Wee Free Library!

Look what I found as I was out on my bike ride this morning! About a mile from my house is this lovely Wee Free Library!

    

It's hard to tell from this picture, but there are almost a dozen books, including a book by Stephen King, a copy of Black Beauty, another kids' book called The Best School Year Ever, and a novel by M.C. Beaton. The front panel looks like plexiglass, and the whole thing looks well constructed to keep out weathery things that could cause harm to books.

This Wee Free Library is a block from an elementary school too, so lots of kids will see it. What a wonderful addition to my neighborhood!

Do you have a Wee Free Library near you?

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You by Caroline Kepnes

I stumbled upon this book at Target. It looked like a page turner and we were going on vacation, so I bought it.

     

It turns out I did not read it on vacation. But I was right, it was a page turner! When I did get to it, I was intrigued from the beginning. Here's how the book starts. I was drawn in by the second person narration...

"You walk into the bookstore and you keep your hand on the door to make sure it doesn't slam. You smile, embarrassed to be a nice girl, and your nails are bare and your V-neck sweater is beige and it's impossible to know if you're wearing a bra but I don't think that you are. You're so clean that you're dirty and your murmur your first word to me - hello - when most people would just pass by, but not you, in your loose pink jeans, a pink spun from Charlotte's Web and where did you come from?"

The tone sets the stage, as does the blurry cover art. The person isn't just observing this woman, he is scrutinizing her, judging her, owning her in his mind. Creepy.

Creepy, indeed. Kepnes keeps the tension taut throughout the whole book, as this narrator inserts himself into the life of this woman who happened to walk into the bookstore where he works. Events escalate, and...well, I'm not going to say any more. This is a good read!

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A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra

I know I am late to the party, as I am just now reading A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra. It has been on my radar since it came out in 2013. I saw it at Barnes and Noble, and remembered a friend's recommendation ("just READ it!", she said). So I am.

     

Starting in 2004 during the second Chechen war (I will admit I have been woefully ignorant about these conflicts), A Constellation of Vital Phenomena starts out with Havaa, a young girl, waking after the night she hid in the woods and her father was taken by the Feds. After her father was taken, she stayed the rest of the night with her neighbor, Akhmed, and his ill wife, Ulla.

Akhmed panics on this day after the disappearance of Havaa's father, as he knows that the Feds will likely be coming for the girl, too. He takes Havaa to a hospital that is several miles away to stay with Sonja, a woman doctor he has never met.

Moving between 1994 and 2004, Marra weaves the story of Havaa, her missing father, Dokka, Akhmed, Ulla, Sonja, another neighbor Khassan and his son, Ramzan who is an informer, and their war ravaged country.

While some of this book is intense - some of descriptions in the hospital are pretty graphic - this is some of the most stunning and beautiful prose I have ever read.

If you can, read this passage slowly...

"Sonja stood and walked to the flat, afraid of what she might hear next. At the kitchen table she examinded the glass of ice. Each cube was rounded by room temperature, dissolving in its own remains, and belatedly she understood that this was how a loved one disappeared. Despite the shock of walking into an empty flat, the absence isn't immediate, more a fade from the present tense you shared, a melting into the past, not an erasure, but a conversion in form, from presence to memory, from solid to liquid, and the person you once touched now runs over your skin, now in sheets down your back, and you may bathe, may sink, may drown in the memory, but your fingers cannot hold it. She raised the glass to her lips. The water was clean."

Not only is the writing beautiful, Marra also captures realities of loss, love, pain, grief and describes them in such a way that I see them with new eyes. I am in the middle of this and am reading slowly, savoring the writing.

Lovely and amazing.

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Language Arts by Stephanie Kallos

Do you remember watching the movie The Sixth Sense? And when, at the end, you realized that the boy, Cole, had been seeing dead people all along, it changed your experience of the entire movie? (At least that's how it was for me.) I didn't see the twist coming at all, and I loved it.

In Language Arts, we meet Cody and his family. Cody was a happy little boy. He was developing normally until he started to lose language. His parents, Charles and Alison, took him to specialist after specialist to find out what happened and to try to help him get better.

Cody doesn't get better. Shortly after the birth of Cody's sister, Emmy, Charles and Alison's marriage deteriorates. As Cody gets older, and ages out of the system that can provide care for him, Charles and Alison have to work together to find a suitable living situation for him.

     

We see everything as Charles and Emmy experience this. Kallos weaves together this family's struggle, including back story around Charles, with Charles as a child befriending an autistic classmate, language arts, and, interestingly, Palmer handwriting. Language Arts felt a little melancholy, heavy with this family's desperation to try to help Cody as well as deal with deteriorating relationships.

I was engaged in the story as it was, and then a Sixth Sense kind of twist came at the end that made me go back and reread passages of the book to see how she did it. SO well done!

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