the dots matter

Today I finished Liar & Spy by Rebecca Stead.
I pre-ordered this book as soon as I heard that Rebecca Stead was writing a new middle grade book. In 2010 her book When You Reach Me won the Newbery Award and was a favorite in our house. We still say "Book Bag Pocket Shoe" to make each other laugh.

Liar & Spy did not disappoint. The writing was beautiful and the characters endearing. And, without giving too much away, Rebecca Stead is still as clever and tricky with Liar & Spy as she was with When You Reach Me.

Georges is a seventh grader dealing with the complexities of friendship, moving, preoccupied parents, bullying, and trust.

Georges is named after French painter Georges Seurat. One of my favorite bits in the book is the mix of science and art and Seurat's painting techniques as a metaphor for life.

"And then I think of all those thousands of dots Seurat used to paint the picture. I think about how if you stand back from the painting, you can see the people, the green grass and the cute monkey on a leash, but if you get closer, the monkey kind of dissolves right in front of your eyes. Like Mom says, life is a million different dots making one gigantic picture. And maybe the big picture is nice, maybe it's amazing, but if you're standing with your face pressed up against a bunch of black dots, it's really hard to tell." ~ Georges

Other favorite bits... chicken is chicken, bittersweet, scrabble notes, umami, Volleyball!, Candy, and Bob English Who Draws. You'll know what I mean once you read the book...

If you love a great book and a surprising twist... 

this is the book for you.

Life is really just a bunch of nows, one after the other.  The dots matter.

*and for Minecraft fans... check out this Minecraft Seurat 

the Wonder of Wonder

"Everyone deserves a standing ovation 

because we all overcometh the world."   

—Auggie Pullman

Somnium means Dream in Latin

I just read a fun book called Kepler's Dream by Juliet Bell. It grabbed me right from the get-go, mostly because I knew it was a book I wanted to share with V (I'll be sending it to her at camp today). It's a wonderful story filled with interesting inside information and great sayings. 


Here are some of my favorite great sayings:

Expletive Deleted (I should explain "expletive deleted".  An expletive is a swear word. I got the phrase from Mom, who used to say it instead of swearing. And she got it from Richard Nixon, who left the presidency in a cloud of shame and cusswords when Mom was a kid. Nixon, I guess, had a pretty dirty mouth - something he had in common with my dad - and when they wrote down what he use to say in meetings, they kept substituting "expletive deleted" for all the bad words. Like an earlier version of bleep.

Meanagers I explained to Rosie about "expletive deleted" and how handy it was around foul mouthed people. She thought that was funny. We started walking along the back tangle together with Lou, talking about teens - how when some people turn sixteen they suddenly seem to stop doing anything but swearing and texting. I told Rosie about the day in Santa Rosa when there was an obnoxious bunch of high schoolers on our bus ride home and Abbie had made up a new word: meanagers.

I plan on using "expletive deleted" in place of swear words, and "meanagers" when referring to mean teenagers on a more regular basis.


Here are some more of my favorite bits:

She made it clear in some lecture or other - maybe the time she told me I must never go into her room without asking; or the time she said, with her trademark sarcasm, how delightful it would be if people would sound less like a herd of elephants stampeding through the hallways - well, anyway, it was clear that if I ever woke my grandmother up by mistake, I would regret it. I'd always been confused about the difference between corporal and capital punishment, but I was pretty sure the GM believed in both. 

(FYI - capital punishment is the death penalty and corporal punishment is the infliction of physical injury - like spanking. I love this bit; especially the amount of punctuation it takes to pull off that first sentence!)

It wasn't my idea to spend that summer at my grandmother's house. I hardly even knew my grandmother had a house - made out of mud or anything else. I'd heard that she and my dad didn't get along, and that she was maybe mean, or crazy, or both, but I never met the woman before. She was like a made-up character, Cruella de Ville or Darth Vader, someone you've heard stories about but don't believe actually exists. 

I don't know where you want to draw the line between being "nosy" and being "curious". Or whether "curious" is even always a good thing. When we were doing our science fair projects, Ms. Nelson told us that curiosity was an important quality for a scientist; on the other hand, look how much trouble that famous monkey George gets into, even if things usually work out for him in the end. As for nosiness, I never appreciated it when my mom occasionally went investigating in my room and found my secret stash of Halloween candy, or some dumb teen magazine I was embarrassed for her to see. "That's private!" I'd protest, and she'd just give me a look, like, Not anymore, it isn't.

