What books are you reading?

[Richard W]

That's been out for a while in the UK - I saw it in bookshops before Christmas. It's one of those books people buy each other as gifts. It actually looked quite comprehensive and surprisingly informative, but I didn't buy a copy.

[crocoduck_hunter]

I'm reading Cave of Bones, the latest Navajo Nations mystery by Anne Hillerman.

[Jusenkyo no Pikachu]

I finished reading The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl: 2 Fuzzy, 2 Furious today.

For those unfamiliar, this is a book series set in a somewhat different universe to the regular Marvel comic book. In this series, Squirrel Girl is a teenager living in Shady Oaks, a nice quiet northeastern suburb. Except, of course, all is not as it seems: HYDRA has extended its tentacles into opening...a Totally-Not-Evil shopping mall. Yeah, this series is Adam West Batman levels of absurd, although authors Dean and Shannon Hale aren’t afraid to take it to dark levels. This time, the villain is Bryan Lazardo (slightly less obvious than book 1’s Mike Romanger), a man who uses a musk to reduce people to a primal state.

It’s again a good book. One thing I do love is how the series, despite being about a girl living in suburbia who has squirrel powers for no readily explained reason (and she’s completely fine with it) has the Avengers doing things like reciting odes to socks and saying they’re off-world fighting Thanos almost as an excuse to not join the action.

Seriously, I would not mind seeing more books in this series.

[Aud 1]

I have one of those Squirrel Girl books. Shannon Hale is wonderful. She spoke at a our local library when one of her other books came out.

My 8 year old daughter and I are reading The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill. I love it and my kiddo who seem a bit intimidated by big books is really getting into it.

[Jusenkyo no Pikachu]

Originally Posted by Aud 1

I have one of those Squirrel Girl books. Shannon Hale is wonderful. She spoke at a our local library when one of her other books came out.

My 8 year old daughter and I are reading The Girl Who Drank the Moon by Kelly Barnhill. I love it and my kiddo who seem a bit intimidated by big books is really getting into it.

I bought the first Princess In Black book for a friend’s daughter (my parents were jointly celebrating a birthday and hers fell on the date they chose). She devoured it.

I also like to think I helped get Viga Lovhaug into Shannon’s books (I sent Princess Academy, the two Rapunzel books, the first SG book and Real Friends). Her husband loved Rapunzel’s Revenge already.

[Jusenkyo no Pikachu]

I went to Tasmania a couple of weeks ago. While I was there, I picked up a book called The Mindful Fairies, a kids’ book from an author who lives in the state.

The best I can figure is that it’s about the adventures of two “Mindful Fairies” (the book never really defines this and implies that they are more helpful) named Tiptoe and Sunbeam, who live at the bottom of a garden. They do things like have tea parties and rescue a unicorn known as a “Magi-Corn”.

The problem is that the book seems to want to be a book along the lines of theFaraway Tree or Wishing Chair books, but it kind of forgets that those books wasted very little time on worldbuilding, leading to it taking three chapters for Tiptoe and Sunbeam to so much as take a step. Also, it occasionally remembers that the story is in a first-person perspective, with our human narrator only briefly actually interacting with the two. It’s like the inverse of the Baby-Sitters Club book where Dawn goes back to California for the first time (where formula dictates that the story has to also focus on the Stoneybrook girls).