The Guncle by Steven Rowley

Patrick used to be a sit-com star, until his partner, Joseph, got killed in an accident and Patrick secluded himself in a large house in remote Palm Springs. Then his sister-in-law, who was also his best friend in college, dies after a battle with cancer and Patrick races off to Connecticut for her funeral.  After the funeral his newly widowed brother, Greg, asks if Patrick will take care of his two kids, Maisie, age 10, and Grant, age 6, while Greg goes to rehab to get over a prescription drug addiction. Over the course of the summer, Patrick bonds with the children and, in very unconventional ways, helps them grieve for their mother.  Meanwhile Patrick has to face his own grief over Joseph and learn to reclaim life. 

I read this book because a picture book call My Guncle and Me by Jonathan Merritt has been officially challenged at my library.  I know this book is by a different author, but I thought the challenger might be uncomfortable about that book because she was familiar with this book. I had mixed feelings about this book.  The writing is great and all the characters are really endearing.  There are funny scenes and really heartwarming scenes where Patrick and the kids interact with each other.  The book is successful in showing how having kids in your life changes your outlook in the world but also how children are real people who have real emotions that need to be acknowledged and understood. However, the book portrays the children in situations that the white-straight-conservative-mother in me cringes at.  Patrick drinks alcohol incessantly throughout the book, swears frequently, and goes skinny dipping and has sexual encounters with a much younger TV star with the children in the house. This doesn't seem like an appropriate environment for kids to me. The author represents this opinion using a character in the book, Patrick's sister Clara. Clara is an active feminist who rants about white male privilege, but secretly is harboring a personal tragedy that is manifesting itself in her prudishness. I kind of resented the fact that the author seems to be suggesting that if you are worried about the kids being in the environment of profanity, alcohol, and sex, you are a deeply troubled man-hater. Still, if I am honest, I enjoyed the book overall, though it felt a little like a guilty pleasure. (2021, 336 p)

The Age of Resilience by Jeremy Rifkin

 This is one man's idea about how the humans can survive the impending mass extinction brought on by global warming and rising numbers of pandemics. Rifkin spends the first part of the book telling all the ways the world is doomed.  Some that he mentions are global warming, soil erosion, increased extreme weather,  and the resultant civil unrest.  He makes a case that all these problems arose out of human's attempts to be "efficient." Then he spends the rest of the book explaining how humans and societies must change in order to survive the catastrophes that are coming. In essence he suggests that humans must move away from the age of fossil fuels, capitalism, and centralized government, and instead become empathetic to each other and nature and learn to live in harmony with both. 

Ok, so that summary sounds flippant, but I was amazed at how lacking this book--by a really famous author and environmentalist--is in sound logic and objectivity.  After reading it I looked up his bio and I wasn't surprised to learn that he has no formal scientific training, but instead only has a bachelor's degree in economics. As a result, the book represents he own personal views on a lot of loosely connected world problems which he promotes with great enthusiasm and confidence but not a lot of rigor. His language is very emotionally charged, and he seems to only speak in superlative.  He also constantly makes logical errors in his writing.  For example, he takes a few examples and presents them as irrefutable evidence of growing trends, when, in reality, they are only a few small examples. As an example, he talks about forest pre-schools where kids stay outside all day regardless of weather.  He boasts that there are 600 such preschools in the US, a clear evidence of their growing popularity.  600? really. There are about 90,000 preschools in the US, so only about a half of one percent are forest preschools. He also compares things that are not comparable.  He spends a whole chapter talking about the problems infants have when they are neglected and fail to bond with adults. Then he says that modern people suffer with the same kinds of problems because they fail to bond with their communities and with nature. I am not saying that everything in the book is wrong.  I think he has some good ideas.  It is just that the solutions he proposes are pipe dreams that would require a pretty drastic change in human nature to come to pass. Still it was interesting to me to see all the different ways he tries to influence readers. (2022, 336 p) 

