Things You Save in a Fire by Katherine Center

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this audiobook. It was such a unique storyline, about Cassie, a female firefighter who is trying to integrate into a new, old-school male-only firehouse. I really enjoyed this different perspective and storyline... sometimes it feels like all contemporary fiction runs together and all of the romances are the same. All the girls are writers or working in an office somewhere, and they meet guys at work or at the gym or someplace... but this book was totally different. The environment of the firehouse was so different and fun, and the stories about what they did were fascinating. I'd never really pictured what working as a firefighter was like, and particularly what it was like being a female firefighter. Cassie was a really different narrator and she was dealing with her own abandonment issues from when her mom left her when she was a teenager, and it made her a really tough and hard person, and part of the story was how she began to thaw and change and become more open to love and new experiences. I loved Cassie as a character and was just rooting for her as she developed. I got so into the story that once the climax started happening, I had to borrow this as an e-book so I could read it super fast instead of listening to it more slowly as an audiobook. I had to know what happened RIGHT THEN and couldn't wait. This was VERY good and I loved it.

Savvy by Ingrid Law

I have been meaning to read this book for years, but never gotten around to it. I read some super-amazing reviews of it a few years ago, and kept remembering it, because the premise sounded pretty great: every member of this family gets a special power on the day they turn 13, and Mississippi (or Mibs) is about to turn 13 and find out what her special power is. I thought that sounded really fun. But her dad gets in a car accident right before her birthday, and is in the hospital, so everything gets turned upside down, and she doesn't have any idea what is going to happen to her. After a few things that happen on her birthday morning, she decides that she thinks her power is waking things up, and realizes she has to get to the hospital to wake up her dad from his coma. So she, and her brothers and a few friends, stow away on a Bible salesman's bus to catch a ride to the hospital, and end up on this road trip adventure to get there. I really liked the beginning and LOVED the ending of the book (I may have cried), but some of the road trip adventures dragged for me in the middle. (I guess I don't love road trip stories.) But it was a great, great story and I think it would be a huge favorite for the middle-grade crowd. This is one I would like to have on our shelves.

Food: A Love Story by Jim Gaffigan

After listening to Jeannie Gaffigan's book, it made me want to listen to some more Jim Gaffigan. So I got this audiobook from the library, and listened to it in basically one day (lots of nursing going on here). I feel like none of this was basically new information--if you've watched any of his comedy specials on Netflix, you've definitely heard all of his jokes before. I personally liked Dad is Fat better, because I love the parenting jokes and I love him making fun of big families and all of the funny stuff that goes along with it. But the food jokes were great and I definitely laughed out loud tons of times while listening to this. It was like a nine-hour comedy special (although let's be honest, the comedy specials on Netflix are better because of the timing and such, which doesn't always translate exactly to an audiobook version).

When Life Gives You Pears: The Healing Power of Family, Faith, and Funny People by Jeannie Gaffigan

I have liked Jim Gaffigan for years, and we went to his live show in the fall. And I've liked him even more as I've gotten to know about his wife and how the two of them are a writing team and how they do everything together, and how they canceled their successful TV show after realizing they couldn't both be doing that and be available to raise their kids. I think they both just seem like stand-up people (haha, get it?). In his show in the fall, Jim talked about his wife's brain tumor, and made a few jokes about it, and I'd read about it in the news back when it was happening as well. But this is a memoir that she wrote about her experience finding out that she had a massive, pear-shaped brain tumor in her brainstem, and then having to spend weeks and months recuperating after contracting pneumonia in the hospital. It was a fascinating story, and Jeannie is just as funny as her husband--she did a great job writing about her experiences without coming across as too depressing or sad, and being honest about it while still making you laugh. I thought it was a really fun book to listen to, and I came out of it liking her even more than her husband.

Also, this was the first audiobook I've listened to in months because with nursing, all of a sudden it's harder for me to read and I need something to be able to listen to while sitting there. This was a great book to get back into it.

