Booknotes: Last Week’s Reading

Finished The Whisper of Glocken, Carol Kendall’s sequel to The Gammage Cup. It was even better than Gammage, though The Firelings still holds the top spot in my heart. I want to write at more length about Kendall’s beguiling, quirky, suspenseful books, especially her fondness for bands of unlikely heroes whose faults turn out, Meg Murry-like, to be their strengths. For now I’ll just say that I highly recommend all three of these novels as family read-alouds or as satisfying read-alones for boys, girls, and fantasy-loving adults.

Received an advance review copy of Mindblind, a new YA novel by Jennifer Roy about a 14-year-old boy with Asperger’s and a genius-level intellect. I enjoyed it, was fascinated by the way Nathaniel’s mind works, and simultaneously appreciated and felt wistful over the general awesomeness of his mother and circle of friends. It is clearly a book with a mission, seeking to help readers understand Asperger’s and autism, but it mostly puts story first. Anyway, I’m all for helping readers (including me) better understand Asperger’s and autism. Once again, I’m working on a better, deeper-digging post about this book and a few others that have moved me recently: Kathy Erskine’s brilliant and powerful Mockingbird; Cynthia Lord’s Rules; Charlotte Moore’s memoir about her sons George and Sam. All enthusiastically recommended. (But George and Sam is not for younger readers.)

River in the Desert, that book about the LA aqueduct I’ve been dabbling in for two months. I’m not going to finish it (I see that now), but I’ve learned a lot and it’s certainly a fascinating piece of history, with far-reaching consequences.

And then Scott brought home A.S. Byatt’s The Children’s Book, which I’ve been in line for at the library for months and months. When did it pub? Since that day. It’s as big as my first NYC apartment, so yeah, there goes the rest of my summer reading plans. LIKE I CARE. Two chapters in, I’m riveted, and I have very high hopes.