Book #98: Mystery Ranch by Gertrude Chandler Warner

Dane is loving these Boxcar Children books. This one was not my favorite--there wasn't really a mystery that the kids solved (the ranch definitely did not deserve the title of Mystery Ranch, haha), and there wasn't even very much of the charming independent living stuff where they explain how they built a campfire or made their own house in a boxcar or a barn, like in the other ones. But it was a lot shorter than the others, which was a bonus--I was able to get through two chapters a day with Dane instead of just one.

It is funny how unrealistic the Alden kids are, now, looking back at these books as an adult. It is super, super unlikely that any kids would excitedly volunteer to go take care of their great-aunt for the summer, whom they'd never met and of whom they didn't know anything except that she was extremely cross. And it seems very unlikely that they would get that great-aunt to be happy again simply by showing up and cheerfully making her lunch. But, of course, those elements don't bother me at all--it's just something to laugh at now. It's just surprising to me that I truly never noticed that before when reading all of these books as a kid.

Book #97: The One-in-a-Million Boy by Monica Wood

I really enjoyed listening to this book. I was worried it was going to be too sad--you know going into it beforehand that it's about a father of a young boy who died--but it wasn't. It was definitely sad in parts, but mostly, it was sweet. The story revolves around Quinn Porter, the boy's father, who is told to finish his son's Boy Scout commitment to take care of a 104-year-old woman's yard for the rest of the summer. He gets to know this woman, Ona Vitkus, who seems at first to be crabby to the extreme, but who warms up to him and they eventually get to know each other and like each other. Mixed throughout the main plot are lots and lots of flashbacks in both of their lives, transcriptions of the interview the boy did with Ona about her life, and lists of Guiness Book World Record holders, which the boy was obsessed with. Before his death, the boy had convinced Ona to go out for a world record of Oldest Licensed Driver, and she gets Quinn involved in her attempt to find her birth certificate and get her license renewed. And she also helps Quinn to get to know his son in a way he never did before he died.

There isn't all that much that happens in this book--a short road trip, a burglary, Quinn working and trying to get a job--but the plot isn't as important as the flashbacks and the character development, particularly in the case of Ona. I loved learning about her life and beginning to care about her as a person, and imagining how her life has changed and developed over more than a century of life. I also loved Quinn's character, how he is an itinerant musician and obviously wasn't a super-involved dad, but how he is trying really hard to care and to make up for his mistakes in the only way he knows how. I also loved the boy, who is only there in memories and flashbacks, but is the main impetus for Ona and Quinn and Belle's (his mother) actions, and who brings them together even in his absence.

All in all, a really great story. It made me want to keep listening and do dishes for longer just to have a chance to keep going.

Book #96: A Fatal Grace by Louise Penny

This is the second book in the series of Chief Inspector Armand Gamache (Still Life being the first) and I actually read this one instead of listening to it. Our library has ten of the series on audiobook but not this one for some reason. I enjoyed reading this one, about a newcomer killed in Three Pines at a curling match the day after Christmas. Like the first one, I had a good guess of who the killer was in this book, but it doesn't disappoint me to know whodunit by any means. I feel like these books are more about the characters and the interest created by the character of Armand Gamache, instead of just figuring out who committed the crime. I really like Gamache as a person, like his relationship with his wife and his team especially, and am infuriated by any people who don't like him (like the inscrutable Agent Nichol, who is so messed up it's hard to even see where she's coming from). The only thing I didn't like about this book were the obvious dark hints about bad things coming for Gamache in the future (betrayals! No!), and the really sad relationships between mothers and daughters in this book. The murdered woman was a terrible person, and the way she treated everyone, but especially her teenaged daughter, was super depressing. I hate imagining any children growing up in a toxic home like that, even in a fictional world. But I thought this story was well done and I enjoyed it. I am going to listen to the next one soon.

Book #95: The Yellow House Mystery by Gertrude Chandler Warner

Dane and I just finished this one today (it was something he wanted to do for his birthday) and he just LOVES this series. I'm sooo happy he likes it, but I'm wanting to move on to reading him something else too. We could be reading Boxcar Children together until he moves away to college, but I want to read some other books together before he goes to kindergarten. I'm trying to convince him--maybe we will read one more and then try to move on to something else, haha.

This book was a follow-up to the Surprise Island book. It's funny to be reading them in order like this, because as a kid, I never put them in any particular order when I read them so I don't think I ever figured out the overall storyline (at least of the first few). There was a yellow house on the island that they weren't allowed to go into, and in this book, they find out what the mystery was and try to solve it by finding out where their grandfather's old friend Bill went forty years earlier. Dane got super into the story and really liked talking about going to find Bill. I liked the details about their camping/canoeing trip they took--Warner loves placing the children into situations in which they have to fend for themselves.