The Vanishing Stair by Maureen Johnson

This is the second book in the Truly Devious series, and I blew through it just as quickly as I did the first one. Stevie is continuing her investigation of the Ellingham murders, but another student has disappeared and she has to figure out what happened to her as well. It all sounds so mysterious, and almost too coincidental, when you describe it that way, but when you read the story, it all makes total sense and works great. I was surprised at the end of the first book that there were no answers to the mystery in that one, that this book just continued Stevie's investigation, but I loved all of her discoveries and all the information you get from the author as you go. Johnson does an amazing job of dropping little pieces of data and documents from the past into her story, to give you, as the reader, more and more puzzle pieces as you figure things out along with Stevie. My main complaints about this book were minor--I still hated her love interest, and didn't get why she felt any responsibility or interest in him at all, and I really didn't like how she referred to one of the characters as "them." I feel like so many YA novels have to have a gay best friend (see Tweet Cute as well), which is great, but this is the first one I've seen with a character that is non-binary and uses a "them" pronoun, which is TERRIBLE to read. This character "wrapped themselves around" someone else, and "locked their eyes" on something, and I was so confused every time I read it and it took so long to make sense of what was being written. I understand wanting to be diverse, but I hate reading things that are so imprecise and difficult to read. I am not a fan of that grammatical change at all. So yes, a very minor quibble, but one that definitely stuck with me.

Truly Devious by Maureen Johnson

I really, really enjoyed this YA murder mystery. I had no idea what it was about, but a friend had recommended it to me several times, and I decided to check it out while we were in the hospital with our baby girl. I couldn't put it down and blew through it and the sequel in just a day each--and then I found out I have to wait for FOUR WEEKS for the final book in the trilogy from the library, without finding out the solution! Ahhh! I wish I'd requested that one sooner; I had no idea this book was going to suck me in like it did.

The book is about Stevie, a girl starting at Ellingham Academy, this school for super smart and super quirky kids that all have their own interests and pursuits. It's secluded on a mountain in Vermont, and is really well-known for a pair of unsolved murders during the first year it was founded in the 1930s. Stevie's passion is solving mysteries and researching crime, and she is determined to solve the Ellingham murders and to find out what really happened while she is at the school. And then--there's another murder at the school, and Stevie begins to try and solve that one too, and all sorts of things start to happen...

I really liked how readable this book was. It was fast and quick and there were all sorts of quips and references to things that weren't explained or drawn out--it was clearly written for YA, and fits in for that audience perfectly. I thought the characters were really fun and believable... I liked Stevie and her quirks, and I loved her friends Janelle and super-grumpy Nate. The one character I really disliked was her eventual love interest, who I could not at all understand and who seems like a terrible person. I hate when characters like people who suck. But the story itself was so well done, and I loved how Johnson incorporated both the older, 1930s mystery, and the contemporary murder, and had Stevie working to solve them both at the same time. She did a great job putting them both together and giving out a little bit of information at a time to keep you interested as you went. I really loved this book.

Tweet Cute by Emma Lord

I thought the premise of this book sounded adorable, and I wanted to read it while recuperating after having the baby--but I didn't end up wanting to wait until the baby was born to read it. This book is about Pepper, whose parents run a burger restaurant-turned international chain, and Jack, whose parents run a deli on the East Side of New York City--and they also go to the same school in New York City. They both end up being put in charge of their respective restaurants' Twitter accounts and get into a Twitter war with each other (without knowing it)--and their relationship progresses from there. I thought this was a very well done YA romance; it was exciting, fun, easy to read, not overly dramatic, and pretty believable. I loved the two main characters of Pepper and Jack, and I thought their hang-ups about each other and the conflicts they experienced were believable enough. I was kind of surprised by a twist at the ending, which was fun. I blew through this book in just this afternoon and evening because I didn't want to stop reading--it was the perfect distracting book to read while I wait for this baby to come.

A Jane Austen Education by William Deresiewicz

I don't know where this book recommendation came from, but I am a sucker for anything with Jane Austen in the title. This is not a rewrite or fan fiction, but the writing of a Jane Austen scholar analyzing what he learned from Jane Austen as he read her books and applied them to his life. I felt like he was appealingly honest about his own flaws and problems, and with how Jane Austen helped him to get over them--whether it was cockiness, loneliness, or indecision about what he should be doing with his life. I liked how he went over each of the books in turn and gave each one its fair due, and I felt like the lessons he gained from each one seemed believable and real. It did feel like it was getting  a little long at times... I could have been totally happy with the book being even half as long. But I always enjoy getting more out of my Jane Austen reading, so I didn't mind it too much (and it wasn't all that long to begin with).

The Work and the Glory 9: All is Well by Gerald N. Lund

This is the LAST book in the Work and the Glory series--I wanted to finish this series before the baby came, and it worked out that I did! I feel like I've learned a lot about Church history, and gained a lot of perspective about our modern-day trials as compared to those of the pioneers. (For example, in this time of the pandemic, it was eye-opening to remember how much sickness and epidemics played a part in their lives at that time, and how so many people died from disease back then before they knew how to treat them. We are spoiled these days compared to them. Dealing with disease is a part of the human experience, one that we have kind of forgotten about thanks to our modern medicine and doctors.)

