Comfort and Joy

Finished July 9

Comfort & Joy by Kristin Hannah

High-school librarian Joy Candellaro is still grieving the loss of her marriage after finding her husband and sister together eleven months ago. She isn't sure how she's going to spend the two weeks she has off over Christmas, and is trying to create at least the look of the holiday at home. But when her sister meets with her with more news, she finds herself needing to get away, and flees for the airport.

There, she takes a flight that ends in disaster, and finds herself trying to escape even further, walking away and finding herself at a small lodge by a lake where she checks in to the otherwise unoccupied resort and befriends Bobby the young boy who lives there with his father Daniel, and is also recovering from a loss in his life. 

As she and Bobby bond over creating a Christmas at the lodge and helping Bobby with his grief and other issues, she finds herself looking for a new future and considering life beyond her divorce.

This is a tale of loss and hope, of looking at things through new eyes, and finding a future despite dealing with grief. 

Joy is a positive woman, who has a good work environment and coworkers who care about her. She also cares about others and this shows in her interactions with Bobby. 

Little Big Love

Finished July 7

Little Big Love by Katy Regan

This novel is told in three voices: Zac Hutchinson, who is ten years old; his mother Juliet; and his grandfather Mick. A few months before Zac is turning eleven, he witnesses his mom at the end of a disappointing date, the first date she's had in a long time. That night, she makes a surprising confession to him, one that she doesn't remember making the next day, but that impels him on a mission that he was already thinking of. That mission is to locate his father, Liam Jones. Liam was supposedly the love of Juliet's life, but has not tried to stay in touch with her or be part of Zac's life. 

Zac's grandmother talks about what a bad person he was, really demonizing him, and his grandfather seems to agree. Zac spends a couple of days a week at his grandparents after school, bonding with his grandmother through baking and with his grandfather with nature documentaries. 

When Zac was just a few weeks old, his uncle Jamie died in an accident, but the whole truth of that night has yet to emerge for everyone. Zac himself has been told one story, and he has been focused on his similarities to his uncle, such as their common interest in cooking creatively. 

Zac's best friend Teagan is his co-conspirator in his mission and she has her own issues, living in a damp apartment, struggling with asthma, and missing her own dad who has remarried and seems to want little to do with her anymore. 

Zac is also struggling with being bullied due to his weight. And soon after Juliet's disastrous date, Juliet has her eyes opened to this struggle.

The two kids are great characters, smart and creative, and they really do their best to follow up every clue in their search for Liam. Juliet is a good mom, who is struggling herself with the loss of Liam, the responsibility of raising a child on her own, and her own self esteem issues. But she takes Zac's situation seriously and works to make healthier decisions going forward. 

Mick is a recovering alcoholic, who started his journey to sobriety a few months before Zac was born, and has always felt inferior to his wife. He struggles with the choices he has made, and it is only toward the end of the book that we see how his self esteem and feelings of precariousness in his relationships made the situation what it is now. 

This is a book that is both uplifting and heartbreaking, but ultimately a human story. 

The Speed of Falling Objects

Finished July 6

The Speed of Falling Objects by Nancy Richardson Fischer

This teen novel was a real pageturner. Danny Warren is almost seventeen and living with her mom in Oregon. When she was seven, she lost an eye in an accident, and shortly after her parents split up. Her mom is a nurse and Danny has taken on a lot of the knowledge of that job, reading the journals her mom brings home and having conversations about the cases described. She good at, and interested in, science. 

Her dad, Cougar, has a television show where he travels around the world, doing dangerous things, and using knowledge and ingenuity to get out of dangerous situations, usually with a celebrity in tow. Danny has only seen him a few times since he left and she feels that due to the compensations that she's had to learn to deal with her new physical reality, he doesn't feel she measures up to the standards he's set anymore. He tends to call her by her full name Danielle, instead of her preferred nickname.

Danny's best friend is adopted and is part of a large family, but still longs to know about her birth parents. The two are close, have each other's backs, and both feel outside the normal social groups at school. 

When Cougar suddenly invites Danny to come on one of his shows with a hot teen idol as the guest, she both longs to go to get closer to her dad, and is afraid that once again she won't measure up. She also has to deal with her mother's reluctance to let her go/

On the trip, into the Peruvian rainforest, the small plane the group is in crashes, and Danny discovers many things about her dad and the others on the trip, and about her own resources to deal with the dangerous situation.