Book #94: Barefoot by Elin Hilderbrand

I hated this book so much that I didn't even finish it. Do you know how rare that is? Do you know how many books I have started and gotten far into and hated so much I couldn't even push through and finish it? In the last few years since I've been writing this blog--ONE. And it was On the Road by Jack Kerouac, which I sincerely hated. This one was not at all similar to Kerouac, but it was just terrible. The characters were all the most obnoxious people I'd ever heard of. There are three women: 1, a young mom with lung cancer; 2, her sister who just lost her job as a professor for sleeping with her student; and 3, her friend who has gone through seven rounds of IVF in the last year (isn't that physically impossible? Doesn't it take more than two months to do one round??) and never got pregnant until after she found out her husband was cheating on her. And they were all TERRIBLE. Number 2 is an incredibly terrible jerk, and number 3 is a total pansy who spends all her time moaning after her cheating husband and waiting for him to call. There was no plot except that these three women were in a house together on Nantucket. I spent like six hours listening to this audiobook (almost one full hour of which was about their child had gone missing on the beach, and the mom is just wandering around looking for him half-heartedly, thinking, "Oh, I hope he's not drowned in the water,"--I'M SORRY but there is no way a real mom would have not been hysterical in that situation), thinking that it had to get better, but I finally had to give up.

But I wanted to still record it because I spent a dumb amount of time listening to it and since I hated it so much I felt like I needed to vent some more. I'd heard good things about Hilderbrand's books, so maybe I'd chosen the wrong one, but I am definitely not reading any more of hers after being burned so badly on this one.

Book #93: Still Life by Louise Penny

I have seen soooo many people talking about Louise Penny's books in the last few months that I decided I just had to see what they were all about. And I am definitely excited to check out some more! This book was the first in a series of 13 SO FAR about Chief Inspector Gamache, the head of murder investigations in Montreal, Quebec. I really liked a lot about this book, particularly the character of Gamache. He is a super nice, decent man, who loves his wife and is super close with her, who speaks kindly to everyone but who isn't afraid to be authoritative when he has to be, who is good at his job but not perfect. This book is solving the murder of an elderly woman, Jane Neal, in the tiny hamlet town of Three Pines. I thought the mystery was really well done, and I loved how Penny kind of skipped over the boring nitty-gritty mundane details about what Gamache had to do to solve the crime (she just would say "they got a warrant and went in" instead of spending half a page having Gamache actually go get the warrant, etc.) and focused more on the conversations he had and observations he made about people in order to give you a sense of what he was seeing. I liked Gamache's relationships he made with his colleagues, particularly Beauvoir, and his trainee, Nichol, who was obnoxious and smug and stubborn and very well written. I loved the side characters as well, and the whole art connection with the story. The town of Three Pines and the people in the town was the best part of the book, though; Penny does a great job of creating an image of the tiny village and life there, and making it seem like such an idyllic, wonderful place with the most interesting cast of characters.

I was pretty pleased with myself though--I figured out who had done it not even halfway through the book, but I think that may have been because I was listening to it and was forced to focus and hear every last word instead of skimming and reading quickly when I got excited, so I don't know if it would have been as obvious to me otherwise. But that didn't detract from my enjoyment of the story. I really liked it and am excited to start another one, especially since I just learned that they are all set in the tiny town of Three Pines, which I am intrigued to find out how she does.

I normally don't want to start a 13-book series--yikes, I have so much else I want to read--but since this was an audiobook, I feel like I can manage it. And there are 10 other audiobooks by her in our library catalog, so I can just read the few the library doesn't have and listen to the rest--so I may end up trying to continue the series, since I've enjoyed it.

Book #92: The Continuous Atonement by Brad Wilcox

This is not a book to speed-read through, and it is definitely one to revisit, often. I've read it before, but not for a very long time, and I was reading about the Atonement in the scriptures and wanted to beef up my understanding of it. When reading just the bare bones scriptures, I sometimes don't have enough deep thoughts to really internalize or apply the scriptures to myself. So something like this--that takes scriptures and does all the thinking for me to help me do that personal application--is really helpful.

Brad Wilcox is super fond of extended metaphors and using sentences like, "It's not like this, it's this" to prove his points. But I think those sorts of metaphors are probably really important to actually help people understand what you're talking about when you're talking about something as ethereal and complicated as the Atonement. I love the metaphor that he uses at the very beginning especially, about the sacrament prayers and how they have to be perfect, but that the priest has as many chances as they need to make them perfect--and how that is like our lives and our attempts to perfect ourselves in order to return to live with Heavenly Father. He makes lots of other excellent points throughout his book as well, such as the true reasoning behind the works/grace dilemma--we have to do the works not to help earn our salvation, but to make us into people who belong in the celestial kingdom and want to be there, after Christ brings us there. "The goal is not just being with God, but being like God" (68).

