Author Archives: Goddess in the Stacks

Book Review: Dear Fahrenheit 451

by

2

dear fahrenheit 451Dear Fahrenheit 451 – Love and Heartbreak in the Stacks: A Librarian’s Love Letters and Breakup Notes to the Books in Her Life
by Annie Spence
Book about Books
244 pages
Published 2017

Dear Fahrenheit 451 was recommended to me by Doing Dewey in the comments to my last book about books, My Life With Bob. I’m very glad they recommended it, because I enjoyed this book immensely!

In Dear Fahrenheit 451, each chapter is a letter to a different book. (Except the last few chapters, those are letters to the reader.) The letters range from disappointment (Wicked) to adoration (The Fledgling) to creeped out (Principles of Bloodstain Pattern Analysis) – but they’re all entertaining, and usually pretty funny. Some letters are explaining why she’s culling them from the library’s collection (too many copies, or bad condition, or haven’t been checked out in years.)

The author has a wonderful writing style that makes me want to grab coffees and gab about books with her. It’s also a great book to read when you don’t have long periods of time to read – the chapters are short and self-contained, so there’s no rush to find out what happens next. It will most likely add things to your TBR, though, as most books about books tend to do!

I really enjoyed this one – it’s way better than My Life With Bob. Probably because it’s actually about the books, where My Life With Bob was more of a memoir.

From the cover of Dear Fahrenheit 451:

If you love to read, and presumably you do since you’ve picked up this book (!), you know that some books affect you so profoundly, they forever change the way you think about the world. Some books, on the other hand, disappoint you so much you want to throw them against the wall. Either way, it’s clear that a book can be your new soul mate or the bad relationship you need to end.

In Dear Fahrenheit 451, librarian Annie Spence has crafted love letters and breakup notes to both the iconic and the eclectic books she has encountered over the years. From her breakup letter to The Giving Tree (a dysfunctional relationship book if ever there was one) to her love letter to The Time Traveler’s Wife (a novel less about time travel and more about the life of a marriage, with all of its ups and downs), Spence will make you think of old favorites in a new way. Filled with suggested reading lists, Spence’s take on classic and contemporary books is very much like the best of literature – sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes surprisingly poignant, and filled with universal truths.

A celebration of reading, Dear Fahrenheit 451 is for anyone who loves nothing more than curling up with a good book . . . and another, and another, and another!

Book Review: The Girl with the Red Balloon

by

0

girl with the red balloonThe Girl with the Red Balloon
by Katherine Locke
Young Adult/Magical Realism/Alternate History
277 pages
Published 2017

I’ve actually had this out from the library for a while, but when discussing Summer Bird Blue with the YA_Pride Twitter Book Club, I learned the person behind the book club is none other than Katherine Locke, the author of this book! I was amused that I actually had her book beside me without knowing that, and pushed it up my TBR list. I’m glad I did, because the sequel, The Spy with the Red Balloon, just came out. And oh man, do I want to read that now! The Girl with the Red Balloon is also “The Big Library Read” for October 1-15th, which I didn’t realize. Happy little coincidences!

So the premise for this book is that Ellie Baum, Jewish schoolgirl on a trip to Germany, grabs a magic balloon and is transported back to East Berlin after WW II. I’m always a little cautious when time travel is involved. This is quite well done, however! Even the magicians are like “this shouldn’t be possible!” As a Jewish girl in possession of a magic balloon used to take escapees over the Berlin Wall, she’s immediately in great danger in East Berlin. Luckily she is spotted by one of the people responsible for the balloons. Somewhat unluckily, she’s soon drawn into a deadly plot to rewrite history and has to figure out who to trust.

I really enjoyed this book, especially the depictions of the wall. The East Berliners’ surprise when she tells them the other side is covered in graffiti and street art is not something I’d thought of. I’ve seen a section of the wall; there’s three at the Marine Corps base in California that my husband was stationed at early in his time in the Corps. There are pictures online, but after sifting through old photos, I don’t seem to have any of my own. (You could google “Berlin Wall Presidio Monterey” and find a ton.) I think I remember a no-photo policy on the base at the time. Regardless, I know what she means because I’ve seen it. Ever since actually seeing parts of the Berlin Wall, reading anything about it has felt just a little more real. That’s always the problem with things like the Wall that you have no personal connection to – obviously they’re real, but when the circumstances are so alien to our own way of life, it’s hard to really comprehend. Finding ways to personally connect – seeing parts of the Wall, talking to people who have personally experienced things you haven’t (if you have the opportunity, and if they’re willing to discuss it) is so important.