I liked Danny, and her reactions to the situations and attitudes that she dealt with. This experience had her coming out of her shell as she had to do things and be part of a team in a way that she wasn't used to. 

Followers

Finished July 4

Followers by Raziel Reid

This is definitely a type of book I don't normally read. This teen novel is set around a group of teenagers who are on a reality television show in Beverly Hills. Most of them have either money or the illusion of money, and most of their parents are also part of the show. The novel moves from character to character and the chapters are structured to begin with Instagram posts on the character that is the focus of that chapter. They are titled with the Instagram profile name and give the number of followers, and then a few comments that appeared on that profile. 

It begins with one of the young stars Hailey Paley reached the point of a million followers, which she decides to have a party to celebrate this achievement. 

Then we have her cousin Lily enter the story. Lily lives with her mom in a trailer in the Valley and she's just had a bad date, one where she ended up in jail charged with a crime. Hailey's mom has decided this event and her being taken in by the Paley family for a time will help ratings. So Lily is bombarded by paparazzi, met by a team from the show, taken to the Paley house in Beverly Hills and installed in the pool house. Cameras are rolling almost all the time, and Lily must figure out what is real and what is staged, and how she feels about it all. It takes a little ways into the book for Lily to get an Instagram account of her own, and some time for her to find her feet. But she's used to relying on no one but herself, and has a summer job as a lifeguard on one of the beaches, and she has a good head on her shoulders.

Getting immersed into a world of status, money, alcohol, and drugs is a big change, and decoding the terminology of this generation and their social media took me a while. This is a very dysfunctional environment and that becomes obvious through some of the behaviour that we see. A window into another world.

My Wrap-Up for the 14th Annual Canadian Reading Challenge

My goal this year was 30 books and I made it to 46, so am very happy with that.

I'll also participate and run the book club I'm doing this year. 

I meant to put up the post sooner, but it was only when I went to post my first book that I realized that I had not. 

1. When We Were Birds by Maria Mutch. Finished July 5

2. The Iron Queen by Julie Kagawa. Finished July 10

3. The True Story of Ida Johnson by Sharon Riis. Finished July 28
4. Maria Chapdelaine by Louis Hémon. Finished August 1
5. The Girl who Rode a Shark by Ailsa Ross and Amy Blackwell. Finished August 23
6. The Swinging Bridge by Ramabai Espinet. Finished August 23
7. 1967: A Coming of Age Story by Richard Doornink. Finished August 25
8. The Afterlife of George Cartwright by John Steffler. Finished August 30
9. Roanoke Ridge by J.J. Dupuis. Finished August 31
10. Benjamin's Blue Feet by Sue Macartney. Finished September 3
11. Led Astray by Kelley Armstrong. Finished September 27
12. Once Removed by Andrew Unger. Finished September 29
13. Shape Up, Construction Trucks! by Victoria Allenby. Finished September 30
14. Starlight by Richard Wagamese. Finished October 1
15. The Wars by Timothy Findley. Finished October 8

