Ahhhh, to be young and freshly in love, without all the grunt work that comes with the middle age slog. Comics that’ll make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, but, ultimately, after putting the book down, it’s a pretty fleeting feeling. But, for those few moments of warmth down in my cockles, it was worth a Netgalley request.

Little Moments of Love by Catana Chetwynd went on sale May 15, 2018.

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

Urggghghhghifadjghgh. I hate it when books are important but just not well written. The memoir parts are cloying and simplistic, the details about when and where Watt-Cloutier became in charge of what are dull, and the real meat of the argument, when she actually talks about policy, especially Indigenous resource extraction in the Arctic, where she really shines, is pushed away to the back. She says it again and again: her goal is to put a human face on climate change in the Arctic, and so, obviously, in a book about her, she (along with some family members) is the human face, but it ends up being a “and then this happened and then this happened” until she gets to her arguments in the end. Interspersing different arguments with human faces maybe would have kept my attention more.

I know you’re not enjoying that book Geoff says to me. Because it’s the fourth night you are reading it.

On one hand, you should read it because you should learn about the Arctic and climate change and bad things happening (which always gives me anxiety and makes me feel helpless because I feel helpless with all this), but on the other hand, it’s kind of like lumpy oatmeal, so eat it ‘cuz it’s good for you but there’s probably a more palatable style that the oatmeal could have been presented in.

The Right To Be Cold by Sheila Watt-Cloutier went on sale (in the US, it’s been out awhile here in Canada) May 1, 2018.

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

This is an odd book. The illustrations — digital collages by Isabelle Cardinal — are quirky, and while not necessarily the wrong choice for a book about Auschwitz, over power the story, which starts abruptly and rather cliched (waking up), and then finishes just as abruptly. This isn’t Holocaust 101 For Kids — we aren’t given a primer on Nazis or concentration camps or the Second World War. And that’s the saddest thing about this book — my daughter is privileged enough that she would need a Holocaust 101 before reading this book to understand it. Imagine if you don’t have to do that, to introduce that narrative to a child because the existence of it (or similar events like what happened in Rwanda, Cambodia, the former Yugoslavia, etc.) is omnipresent in her and her family’s history. That makes me so sad, even if I found the book so uneven.

The Promise by Pnina Bat Zvi and Margie Wolfe went on sale April 18, 2018.

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

Over on Reading In Bed, Laura makes some good points about book reviews, and I took away from it that maybe don’t review something unless you have something new, different, or unique to add to the conversation. But, equally, if I stop reviewing books, Netgalley will stop giving me free books, so I’m in a bit of a quandary because I have nothing new, different, or unique to say about Herding Cats except that I love it, and that Sarah Andersen and I are secret, over-thinking, heavy period, anxiety-ridden, introverted best friends (secret because I know we are best friends, but she doesn’t yet, because being introverted and living far away from her, there has been no chance for us to meet and me to stare creepily at her rather than approaching her and saying hey I’m meghan and I love you so much and be my friend okay?).

My nine year old, after also reading Herding Cats: You and this person are exactly the same mom!

See. See! SEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

Herding Cats by Sarah Andersen went on sale March 27, 2018.

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

It’s. So. Beautiful.

The epub.

I am so used to getting epubs that aren’t final versions or are final versions and just suck, with weird margins and fonts, and low-res images I can’t make head nor tails of. Ramadan by Ausma Zehanat Khan is just so beautiful and colourful and laid out in such a way that what I’m focusing on is the fact that someone, somewhere (I guess, to be specific, someone(s) at Orca Publishing) knows how to make beautiful epubs.

So beautiful.

Content: A good introduction to Ramadan for kids, probably up to early high school. There are recipes (lassi, yay!) and information, but it’s so beautiful it could have just been lorem ipsum text in parts because the pictures and layout, be still my graphic-design beating heart. It would be good for a classroom discussion, maybe taking the pressure off any Muslims to feel like they have to be ambassadors/educators to everyone else (I remember a classmate fasting for Ramadan for the first time growing weary of having to explain again and again and again).

But the beauty. It’s so beautiful the book. It’s worth it for the beauty alone.

Ramadan by Ausma Zehanat Khan went on sale March 27, 2018.