I have digressed. I’m curious to know more about the magic in the Balloonmakers’ world – in the book we only see a small slice of it being used under dire circumstances. I hope Locke explores it more in the sequel. I’ll find out as soon as the library sends the book my way! Plots like this can be interesting or very disappointing – if the main character finds a way home, she leaves behind the love interest. But if she stays with the love interest, she never gets to go home. Luckily, Locke is a wonderful writer, and I was mostly happy with the ending but it was definitely left with questions for the sequel to answer!

I know I haven’t revealed a whole lot about the plot, but this is a twisty book, and I can’t really say much without spoiling surprises. I’ll just say it’s a great book, I’m very glad I finally read it, and my library needs to hurry up with that sequel!

From the cover of The Girl with the Red Balloon:

This can’t be real, I thought. But I had the same feeling I had whenever Saba told me his stories: that somewhere, somehow, the impossible had happened. 

Ever since she arrived in Germany on a school trip, Ellie Baum has felt the weight of history on her. After all, she’s the first one in her family to return since her grandfather’s miraculous escape from a death camp, and in Berlin, pieces of the past – World War II, the Cold War – are still visible decades later.

One day, visiting the Berlin Wall Memorial, she sees a stray balloon floating across the park, and she wanders away from the crowd to follow it. One moment she’s reaching out to grab it – the next, she’s yanked back through time to when the wall is still standing. It is 1988, and Ellie is in East Berlin. 

Nobody knows how she got there, not even the members of the underground guild – the Runners and the Schöpfers – who use balloons and magic to help people escape over the wall. Now as a stranger in an oppressive regime, Ellie must hide from the police with the help of Kai, a Runner struggling with his own uneasy relationship with the powerful Balloonmakers and his growing feelings for Ellie. Together they search for the truth behind Ellie’s mysterious time travel, and when they uncover a plot to alter history with dark magic, she must risk everything – including her only way home – to stop the deadly plans.

 

Friday 56 – The Girl with the Red Balloon

by

3

girl with the red balloonThe Friday 56 is hosted by Freda’s Voice. The rules are simple – turn to page 56 in your current read (or 56% in your e-reader) and post a few non-spoilery sentences.

Today’s quote is from The Girl with the Red Balloon, set mostly in East Berlin. The Girl with the Red Balloon also happens to be “The Big Library Read” for October 1-15, too! The sequel, The Spy with the Red Balloon, just came out.

The Schöpfer workshop was underground through the subway tunnels. There were two entrances, but one was only for the Schöpfers who could use magic to hide themselves and bypass the guards. The only time we Runners used that entrance was to replace the helium tanks for the balloons, a magic written on our arms in our own blood to hide our comings and goings. The rest of the time, we went into the tunnels by one of the ghost stations beneath the death zone by the wall. The ghost stations used to work, I guess, before the wall and after the War, but now they were closed. The trains came by from West Berlin but didn’t stop. Couldn’t risk anyone wanting to leave.

Book Review: Summer Bird Blue

by

0

summer bird blueSummer Bird Blue
by Akemi Dawn Bowman
Queer YA
373 pages
Published September 2018

This is the second YA_Pride book club chat I’ve participated in – the last one was The Summer of Jordi Perez and the Best Burger in Los Angeles. (Which was great.) Summer Bird Blue was just as good, but where Jordi Perez was a lovely, lighthearted beach read, Summer Bird Blue is a tearjerker that you’ll want to read in private so you can sob the entire way through the book. Or at least that’s what I did.

Gorgeous and evocative are both words that could be applied here. Rumi’s grief over losing her sister is profound. She feels abandoned by her mother, sent to live with the aunt she barely knows in Hawaii. Rumi has absolutely lost everything – her sister/best friend is truly lost. She feels like she’s lost her mother, her home, any semblance of normality, and her musical ability. It’s a lot for a kid to deal with.

In the middle of all that, she’s trying to figure out her sexuality – she might be ace or demi; she spends most of the book questioning and trying to make sense of it. As we discussed in the Twitter chat, even if she doesn’t come to a conclusion on what her sexuality is, even having “questioning” as a sexuality is so important in YA books. Showing that you don’t need to have everything figured out is really important.