16. Blue Sky Kingdom by Bruce Kirkby. Finished October 16

17. Summer Constellations by Alisha Sevigny. Finished October 27

18. Duck Days by Sara Leach. Finished October 31

19. Raven, Rabbit, Deer by Sue Farrell Holler, illustrated by Jennifer Faria. Finished November 4

20. Teaching Mrs. Muddle by Colleen Nelson, illustrated by Alice Carter. Finished November 5

21. The London Restoration by Rachel McMillan. Finished November 17

22. Snow Days by Deborah Kerbel and Miki Sato. Finished November 28

23. The Ever Open Door by Julie Band. Finished November 29

24. The Library Bus by Bahram Rahman, illustrated by Gabrielle Grimard. Finished November 30

25. A World of Mindfulness by editors and illustrators of Pajama Press. Finished December 2

26. Journey to the Hopewell Star by Hannah D. State. Finished December 4

27. Bomb Girls by Barbara Dickson. Finished December 8

28. The Rogue Wave by Paul Nicholas Mason. Finished December 12

29. Victory Colony, 1950 by Bhaswati Ghosh. Finished January 3

30. The Blondes by Emily Schultz. Finished January 4

31. Her Aussie Holiday by Stefanie London. Finished January 13

32. The Push by Ashley Audrain. Finished January 22

33. Uncharted by Kim Brown Seely. Finished February 10

34. Midnight Cab by James W. Nichol. Finished February 18

35. The Deadly Hours by Susanna Kearsley, C.S. Harris, Anna Lee Huber and Christine Trent. Finished February 21

36. Swallow's Dance by Wendy Orr. Finished February 24

37. Season of Fury and Wonder by Sharon Butala. Finished March 28

38. Just Their Luck by L.A. Donahoe. Finished March 29

39. Proof I Was Here by Becky Blake. Finished April 2

40. Juliet's Answer by Glenn Dixon. Finished April 8

41. The Healing by Lynda Faye Schmidt. Finished April 27

42. Two White Queens and The One-Eyed Jack by Heidi Von Palleske. Finished May 12

43. How a Woman Becomes a Lake by Marjorie Celona. Finished May 20

44. The Dutch Wife by Eric McCormack. Finished June 13

45. Aubrey McKee by Alex Pugsley. Finished June 23

46. Elevator Pitch by Linwood Barclay. Finished June 29

The Full Scoop

Finished July 2

The Full Scoop by Jill Orr

This book is the fourth book of a series set in the small town of Tuttle Corner, Virginia and featuring Riley Ellison, small town journalist. Riley is single, recently split amicably from her boyfriend Jay when he took a job in D.C.

Her coworker and friend Hal Flick died a month ago when his car was forced off the road. The case is still unsolved. Hal was working on the case of Riley's grandfather's death a few years ago, which Riley also suspected was a murder, but that was set up to look like suicide. Riley has taken some time off work and then some part-time weeks to deal with Hal's estate and her own grief, but she is now headed back to work at the Tuttle Times full time. Another coworker, Holman is also a good friend and the two often hang out together and he helps her as she continues to look into Hal's and her grandfather's deaths.

Other friends include her high school boyfriend Ryan and his Swedish girlfriend Ridley, who have recently opened Mysa, a cafe in a former Tavern. She is also spending time with Lindsey Davis the new county prosecutor. Riley has also started to date Ash, a recent addition to the town who runs the local funeral home. Riley gets out and about in town often walking her dog Coltrane. 

Riley's mom Jeannie has set her up with a subscription to an astrology site that sends her daily updates. Jeannie is also the local Uber driver.

With the former sheriff, now in jail, saying he knows more about the two deaths and indicating he's willing to make a deal with the information, a file of documents Hal left for her, and her own ability to sniff out a story, Riley has a lot of leads to follow. 

Part of the plot in this novel figures around a New Year's Eve party at Ash's cousin Toad's house with a Gatsby theme. 

I liked Riley, and her strong sense of self. She's still unsettled in terms of her love life, but she has a job she enjoys, a circle of good friends, and a home she loves. She stands up for herself and those she cares about. This was a good read. 

Because Internet

Finished July 1

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch

This book was fascinating. I've always been interested in language, poring over my mother's old linguistics textbooks when I was a kid, but this book brings a lot of linguistic theory into the now with its focus on how the internet changed the way we use language and the way that we communicate.

It sometimes looks back further at how other technology changed communication as well and looks at how societal change feeds the way language changes. For instance it looks at the telephone and how greetings were suggested and adapted for that new broadly adapted form of communication and compares that to the way that different pieces of the internet changed language and communication.

It looks at both formal and informal types of communication and generational differences between broad groups as the internet grew and changed and became part of everyday life. 

There was so much here in terms of ideas that made me think and bits of communication history I hadn't been fully aware of before. 

My favourite part was in the section on memes where the author talked about an embroidered piece that she made based on a common meme, that she then adapted to be more personal to herself.  She comments

Both memes and needlework are collective folk texts that spread because people remix and remake them. The words "text" and "textile" have a common origin, from a Proto-Indo-European root teks, "to weave." Writing and weaving are both acts of creation by bringing together. A storyteller is a spinner of yarns, and the internet's founding metaphor is of a web. If we go far enough back, before printing presses and cameras and photocopiers introduced the notion of faithful reproduction, all transmission is re-creation. Teks is also the root of the word "technology," which at one point meant a systematic treatise on an art or craft, or even a grammar, before it referred to a study of mechanical or industrial arts (a 1902 dictionary gives the examples of "spinning, metal-working, or brewing") and then to digital tech.

