'May those frightened cease to be afraid, and may those bound, be free.'

Right from the cover... a young boy, a baby elephant in chains... I knew this book would require tears.

Yesterday I read Chained by Lynne Kelly. It is a book that asks you to be brave, and above all... kind.

I loved the references to Ganesh. He's my favorite Hindu god. He's a boy with an elephant's head... maybe you've seen him before? Ganesh is my favorite because he is known as the Remover of Obstacles, which is why he is always great to have around.

From Chained:

From my hammock I peek through the spaces between the stable logs. Even though I can't see anything but the night sky, I pretend to see all the way to my house. I picture my mother as I last saw her, when I looked out the back window of the truck to see her standing in the road. 

Just before I fall asleep, Ne Min comes into the stable. When I sit up I see that he's holding a palm leaf and a hammer.

He holds up the leaf. "I meant for you to keep this," he says.

"Why? What does it say?"

"It is from a prayer." Ne Min holds holds the leaf on the wall in front of me and places the end of a nail against it. "It says, 'May those frightened cease to be afraid, and may those bound, be free.'"

With one strike he pounds the nail into the wall. 

 

In a small town, murder is always more than a paragraph in the local paper.

"It is, after all, these small-town tragedies that truly bring a community closer together. That separate the outsiders from the ones who belong. That keep the gates closed, and the doors locked, and the evil of the wider world safely outside.

We don't trust you if we don't know you, and sometimes, we don't trust you if we do. We band together; we circle the wagons; we peer out of our shuttered windows with weapons in hand and loved ones at our side.

When the blinds are drawn and the stakes are high, only the lucky few are allowed to come in."

  ~~~~~  

I just finished a great YA book, Amelia Anne Is Dead And Gone by Kat Rosenfield. It's beautifully written and completely mesmerizing. The Kirkus review called the book "utterly compelling".


I couldn't put it down; it was an absolutely brutal page-turner!


It's unlike any murder mystery I've ever read. The chapters are intercut between Amelia Anne Richardson's life and Rebecca, the town of Bridgeton's high school salutatorian.


However, there is violence and sex and bad language... still, it was all perfectly placed and necessary... yet, maybe you should be 13 or 14 years old to read it... or have your parent read it first and see what they think.


Chapter 12 was so lyrical and atmospheric and evocative and positively lovely:

"The day that Brendan Brooks died was the hottest in anyone's memory, so hot that cats lay down in the shade and panted, elderly women fainted under the weight of their support hose, and the newly paved parking lot behind the grocery bubbled and churned and turned into a viscous black pudding. The sun, silvery-bright and hot, so hot, blazed arrogantly down from a blanched and cloudless sky. It baked small bits of gravel into the soft asphalt roads, it melted popsicles off their sticks and over the grubby hands of porch-sitting toddlers, and it pounded relentlessly against the supple skin of the local kids who gathered at the south shore bridge to cool off."

If you want to see what gorgeous writing looks like, sounds like, feels like... you need to read Amelia Anne Is Dead And Gone.


* with your parents permission, of course.

from beyond

Small Medium at Large by Joanne Levy 

is a book I know I would have loved when I was 11 or 12.

It's about 12 year-old Lilah Bloom, who right in chapter one gets struck by lightning. By chapter two, she realizes that because of this, she can hear dead people; she can talk to ghosts.


Lilah isn't so sure about this. She thought it was very weird. She asked her dead grandmother:

"What's it like to be dead?...

There was a long pause. So long, I began to think she was gone, when she suddenly said, "I'm sorry but I can't tell you."

This book made me think... What would I do if I could hear dead people? What would you do? What would you ask them? Who would come looking for you to give you a message from 'beyond'?

much better now

LoBeau (emphasis on the second syllable because it classes it up)

I just finished a fun to read mystery called 

Three Times Lucky by Sheila Turnage.

If you judge a book by it's first sentence, this one is a beauty:

Trouble cruised into Tupelo Landing at exactly seven minutes past noon on Wednesday, the third of June, flashing a gold badge and driving a Chevy Impala the color of dirt.

... and this is just the beginning. 


Mo LoBeau and her best friend Dale set out to solve a mystery, a murder, and a kidnapping all in the course of the summer.


Eleven years ago, Mo washed ashore in Tupelo Landing, North Carolina, tied to a makeshift raft after one of the biggest hurricanes in history. She lives with the Colonel and Miss Lana at their cafe.


The action is fast, the characters are wonderfully quirky, the villains are fierce, and the writing is beautiful.


I know I said that the first sentence was a beauty, but here are a few others that I found quite pretty too:

• Miss Lana's voice is the color of sunlight in maple syrup.
• No one's on their own in the eternal sense of things.
• Miss Lana reads my voice like tea leaves.
• Do you have hair like mine? If so, I offer my condolences.
• I slept restless and dreamed thin. My universe didn't fit together. My world spun wobbly, like a worn out top.
• There's nothing like camping to restore a sense of size, Soldier, remember that. When you lose your way, wait under the stars.
• Listen to me. We are born over and over, day by day. When you feel lost, let the stars sing you to sleep. You'll always wake up new.
• To the east, the clouds gathered like an invading army.
• As I watched them together, my earth found its axis and my stars found their sky.

(without giving any of the mystery away... like Mo is a goddess of free enterprise, Sheila Turnage is a goddess of the simile)

total epicness

The Classroom: The Epic Documentary of a Not-Yet-Epic Kid

 

A documentary crew descends upon Westside Middle School to reveal what middle-school students’ lives are really like.

Trevor Jones is just starting middle school. He's a worrier and a "pre-thinker". Despite his claim that he's not worried about seventh grade, he has his first day all planned out... only nothing goes as planned.


This is a funny, very appealing story for anyone approaching the middle-school years. The book's documentary style, complete with "interviews", is very clever. The illustrations are a mix of notes, cartoons, and other "found materials" that keep the book's sense of humor alive. There are also plenty of misunderstandings, anxiety, and romantic entanglements to keep you laughing.


In the end, being "epic" is actually easier than you think.

more to come

I just ordered...