I loved Rumi’s relationships with the neighbors, both Kai and Mr. Watanabe. I wish Rumi had been nice to Mr. Watanabe in the beginning, but she comes around eventually. And she was dealing with A LOT, so I’ll give her a little slack. She was beginning to try my patience near the end of the book, though.

The one real disappointment I had with this book is that while Rumi is portrayed as this awesome musician whose lyrics and melodies are really good – the other characters say so – I don’t like her lyrics. Of course I have no way of knowing what her melodies sound like, but I just don’t think her lyrics are that good.

Other than that little quibble, this book is really, really good. But also really, really sad. Prepare to cry.

From the cover of Summer Bird Blue:

Rumi Seto spends a lot of time worrying she doesn’t have the answers to everything. What to eat, where to go, whom to love. But there is one thing she is absolutely sure of – she wants to spend the rest of her life writing music with her younger sister, Lea.

Then Lea dies in a car accident, and her mother sends Rumi away to live with her aunt in Hawaii while she deals with her own grief. Now thousands of miles from home, Rumi struggles to navigate the loss of her sister, being abandoned by her mother, and the absence of music from her life. With the help of the “boys next door” – a teenage surfer named Kai, who smiles too much and doesn’t take anything seriously, and an eighty-year-old named George Watanabe, who succumbed to his own grief years ago – Rumi attempts to find her way back to her music, to write the song she and Lea never had the chance to finish.

Aching, powerful, and unflinchingly honest, Summer Bird Blue explores big truths about insurmountable grief, unconditional love, and how to forgive even when it feels impossible.

Library Loot Wednesday

by

3

I got more books than I expected this week – went in to pick up three and there were six waiting for me! It turns out there should have been one more, so I sent my husband back to get it the next day, and he came home with another hold, but STILL not the one the system says is waiting for me, so I might have to go back in and ask the librarians what’s up with America For Beginners. My account says it’s waiting, but it’s apparently not on the shelf!

 

Like America for Beginners, A River of Stars and Number One Chinese Restaurant were on my Summer TBR list – I thought they’d release and make their way to me in time to read them this summer, but here it is October! If I’m dependent on library books, I may need to remember not to put New Releases on my seasonal TBR lists. Another “new” release that just got to me is Catwoman: Soulstealer. It’s the third in the DC Icons series, after Wonder Woman and Batman.

 

After hearing it recommended multiple times at the Baltimore Book Festival, I checked out Laini Taylor’s Daughter of Smoke and Bone. The other three books I checked out this week are Bob Woodward’s FEAR: Trump in the White House (which I know I won’t be able to renew, so it’s high up on my to-read list right now, and lord that cover is creepy), Carol Anderson’s One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying Our Democracy, and Many Love: A Memoir of Polyamory and Finding Love(s) by Sophie Lucido Johnson. I now have quite a bit of heavy nonfiction out from the library that I need to sit down and read, so I may have to drop by the grocery store and get some crunchy snacks to help keep me awake!

Top Ten Tuesday – Longest Books I’ve Read

by

6

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl, and this week’s topic is the longest books I’ve ever read. I typically read books between 400 and 600 pages, so I tend towards the long end of the spectrum anyway, but when I start creeping towards 1000, that’s notable, even for me.

Knocking out 4 spots are books #2 through #5 of the Song of Ice and Fire. A Clash of Kings clocks in at 768 pages, A Feast For Crows is 753 pages, and A Storm of Swords is 973 pages, making it the third longest book I’ve ever read. The second longest book I’ve read is #5 in the series, A Dance with Dragons, clocking in 1056 pages!

The rest of these I’ll list in order of size. The longest book I’ve ever read – I think – is actually one long poetry book, Gooberz, by Linda Goodman, back when I was going through my astrology phase. It was 1081 pages! Inheritance by Christopher Paolini is the fourth-longest book I’ve read, at 849 pages. Power, Faith, and Fantasy by Michael B. Oren, on American’s involvement in the middle east, is 832 pages.

From here we drop back into the 700s, with Orcs by Stan Nicholls (769 pages), Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (759 pages), and Martha Stewart’s Homekeeping Handbook, at 752 pages.

I don’t think I’ve forgotten anything longer than these, but it is possible. There are several I’ve read in the lower 700s that only barely didn’t make the cut.

Update, after checking other people’s Top Tens: I should have included Patrick Rothfuss’s The Wise Man’s Fear! There also seems to be a lot of variance in actual page counts on some of these books. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix seems to actually be longer than Deathly Hallows, by some counts. So that should have been on here too! Whoops.