Since I am a needleworker, this really hit home for me. Since I also work with a lot of internet pieces, and have helped others navigate the internet as part of my job, this all connected for me. 

A fascinating look at language, social change, and human adaptation. 

Elevator Pitch

Finished June 29

Elevator Pitch by Linwood Barclay

This novel makes you look at elevators in a completely different way. In New York City, an elevator falls and all occupants are killed. It was a nice touch to have one of them doing an actual elevator pitch at the time. When a second elevator accident kills too, questions start arising about what is happening, and what caused the falls. 

Barbara Matheson is a reporter for a New York City paper. She covers mostly politics and business, and lately she's been writing a lot about the mayor, Richard Wilson Headley. .She calls out behaviour that  she considers sketchy, even if it is "how things get done." In this case it is the awarding of a construction contract to a firm owned by a big political donor. As she enters the story, she is at city hall with a crowd of reporters, hoping to ask questions. And she definitely gets a reaction. Along with the mayor are a few of his staff, including his twenty-five-year-old son, Glover. Glover and Richard have a not-always-smooth relationship, but Glover is bright in a techie way and helpful in certain areas. 

Barbara also has a difficult relationship with her child, daughter Arla. Barbara got pregnant when she was young and when the father wanted nothing to do with it, she considered her options. Her parents offered to take on the raising of Arla, and there was no secret that Arla was her daughter, but more recently, after her parents died, there have been tense discussions between the two women. 

Meanwhile, police have found a body, badly beaten and with an attempt to disguise the identity of the victim. As they research his identity and look for why this man was killed, one of them, Jerry Bourque is also dealing with PTSD and guilt from a recent case. 

There is also a group of people in the middle states of the U.S., who have organized their resentment at those on the coast and have acted out their frustrations in violent ways. A couple of them, including the head of the organization are in New York City, and questions arise about the ties to some of the accidents happening there. 

Conversations between a boy and his mother in a different font are interspersed through the story and only make sense as things are revealed near the end. 

I liked how all these storylines wove in and out of each other in a natural way, and not all the clues lead somewhere. 

As I said at the beginning, I also like how Barclay makes you think about ordinary, everyday things in a different way. This is something he does in many of his books, both the standalones like this one and The Accident, and many of the Promise Falls series. His characters are ordinary people who did things that you and I do, and then some of them get caught up in situations beyond what they could ever have expected. Even though this is a long book, it's a quick and satisfying read. 

Bargello Needlepoint books not worth purchasing

Finished June 26

Bargello Needlepoint: A Pattern Directory for Dramatic Creations by Justine Pfefferie

Bargello Needlepoint Guide for Beginners: Basic Bargello Needlepoint Instructions by Rebecca Weber

Bargello Needlepoint: Detail Instructions to Bargello for Beginners by Sarah Jarrad

Bargello Needlepoint for Mom: Learn to Basic Bargello Needlepoint - Guide for Beginners by Montavious Bulger

I'm reviewing these four books in one review as despite having different covers, titles, and authors, they are essentially the same book, and none of them is really worth the purchase. I was looking for more books on bargello or florentine stitch and these were under $10, and looking like they might have something unique. 

They are all poorly written with many spelling and grammar mistakes and some have pages repeated within them, or sections repeated under different headings. Cryptic notations seem to indicate they have taken content from webpages. Some include small black and white pictures of patterns and finished stitching, but not all are bargello stitches. 

The one with the orange design on the cover, the one with the heart design on the cover, and the one "for mom" are word for word, page by page exact copies of each other. 

The Pattern Directory one includes a little more history and some patterns, but nothing that you can't find in any real bargello or florentine book. If you are going to buy one of these, I'd recommend that one for the extra content. 

July Reviews for 15th Annual Canadian Reading Challenge

 Here is where you add your reviews for books read in July 2021 for this challenge which just launched. 

Remember to link to the review itself! You can also add comments below.