The defining characteristic of this book was: LONG. It wasn't that much longer than some of the other books, but it was over 700 pages and I felt like some of the storylines could and should have been cut out. Will and Alice traveling on the ship, and Peter and Kathryn with the Donner/Reed party were interesting, but took up SO much more time than was necessary. I mean, I was definitely fascinated by the Donner/Reed party, but how come he tried to fit that all in to this storyline? It was overwhelming to keep track of all the different groups. And the most boring storyline was the main body of the pioneers, where most of the Steeds were. I feel like he should have cut out those extraneous storylines and added in more family drama and character development instead... there was basically nothing interesting happening for any of the individuals in the Steed family. I was disappointed that all of a sudden, because he is now baptized, Joshua is basically a cardboard cutout of Nathan, with no personality and no distinguishing traits. He didn't get mad once in this book, and that was basically his default setting in all of the other books. Just because he got baptized doesn't mean he became a robot. I feel like Lund should have had his baptism happen at the end of this book and plotted the books differently so that he included more in the last book and allowed for Joshua's conversion to happen in this one--that would have been a much more interesting way to end the series. In the end, I felt like this book was just a race to get the Saints across the prairie to the Salt Lake Valley, but I still felt like the story was unfinished by the time the book ended--probably because it was... How are they supposed to survive the winter without houses or enough food? Nobody seemed concerned enough about having enough to eat, either at Winter Quarters or in the Salt Lake Valley, even though we'd just witnessed what can happen with the Donner Party.

Overall, not the most satisfying finish to this gargantuan series, but I feel good about having read these again and I enjoyed the process.

The Work and the Glory 8: So Great a Cause by Gerald N. Lund

This book covers when the Saints left Nauvoo until they made it to Winter Quarters later that year. The main thing that surprised me about this book was how long it took the pioneers to get across the plains. I knew there was a Winter Quarters, of course, but I'd kind of thought it was for smaller groups of people--I had forgotten or never realized that it was for everyone that first winter after they left Nauvoo. I can't believe how annoying that must have been to Brigham Young to take so long to get across the plains. The main Steed family drama in this book was Joshua's conversion to the Church... which I thought was well-thought-out and believable, although I wouldn't have been surprised if it had taken longer, knowing Joshua's history. Every time Joshua had a question and asked Nathan about it, the chapter took the form of a Sunday School lesson about Gospel Principles, which was a little bit boring... and I sometimes think Lund exaggerates the level of doctrinal understanding the Saints back then had, when revelation was coming all the time and everything was new to everyone. I don't think Nathan would have sounded just like a modern-day elder's quorum president.

The Work and the Glory 7: No Unhallowed Hand by Gerald N. Lund

This book covers the next year and a half after Joseph Smith was killed, and how the Saints decide to leave Nauvoo and move West. It really brings home the feelings of indecision and how terrible the first few weeks after Joseph's murder were for the people of Nauvoo, and how they didn't know who was going to be in charge of the Church. It seems obvious to us now, but of course, that's where the seeds of the RLDS church came from, so it wasn't as obvious to them back then. I had totally forgotten about the big climax at the end of the book, and was taken aback by how sad it all was. I'm not sure how he's going to fill up two more books with the pioneers going across the plains, but I'm crossing my fingers that maybe I can finish both of the last two books before this baby comes. Phew!

The Work and the Glory 6: Praise to the Man by Gerald N. Lund

This book was fun to read and packed with drama and excitement. But of course, nobody wants to spend much time reading about polygamy--and the majority of the discussion about polygamy is how much the characters in the Steed family struggled with it and how terrible they all think it is. This is obviously an incredibly sensitive subject for everyone in the Church, and I think Lund did as well as he could have with it. It does seem like they resolve the issue pretty well and then nobody discusses it again, which seems unlikely, but oh well. I felt like he did a good job showing all of the negative forces at work in Nauvoo at the time, especially John C. Bennett and his cronies. The serious drama for the Steed family continues, with Kathryn getting struck by lightning and the terrible wagon accident at the end... and it ends with Joseph Smith being killed in Carthage Jail. This was an easy book to get sucked into and to read.