And finally:

So here's a piece of advice I will give you free of charge. Don't, if you can help it, lie to horse people about how much riding experience you have. It isn't worth it.

And yet I haven't said a thing about what Kepler's Dream is about; in a nutshell...


Eleven-year-old Ella's mother is hospitalized to undergo a dangerous cancer treatment and Ella is forced to spend the summer with her estranged grandmother. Through a rare and beloved book called Kepler's Dream of the Moon comes mystery and forgiveness and the enduring bond of family and friendship.


A book about a book is always a favorite of mine.

Some things you might want to reference 

if you read Kepler's Dream:

This is the crew of Apollo 11
Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, & Michael Collins (center)

Johannes Kepler

NASA's Kepler Website

GM's House of Mud Map

The Big Dipper pattern

The Big Dipper is made up of seven brightest Ursa Major stars. The Dipper is significant because the North Star (Polaris) can be found using it ... maybe now I've given too much away!?

graced with...

I'm reading a book called Graceling by Kristin Cashore.
It's a land of seven kingdoms and seven thoroughly unpredictable kings. It's a world where certain people are 'Graced' with miraculous abilities. No one can tell you what your Grace is... but when it emerges, you will know.

"In a world where people born with an extreme skill - called a Grace - are feared and exploited, Katsa carries the burden of the skill even she despises: the Grace of killing. She lives under the command of her uncle Randa, King of the Middluns, and is expected to execute his dirty work, punishing and torturing anyone who displeases him."  -GoodReads

Kasta sees her Grace as a curse. She hates how her skill defines her.


But then... Spoiler Alert...


Kasta has a shift in awareness or perspective... she discovers that her Grace isn't killing; her Grace is survival. It's a subtle shift, but with it she is liberated. From this new perspective on her life & her talents she is able to begin life anew.


This book has left me questioning...
What is my Grace? And... am I sure?


Maybe you think your talent is music or writing or soccer or painting or cooking...
But maybe your talent isn't what it appears to be; maybe it is something deeper.


Maybe your talent isn't just writing (limited to the page or the screen); maybe it's self-expression, or persuasion, or inspiration, or...


Like Kasta, dig a little deeper. What is your true Grace... what's behind what defines you?




* Something I love...
In the dedication of Graceling, Krisin Cashore writes:
For my mother, Nedda Previtera Cashore, who has a meatball Grace,
and my father, J. Michael Cashore, who is Graced with losing (and finding) his glasses.

yearning to breathe free

"The Arrival is a migrant story told as a series of wordless images that might seem to come from a long forgotten time. A man leaves his wife and child in an impoverished town, seeking better prospects in an unknown country on the other side of a vast ocean. He eventually finds himself in a bewildering city of foreign customs, peculiar animals, curious floating objects and indecipherable languages. With nothing more than a suitcase and a handful of currency, the immigrant must find a place to live, food to eat and some kind of gainful employment. He is helped along the way by sympathetic strangers, each carrying their own unspoken history: stories of struggle and survival in a world of incomprehensible violence, upheaval and hope."

I loved The Lost Thing & knew I needed to get my hands on Shaun Tan's newest book The Arrival.

It's a fantastical, abstract, surreal immigrant story. Everyone has struggled with the idea of belonging... whether it is a new school or team or job or country. At one time or another, everyone becomes a stranger in a strange land.

There is the innate desire in all of us to create a better, safer, freer life for our family. And often that requires relying on the kindness of others who have come before.


The Arrival is a beauty ... more to be looked at than read.

in my heart forever

“Tell me a fact and I’ll learn. 

Tell me a truth and I’ll believe.

But tell me a story and it will live in my heart forever.”

— Indian proverb

Quill prevails when the strong survive

V is away at camp :(


As a way to stay connected, we are both reading the same book while she is gone: The Unwanteds by Lisa McMann. 

If you liked The Hunger Games, Divergent, and Harry Potter... then this is the summer read for you!


In a place called Quill, children are sorted into three categories when they turn 13: the Wanteds, the Necessaries, and the Unwanteds. The Wanteds get to be educated. The Necessaries perform manual labor, and the Unwanteds (those who are creative and artistic) are ... sentenced to death!

This is an exciting book, full of magic and action. Luckily book 2 Island of Silence comes out in September.