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Category Archives: What I’m Reading

The Light Between Oceans

Thanks for the recommendation, Laura.  I really liked this book.  A straightforward narrative told from the perspective of Tom, a “hero” of World War 1 who relishes his postwar job as a lighthouse keeper for its solitude until he meets Isabelle and brings her to Janus Rock as his wife.  When a boat washes up […]

How To Talk So Teens Will Listen & Listen So Teens Will Talk

Small Victories

Essay collection.

From The Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Comatant

Satire about a Filipino immigrant fashion designer arrested by Homeland Security and held in Guantanamo Bay.

Orbiting Jupiter

by Gary Schmidt.  Very spare writing, violent and sad ending.  I really didn’t love this.  It’s hard for me to imagine a middle schooler who would but the main character has been terribly traumatized and I haven’t so I can’t know.  I read this directly after reading The War That Saved My Life about another […]

The Invention of Wings

Sarah Grimke, daughter of slave owner in South Carolina in the late 1800s.  Hetty, or Handful as her mauma calls her, is one of her family’s many slaves.  Absorbing story of their simultaneous struggles to escape — Sarah, her status as a woman and the mental chains that prevent her from exercising the inner outrage […]