Eight Cousins by Louisa May Alcott

I am sure that I read this book when I was younger--either at my house or my grandma's house when we were visiting. I didn't really remember anything about the story, though, and I felt like it ended up being kind of a drag to read now. Maybe I'm just not getting along with the unbelievably "good" children in these books, and having a harder time dispensing with my unbelief here, but I felt like none of the characters in this book felt real. This story is about Rose, whose uncle becomes her guardian after her parents have died, and how he uses all of these unusual parenting and childrearing techniques to help her regain her health and happiness. And how she gets to know her seven boy cousins, who she is afraid of at the beginning of the book (come on, really?). I thought the unusual things that Uncle Alec pushes on Rose were the most interesting part of the story, seeing how they really thought about things and what he had to push back on and change in how Rose was being raised. But Rose herself was a cardboard cutout of a person, and it felt a little weird how Uncle Alec talked to her and treated her like a six-year-old instead of a fourteen-year-old, and how she was always sitting on his lap and stuff. It felt a little creepy with a girl that age. I have to say that I liked An Old-Fashioned Girl better than this one, and I don't think I'm going to force myself to read the sequel (although I bought it--hopefully Lucy will get into Louisa May Alcott someday and read it).

Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein

I read about this book on one of the book blogs I follow and was immediately interested in it because I resent the pressure that is placed on kids and parents to become hyper-specialized in their sports/hobbies/etc. at such a young age. I want my kids to be generalists and to be well-rounded (that's what my mom always talked about--being well-rounded) and we are never, ever going to invest the time and energy and money required to make our kids world-class athletes in any one sport, so I don't want them to be punished by not making it on a team because they don't practice it all day long. And this book gives some good thoughts about why being a generalist is more important and beneficial than being a specialist. I think the first chapter/the introduction about Tiger Woods vs. Roger Federer was a perfect introduction to this topic, but I think it was probably the most interesting part of the book. The rest of the book kind of felt like a slog. He talks about the important connections that generalists can make in research when they know more about the world than just their one subject, and how generalists are better at using analogies to understand things. I felt like there had to be better stories and more information about why generalizing was better though, and I felt like there had to be better takeaways than what he offered at the end of the book. This was definitely interesting, but it took a lot of energy to read.

By the Shores of Silver Lake by Laura Ingalls Wilder

I was tempted to skip this book in our reading aloud of the Little House books, because it's always seemed kind of forgettable to me. No iconic scenes like the grasshoppers eating everything or Pa building a house from scratch. But we decided to read it and I'm glad we did. The boys really enjoyed the details about the railroad and how the railroad was being built. They just really enjoy everything about these books. We had five chapters left in it this morning, and I read them while they played with Legos, and as soon as we finished they yelled, "LET'S START THE NEXT ONE!" They really loved it and I am super glad we read it. But I am really looking forward to The Long Winter because that one has always stuck in my memory.

An Old-Fashioned Girl by Louisa May Alcott

I used to have a big collection of Louisa May Alcott's books when I was younger--not JUST Little Women and Little Men, but a lot of the other books she wrote as well. After reading Little Women in the fall, I had this desire to revisit some of her other books, and I bought a few that I vaguely remembered based on their titles and brief summaries that I could find online. I finally just re-read this one, An Old-Fashioned Girl, and it felt just like I remembered. It goes right along with Little Women, and The Five Little Peppers, and All-of-a-Kind Family--all of these stories that are about normal life back then, but with an extra dose of sermonizing about how hard work and humility are the best thing that anyone can have. As a kid, I didn't notice or mind those things; as an adult, they stand out a little more (and plus, the characters become more obviously un-real the older I get, because no one is cheerful and happy dealing with their poverty their entire lives). I still love these stories and I happen to agree with Alcott's preaching, even if it doesn't strike me as believable all the time. I do think the principles her characters are embodying are right, even if it's much harder to live them than she makes it seem like (which I think she knew herself, if Jo is any indication). I liked Polly and her sweet romance with Tom in this book, and I liked how Alcott paints the fashionable society as being filled with ennui and boredom. (It always seemed like it would be that way to me.) I really enjoyed this and read it in just over a day.

The War I Finally Won by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

After just re-reading The War That Saved My Life for our book club, I couldn't help myself but to read The War I Finally Won again. I did read it two years ago when I first encountered them, but I loved the first one so much that I wanted to finish off Ada's story. I don't have much more to add to my previous review of this book, but I just think this book holds up and it did such a good job giving a great perspective on the war in Britain, plus gave such a good story about Ada overcoming these challenges in her life--particularly her emotional struggles overcoming her traumatic childhood. I love how real Bradley is and how Ada doesn't overcome everything at once.