Review: Me and the Pumpkin Queen

Title: Me and the Pumpkin Queen
Author: Marlane Kennedy
Category: Fiction, Children's
Rating: 2.5/5
Summary: 11-year-old Mildred starts growing giant pumpkins as a way to reconnect with her mom who passed away when she was 6.

Review: The best parts of this book were the ones about growing giant pumpkins. It's easy to see the author did her homework on the topic. The story was alright, but a few things bothered me: Mildred didn't always sound 11 years old—saying things like "to no avail," when it wasn't part of her character to be precocious. A few parts weren't really necessary and slowed the story down, like stepping the reader through every single thing Mildred does when she gets home from school one day. And finally, there were a few things that didn't feel resolved, like a mention of how the dad and his co-worker should go on a date but it's never mentioned again.

Overall, I wouldn't recommend this unless you're really into pumpkins.

Review: What's Going on in There?

Title: What's Going on in There?: How the Brain and Mind Develop in the First Five Years of Life
Author: Lise Eliot
Category: Nonfiction
Rating: 4/5
Summary: Neurobiologist Lise Eliot brings together insights from biology and cognitive psychology about how a child's mind develops.

Review: Just about every day as I was reading this book, I would read an interesting sentence or paragraph out loud to Erik. I found it fascinating, and before it goes back to the library I'm going to type up a few quotes to keep around for reference.

A few interesting things I learned:

• The flavor of your breast milk changes depending on what you eat.
  
• For optimal language development, it's important to have conversations with even young infants. You can do this with face-to-face contact and taking turns so your child gets to hear you speak but also gets a chance to practice herself. Even babies need to know that they are being addressed and that they are being heard.
  
• Sensitive parenting can improve a child's temperament. This means being aware of a baby's signals and responding promptly to her needs. And no matter how busy you are, they should feel that you are available and not ignoring them.
  
• Babies prefer novelty—new places, toys, experiences. It helps their brains grow.
  
• Daily infant massage improves a baby's motor skills development.

I like how the author structures each chapter—starting with the biology up front and then ending with how you can encourage that particular area of development, whether it's a sense, motor skills, social-emotional growth, memory, language, or intelligence. (I have to admit that I skipped over some of the biological details, and that structure made it easy for me to do that!)

The book did leave me with a few unanswered questions. For example, I wanted to know what impact baby sign language has on overall language development. And the author mentions that children in bilingual homes start talking later, but she didn't talk about the optimal age for starting to introduce a second language.

But I would highly recommend this book to any parent interested in how their child's mind is developing.

Review: The Sweet Far Thing

Title: The Sweet Far Thing
Author: Libba Bray
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 4/5
Summary: Like her mother before her, Gemma Doyle can travel to an enchanted world called the realms. But when Gemma came up against the corrupted sorceress who killed her mother, she bound the magic to herself to protect all worlds from the sorceress. Now all manner of powerful organizations are trying to wrest the magic away from Gemma, and she doesn't know who she can trust.

Review: Clever, passionate, self-deprecating Gemma Doyle—I'm going to miss you. This final book of the Gemma Doyle trilogy was maybe a little on the long side, but I enjoyed it all and I was sad when it was over. At the moment I finished reading the last page, I found myself wanting to immediately start re-reading the first book of the trilogy—A Great and Terrible Beauty. The only other time I've felt that urge with a fiction series is with Harry Potter!

I can't wait to see what else this writer does.

Review: The Sorta Sisters

Title: The Sorta Sisters
Author: Adrian Fogelin
Category: Fiction, Children's
Rating: 2.5/5
Summary: Two lonely girls—an orphan who just moved to a new foster home and a motherless girl who lives on a boat with her dad—become pen pals and discover they share a love of science.

Review: Sorta good. I liked the author's drawings throughout, and I liked the characters well enough. But the book was sooo slooow! It was almost 300 pages, and too many scenes seemed too long and drawn out or not necessary at all.