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

No more book length plot like the last Phoebe and her unicorn book I read 🙁 The two of you who regularly read my reviews know what a sucker I am for plot. Man, I love plot. Cute little few pages story-lines are all right, but plot: plot is like pancakes, I could eat it all day.

So it’s cute. Phoebe and Marigold get up to this-and-that. Dakota is snotty as ever. I think there’s a Hallowe’en party? See — without a nice, rigid, plot-scaffolding, I’ve already forgotten most of what I read. Sigh. But Tesfa still likes these books, so that’s all that matters, and the next time Netgalley has one to review, you can bet I’ll be hitting that request button straight away.

Unicorn of Many Hats by Dana Simpson went on sale March 20, 2018.

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

Once upon a time I read a book about the Czech Republic where someone (the author? the editor?) translated some of the Czech words but none of the German ones, which annoyed me because I took Russian in university, not German, and could often suss out the Slavic-based Czech on my own, whereas the German remained incomprehensible to me. Similarly (sort-of, maybe — okay it’s a bit of stretch), I keep putting the ‘z’ in Urzidil in odd places where I think it should be because I guess even the more Slavic parts of Czech culture ended up being just as incomprehensible to me as the German words in another book that is in no way related to this one, The Last Bell, that I’m supposed to be reviewing.

So the whole thing feels like a dream. I read the stories in bed, before sleeping, so maybe that’s why. Maybe it’s because there’s a story about a talking painting and another about a girl who can touch nature. There’s also a story about villagers on either side of a pond fighting about cheesecakes and venison. There are bank clerks and forest wardens and countries (Czechoslovakia) that no longer exist and none of it seems real because it isn’t real anymore, after Nazis and Soviets and globalization destroyed it all. What was that Zweig book I read awhile ago: Messages from a Lost World? They gave the title to the wrong book, s’all I’m saying.

Maybe I should go to Prague, other parts of Bohemia. Maybe then this will all seem real. Well, not the talking stolen portrait part I hope.

The Last Bell by Johannes Urzidil went on sale April 25, 2017.

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

It’s a ghost story and a mystery and some stuff about mental health and kind of a hodge-podge that gets spooky with an unsatisfying resolution (but at least not, thankfully, it was all a dream or she’s secretly hallucinating, so yay on me for finally not inadvertently selecting via Netgalley such laziness). I just can’t get past how unsatisfying the dénouement was when the set-up — a depressed girl working nights at a medical specimen museum that is haunted by a ghost from when the building was an asylum — was so full of potential and then squandered.

I’m actually angry about it, like personally affronted. It could have been so wonderful. I am rage-filled on the internet!

Archival Quality by Ivy Noelle Weir went on sale March 6, 2018.

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

(or how I am using Netgalley to slowly accumulate the collected works of Stefan Zweig).

(Also, again I have selected on Netgalley that I would like to connect with the author and Netgalley has done nothing NOTHING! to make this happen and just because Zweig has been dead since 1942, that is no excuse. Netgalley, you put that option to connect to dead people, then I am expecting you to follow through.)

(Also, as per the last time I wrote about Stefan Zweig, I must mention the sheer beauty in futility of his death: likely killing himself in Brazil in 1942, in part as a rebuke, and in part as desperation, against the Nazis. It seems like a gorgeously fictitious way to die.)

Yay! More Zweig (which if you say in a very poor German accent, sounds a lot like swag, which is what getting another Stefan Zweig book to read is like: glorious, unearned, luxurious swag). Five short essays/stories on points in history where fate or people or I don’t really know — the collection starts with Zweig dribbling some Tolstoi spew to elucidate something about history and importance or people, I don’t know. It read like a twelve year old with a thesaurus trying to pad out an essay. I even went back after I read the rest of the book to try and make sense of it and nope. And I was like “Zweig — why are you doing this to me?” But thankfully, the spew is like two pages and then we get right into the meat and reading Zweig is like a blanket on a bed next to a fire and it’s just so easy to slip on in there and read about history that I forgive your Tolstoi-spew Zweig. I still don’t understand it, but I forgive it, because I got to spend yesterday evening reading Zweig in my bed and it was wondrous.

Triumph and Disaster by Stefan Zweig went on sale November 14, 2017.

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