The reason why I was hoping to get out of this book was some thoughts about how I can apply the Atonement to myself more regularly. I was especially touched by the chapter about how Christ has us covered. He says, "He covers us when we feel worthless and inadequate... when we feel lost and discouraged... when we feel abused and hurt.... when we feel defenseless and abandoned" (49). The Atonement helps us, comforts us, and makes up for our mistakes. I am going to be thinking about these things for a while--and I want to re-read this book more often to internalize it all better. Really, really great thoughts in here.

Book #91: Wolf Hollow by Lauren Wolk

I listened to this book, and I think that tainted my enjoyment of it. This story felt very suspenseful and ominous, and I think I would have liked it better if I could have sped through it in two hours like it would have taken me to read it. As it was, I kind of dreaded coming back to it every time I was due to listen, and I'm pretty sure the only reason I actually finished this one was because it was only about 7 hours long, which felt very manageable.

This book is about Annabelle McBride, an eleven-year-old girl in 1943, who gets caught up with a bully at her rural school in--Pennsylvania? I guess I never paid attention to which state exactly it was. This bully, Betty, started demanding money from her and causing problems--but then the problems start getting bigger and bigger and involving more and more people, including Toby, the WWI vet suffering major PTSD who lives nearby, who many people think is strange but whom Annabelle and her family know is a good man. Annabelle learns the importance of her own choices and how to lie or tell the truth as the situation demands it, and she does all these things to try to protect Toby as Betty begins to try and drive him away.

It was a very non-dramatic story, in some ways--nothing totally traumatic happens to Annabelle--but things always felt as though something terrible was about to happen. She makes some choices that I was a little annoyed with, but I guess as an eleven-year-old you can't argue too much with their judgment sometimes. I was somewhat surprised by the ending--I expected things to be wrapped up nicely in their neat little bow and for the bully to learn her lesson and everything to return back to normal, but that's not how things ended, and I liked that it was a little different than I expected. Definitely a well-written book, but not quite my favorite in the world. I was also surprised that this was a middle-grade book, because nothing about it felt middle grade except for maybe the fact that the narrator/main character is eleven. It felt very serious and grown-up in the rest of it.

Book #90: Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee

After my effusive response to my last reading of To Kill a Mockingbird, I was not expecting Go Set a Watchman to live up to that book. And, long story short, it did not. And not just because the storyline is about how Scout discovers that Atticus actually has some bigoted ideas about race, which totally destroys her sense of the world--and ours, as readers, who have held Atticus Finch up as a bastion of equality and justice for the last fifty years. I of course was a little sad about that part of it, but that wasn't the worst of it, for sure--and I think if it had been done well, that could have been an interesting story about reconciling your childhood ideals with messy reality (for Scout and for us). However, this book was definitely missing the charm and style of TKAM, the overwhelming feeling of Maycomb that you get while reading that book, and the striking personality of Scout as we get the story from her perspective. But it's hard to be offended by Lee's problems as a writer in this book, because it seems pretty clear (to most people, anyway) that she probably had no intention of this book ever being published, that this was an unfinished manuscript that she wrote prior to the extensive revisions she did to get to TKAM. (Harper Lee was 89 when it was published, living in an assisted living center, apparently not in a sound mind, and her protective sister had just died two months prior to the publishers' announcement of "finding" a manuscript. It all seems pretty fishy to me.)

The major problem with this book is that it is unfinished and unpolished; many chapters are kind of uninteresting and the end of the book is filled with whole chapters of Scout raging about race politics at anyone who will listen for pages on end, which is dull and annoying, even if we as modern readers agree wholeheartedly with her. There are some fantastic scenes, though, and most of them are the flashbacks to Scout's childhood and are therefore most similar to TKAM--which is why it's easy to imagine that the editors may have pushed her to develop those more and helped her get to the book she ended up with. It's hard to say if this really does feel like a first draft of TKAM though--some characters are barely introduced and it's hard to imagine that we would care about them if we hadn't read TKAM first, so it feels more like a true sequel than the first reading of it. I totally get what sort of debate Lee was trying to start with this book, and I think it was really an interesting idea and that the whole topic of race relations in the south in the 60s was timely and important, but it felt like she was hammering it into our brains. Telling us, not showing us, like she did in TKAM in the end.

All in all, I'm glad to have finally read it, but glad that I didn't actually pay for it and buy into the dumb publishing house's scam (which I am convinced it was). And other than the few flashback scenes adding to my enjoyment of the characters, I don't think I will think too much about this book changing my view of the original.