Review: A Drowned Maiden's Hair

Title: A Drowned Maiden's Hair: A Melodrama
Author: Laura Amy Schlitz
Category: Fiction, Children's
Rating: 3.5/5
Summary: An 11-year-old orphan is adopted by three sisters who give her nice clothes and food but keep her secret from everyone they know.

Review: What an eerie little story! I loved it. The main character Maud has just the right amount of spunk—she's no Pippi Longstocking but she can take care of herself. As a lonely orphan, she starts out thinking that any attention is good attention, but she learns along the way that maybe it's not always worth the trade-off.

Review: Flash Point

Title: Flash Point
Author: Sneed B. Collard
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 3.5/5
Summary: A high school sophomore who lives in a logging community finds himself disagreeing with just about everyone in town about why the nearby forest fires are so bad.

Review: YA novels with environmental themes can be hit or miss for me, but I enjoyed this one. Even though the environmental issues were central to the story, it didn't feel preachy at all. The details about birds of prey were so vivid. I'm too much of a chicken to watch nature TV shows about predators, but this book had me riveted and I didn't mind (too much) reading about the birds eating mice and rabbits. And the scenes with the wildfire had me reading at lightning speed to find out what happens at the end!

Review: Downsiders

Title: Downsiders
Author: Neal Shusterman
Category: Fiction, Children's
Rating: 2.5/5
Summary: A boy from a secret underground world called the Downside breaks the rules of his world and sneaks above-ground.

Review: After the first 100 pages, I still wasn't into this book, so I skimmed the rest of the way just to get an idea of what happened in the plot. The problem for me was that neither of the main characters seemed to have a terribly important problem they needed to solve. The boy character, Talon, has a sick little sister at one point, but she gets better pretty fast.

The setting was intriguing, but I just couldn't connect with the characters.

Review: Influencer

Title: Influencer: The Power to Change Anything
Author: Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler
Category: Nonfiction
Rating: 4/5
Summary: This book articulates the strategies that the world's most influential people use to solve persistent, resistant problems.

Review: The biggest eye-opener for me was the point that verbal persuasion can't solve all the world's problems, especially when you're trying to convince someone to change their behavior. I've always believed in the power of a carefully crafted argument and prided myself on being able to put forth an effective argument for certain things. But this book made me realize that verbal persuasion is just one eensy weensy technique in the grab-bag of influential techniques, and it's an overused and often ineffective technique at that.

I love how this book teases out the different techniques and gives lots of examples of each. The authors recommend that you read it with a problem in mind that you want to solve. The problem I kept in mind as I was reading was how to get more people at my company to recycle everything that's possible to recycle. Too many times at work, I walk by a trash can that contains a perfectly recyclable piece of paper or aluminum can. And the recycling bin is right. next. to. the. trash. If the person had just moved their hand a measly couple of inches to one side, they could have dropped the item in a recycling bin instead of the trash! But I digress...

For some of the techniques, I immediately got ideas for how to apply them to this problem. For others, I couldn't think of anything. So while I don't think all these techniques will work for every problem, this book certainly made me look at the lack of recycling at my office in a new light, and it gave me a renewed sense of hope for increasing the amount we recycle.

I'm going to put this on my wish list to own because I could see myself referring to it fairly often. The authors also have a web site, influencerbook.com, with a worksheet you can fill out to brainstorm solutions to a problem you're trying to solve.

Review: The Starfish and the Spider

Title: The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations
Author: Ori Brafman, Rod A. Beckstrom
Category: Nonfiction
Rating: 2.5/5
Summary: This book argues that decentralized "starfish" organizations are more powerful than more traditional top-down, hierarchical "spider" organizations.

Review: Mildly interesting. It's been compared to The Tipping Point, but I didn't have any big "aha" moments like I did with The Tipping Point. They gave lots of examples of successful decentralized organizations. And they did try to summarize the qualities those successful groups had. But that part was pretty short—I wanted more of that. I didn't get a lot out of the book that I feel like I can apply in real life. Whereas The Tipping Point helped me to start making connections about how to create tipping points for things I care about. If you're looking for practical advice on how to encourage a decentralized community feel in an organization, this book doesn't have much to offer.

