, and she had absolutely zero communication skills. The scenarios she finds herself in are silly and over the top, and the ending was hardly satisfying as the grandmother's story is not resolved in any meaningful way.

I was drawn to this book by the cute, red gingham checked spine and fun title. When I saw a comparison to The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, I thought I'd be in for a treat. But what I got was a generic, played out Hallmark plot wrapped up in a cute cover that turned out to be more frustrating than entertaining. Oh well. You win some, you lose some. But here's to starting a petition to recall any statement comparing The Irresistible Blueberry Bakeshop & Café to The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. We don't deserve that.