This book has a very long title. Also, it didn’t answer the most persistent rumors (stuff like where Jimmy Hoffa ended up). At least not in my opinion.

It’s a cute book of science questions with answers and cute drawings. Each question gets a couple hundred words devoted to it, taking about four or five pages each with the drawings. There’s nothing too deep (we aren’t explaining string theory here or anything like that). It took me about forty-five minutes to read the whole thing, spread out over two days. I’m not one hundred percent clear who the audience for this book is supposed, having never listened (or really known about) the AsapSCIENCE blog/youtube channel/whatever. A lot of the questions seem to be ones my six year old would ask (Can sneezing pop your eyeballs out? Why do we itch? Where does all the light go when you turn off the lights?) but then there are others that really aren’t kid based (The science of morning wood), so maybe the audience is meant to be teenagers? Adults with a recreational interest in science? It struck me like a book to leave out in a waiting area because everything is chicken-nugget sized.

I don’t know if I learned anything from the book though. But then again, I have a pretty solid natural science background 😉

AsapSCIENCE … by Mitchell Moffit and Greg Brown went on sale March 17, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I have a real soft spot for middle-grade novels. Middle grade books are the books where you see readers actually coming into their own. There’s no more of the forced level reading like in grades one and two. It’s all the kids’ choice. And no one ever became a reader because they read War and Peace or Wuthering Heights. They became readers after reading The Phantom Tollbooth and Matilda. So, ignoring the suggestion of “middle grade” inherent in the title, I’ve been reading them to Tesfa since she was four because I don’t have the patience for picture books, which seems strange considering a picture book takes three minutes to read and to read a middle-grade novel aloud takes four or five hours. I like plot because, unlike, Alice, I do see the use of reading a story with no pictures in it. Hopefully I am forcing encouraging Tesfa to appreciate plot too.

So I read The Swallow: A Ghost Story aloud to Tesfa this week. It’s full of lots of little short chapters, with most chapters divided into two sub-chapters, one from each of the protagonists’ perspectives. It was Tesfa’s first experience with a book with more than one narrator and I had to explain that type of story-telling after the first chapter. But she caught on, although every now and then she would ask me to clarify whether Rose or Polly was telling the story at that point. The book has a cute Toronto setting in the 1960s, which made me think of my mum, who grew up in Toronto in the 1960s. I don’t know if it was a book really intended for reading out loud, since sometimes the sentences were repetitive when one said them (i.e. falling into step beside me as we went down the steps, emphasis mine) but if Tesfa had been old enough to read the story quietly to herself, I doubt she would have noticed. The twist at the end surprised Tesfa, but let’s just say that if you’re my age and have seen a certain movie (clicking on the link counts a spoiler), then the reveal wasn’t as shocking as it was for my six year old.

But, what is the point of reading a middle-grade novel to a middle-grade kid without getting her opinion on it? So yesterday, when we finished, I asked Tesfa a few questions and got her to tell me her thoughts on The Swallow: A Ghost Story. There are spoilers in the answers to her questions, so stop reading here if you don’t want to find out some of the plot.

What was the book about? Polly and Rose. Two girls become friends. Polly thinks Rose is the ghost at first. But Polly is actually the ghost!

Who do you think would like the book? Not Geoff! (Tesfa’s dad, who doesn’t like scary stories) People who like scary stories.

Was the book really scary? Not too scary.

What age is this book good for? Six or seven, like me.

Favourite character? Rose, because she could see ghosts.

Did you like the ending? I liked the whole story as it was.

Do you think there will be a sequel? I don’t know.

From one to five stars, how would you rank this book? One hundred stars, no one thousand!

So, it was a good book? YES!

The Swallow: A Ghost Story by Charis Cotter went on sale September 9, 2014.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Road trip!

1988: I Want to Talk with the World is, as one might guess by the previous sentence, is about a road trip. Our narrator is driving across China to pick up his friend from prison. A sex-worker comes along for the ride. He thinks about his childhood. For example, he was an eye-exercise monitor in school and if there was ever any doubt that I know so little about China it is completely encompassed in the fact that their are daily eye-exercises with monitors to ensure they are being done correctly. Also, this quote from 1988: Since leaving home, I’ve seen all sorts of strange shubbery. I don’t even know what to do with that thought.

But road trips are road trips. They stop for snacks. They get in a traffic jam. They sleep at run-down motels. The rhythm of the road trip, the random thoughts and the philosophising-as-the-scenery-rolls-past, it’s all there. The universality of the roadtrip. Although, I really wish that our narrator wasn’t a john, even if he tries to paint himself as a valiant one (i.e. if he opens the door to a sex-worker, he pays her for her services regardless of whether he thinks her to be attractive or not. Um, yeah, okay.), but then he ends up kind of adorably buffoonish. I mean, it’s hard not to root for someone who ends up tossing cremated ashes into the wind and having them blow back all over him, because, basically that’s the sort of thing that would happen to me.

The prose and story veers wildly. There are trite sentiments (That nasty thing called time was passing). There are cute and affecting memories, like the story about all the kids playing marbles. There are completely ridiculous and useless coincidences (although I couldn’t help thinking of some quote I read somewhere by someone who I don’t remember basically saying that what isn’t surprising in life is coincidences, it’s how few there are given the huge number of possibilities. Maybe it was some physicist or a self-help author?). There are his memories of him trying to find his first love before he even knew her. Still, it’s really hard to know what to expect and whether some of the randomness (seriously, shrubbery?) has more to do with cultural divides or translation.

The narrator’s a rake, but he’s rather endearing. That’s the main thing I took away from this.

1988: I Want to Talk with the World by Han Han went on sale January 13, 2015.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Near the beginning of this book, our narrator corrects a non-native-English speaker’s English (prolixity to proximity). It’s one of the few times she (the narrator) does something, rather than simply being a receptacle for the other character’s life-stories and foibles, because this is what the narrator is in this story: an urn that all the other characters, and for such a short novel, they are legion, pour themselves into. But back to the correcting of English — it’s sort of a jackass thing to do to a complete stranger who is speaking to you in a language not his own, isn’t it? Plus, since she’s able to correct him, she understood what he meant when he said it incorrectly, so why did she do it? The novel ends with her correcting his English again. I don’t know why. I think if I did know why, maybe I would understand this book better.

Outline is like a big nineteenth century pastoral novel, except for it being twenty-first century and short and set mainly in urban Athens. But it has that feeling of weightiness and heft and importance and description. Like a nineteenth century novel, especially say a melodrama like The Woman in White or The Wanderer, a sense of disbelief is required (that or the Greek education system is just churning out wonderfully adept English speakers, which it may be). Like a big nineteenth century novel, I get the impression that if I had at least a Masters in English, I would have gotten a lot more out of it than I did. I enjoyed it. I liked reading the stories of the people baring their lives to our narrator. But I just don’t know. Am I jealous that our narrator has that sort of aura or personality or welcoming face that lets others unburden themselves to her, or do I simply not believe it? Is this even a novel? It’s like a theory of a novel, or a theory of characterization, or a theory of something. Not much happens outside the strangers’ unprompted sharing. But, as I said, I think English lit people will like it. I think people who don’t like theory will hate it. How flummoxed someone would be if he were given this book and told to make a Michael Bay-esque movie of it. That thought made me laugh out loud. Others may have looked at me.

What happens in this book: nothing. But I gave it four of five stars anyway.

Outline by Rachel Cusk went on sale September 4, 2014.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.