Review: The Off Season

Title: The Off Season
Author: Catherine Gilbert Murdock
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 3.5/5
Summary: D.J. Schwenk starts her junior year of high school as a linebacker on the football team. Just as her relationship with the quarterback at a rival high school starts to heat up, real life gets in the way.

Review: I liked this sequel better than The Dairy Queen because the action picked up a lot faster. It's easy to root for this honest, hard-working girl who just so happens to be a linebacker. And even though the plot was a little more heavy than the first book, I think it was handled in a much more balanced way that left me feeling hopeful at the end. I also liked that certain things weren't given a Hollywood ending.

Review: Writer Mama

Title: Writer Mama: How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids
Author: Christina Katz
Category: Nonfiction
Rating: 4/5
Summary: Freelance writer Christina Katz offers advice for moms wanting to begin a freelance writing career.

Review: I'll definitely be purchasing a copy of this book to keep. The advice for starting a freelance writing career is straightforward and practical, especially how to start off small and work your way up to bigger publications. And by doing just the first few exercises in the book, I got a ton of ideas for articles I could write.

If you're interested in writing fiction, some of the advice will be helpful to you, but in general the focus was on nonfiction freelance writing for magazines, newspapers, and so on.

Review: Writing Motherhood

Title: Writing Motherhood: Tapping Into Your Creativity as a Mother and a Writer
Author: Lisa Garrigues
Category: Nonfiction
Rating: 3.5/5
Summary: Writing teacher Lisa Garrigues offers advice on chronicling your experience of motherhood.

Review: This book has a lot of great ideas for writing prompts. I was expecting more practical information about balancing motherhood and a writing life—there was some, just not a lot. But this book would be worth owning for all the great prompts. You would never be able to say "I don't know what to write about!"

If you're looking for a book with more practical advice for moms about launching a writing career, check out Writer Mama: How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids.

Books of 2008 (So Far)

I'm going to start posting reviews of the books I read, but here's a quick summary of the books I've read so far in 2008. Ratings are out of 5 total. You can find reviews in my LibraryThing library.

And if you haven't heard of LibraryThing, it's a site where you can catalog all the books you own and/or read. Then you can see who's liked the same books as you and get some great recommendations for what to read next. I also like it because I can keep up with what my friends are reading and get good recommendations that way too. And the best part is it's free up to 200 books! Even after that, a lifetime membership is just $25.

Nonfiction

• Birthing from Within—3.5
• Ina May's Guide to Childbirth—3.5
• Good Nights: The Happy Parents' Guide to the Family Bed (and a Peaceful Night's Sleep!)—4
• The Happiest Baby on the Block: The New Way to Calm Crying and Help Your Newborn Baby Sleep Longer—3.5
• The Vaccine Book: Making the Right Decision for Your Child—4
• Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life—5
• Book Crush: For Kids and Teens - Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment and Interest—3.5
• Nursing Mother, Working Mother—3.5

Fiction, Adult

• Austenland—3.5
• Ella Minnow Pea—3

Fiction, Young Adult

• Twilight—3.5
• New Moon—3
• Eclipse—3
• Sorceress—2.5
• Rebel Angels—4
• Flush—4
• The Secret Under My Skin—3.5
• Dairy Queen—3
• Frannie in Pieces—3

Fiction, Children's

• When Zachary Beaver Came to Town—3.5
• Olive's Ocean—3.5
• The City of Ember—3.5
• The People of Sparks—3.5
• The Invention of Hugo Cabret—3.5
• Semiprecious—3.5
• Home, and Other Big, Fat Lies—1.5
• Clementine—3
• So B. It—3.5
• Criss Cross—3
• Skulduggery Pleasant—3