The Wordhord by Hana Videen

Here is a book for the word-nerds among us.  Ms Videen is a scholar of Old English and this entire book explores the origins and oddities of certain Old English words. She starts the book by explaining the differences between modern English, Middle English and Old English.  While many people can understand Middle English pretty well, Old English sounds like a foreign language to modern English speakers.  Videen posits that by learning Old English we can come to understand the culture and look inside the thought processes of people living 1000+ years ago.  This book was published by Princeton University Press and is pretty academic.  I am not sure how much appeal it would have to the general public, but I loved it.  I love ancient languages and have studied Latin, ancient Greek and Hebrew. This book made me want to go back and learn Old English too.  I was fascinated to learn that there are only about 200 texts written in Old English that still exist. I had never before thought of the challenge of trying to figure out what a word means when it only appears once in all existent texts.  I loved learning how medieval Englishmen put terms together to describe the people and things in their lives. I also was struck by how much Christianity permeated everything they did in 1000 AD and it made me realize how much our modern western culture has strayed from that. Finally, hats off the the narrator of the book, Sara Powell, who had to read all of the crazy Old English words.   (2022, 296 p.)

Seams Deadly by Maggie Bailey

 Lydia is starting a new life after a painful divorce by working at a fabric store in a small town in Georgia. She has been reluctant to reenter the dating scene, but after her first awkward date with Brandon, the guy next door, he turns up dead in his apartment.  Lydia discovers that she is the top suspect, and so decides she needs to solve the mystery to keep herself out of a life sentence in prison. As she starts to talk to people around the close-knit town, she soon discovers that there is more than one person who had a motive to kill Brandon. It is hard to think one of her new friends is a murderer, but it is hard to deny that it had to be someone within her own friend circle. Can she figure out who it is before she is sent to jail by default?

I have read several "baking" mysteries and this book seems to have the same vibe, but with sewing instead of baking. It was alright. It is in every way a "cozy" mystery, with a lot of the people being really nice to each other, except for the killer, of course. Bailey does a pretty good job introducing the reader to all the quirky people in the village. The author sets up plenty of suspects, with plenty of clues.  I wondered if the book would have sewing projects at the end of each chapter instead of recipes like they have in the baking mysteries.  It didn't, but it did describe some sewing projects in the book that would be interesting to try. (272, 273) p

Artie and the Wolf Moon by Olivia Stephens

 Artie lives with her mom, and misses her Dad who died when she was young.  Sometimes her mom does things that are a little weird, but isn't that true of all moms?  Then one day, she sees her mother transform into a wolf, and discovers that she is a werewolf.  When Artie turns 13, her own werewolf powers immerge and Artie's mother introduced her to the greater werewolf community.  At first transforming and running with the pack is thrilling, but soon Artemis discovers that werewolves are not the only--or most dangerous--mythological creatures that are real.

This is a graphic novel but I only listened to it as an audio.  There have been some graphic novels that have been adapted well enough to an audio format that you could hardly tell they are graphic novels.  This is not one of them.  It was difficult to follow the story without the pictures to look at and the readers makes no attempt to fill in the gaps. That being said, I can imagine it is a pretty good graphic novel. The story and characters are solid, and there are plenty of action scenes that I imagine work well in a graphic novel form.  My library doesn't own this graphic novel but if we purchased it we would probably put it in the YA graphic novel sections because of some hints of LGBTQ relationships. They are not in your face, but they are there. (2021, 256 p.)

Cross Country Christmas by Laurie Lewis

 After a messy breakup, CC Cippolini agrees to deliver a self-driving Tessla to Las Vegas just as a way to get away from the bad situation.  However, crossing the mountains of Utah, she falls asleep at the wheel and crashes into a fence owned by the rugged and handsome Reese Brockbank.  CC's arrival brings light and goodness into his life that he realizes he has been missing since his divorce six years ago.  Their relationship develops quickly, and soon they are wondering if this could be what they both have been looking for.  The road to Happily-Ever-After, however, is never easy, and there are a lot of issues from their past they have to work through before they get there.

I think this is the first time I have read anything from Laurie Lewis.  It was pretty much romance cotton candy.  It is by Covenant Book so it is PG rated, and there is a lot of Western style wish fulfillment going on here. Reese is not only handsome, he is also really kind and rich, plus his family is also really nice and incredibly supportive. CC is beautiful, effervescent and also really kind. There are moonlight rides on horses, and befriending a mother deer and her faun, lots of sweet, meaningful kissing scenes, and everything warm and fuzzy that you can think of.  It is a Hallmark Christmas Special in print, so if you are in the mood for that, this is the holiday read for you. (2021, 256 p)

P.S. I promise this is the last of the sappy Christmas stories for this year. 

The Hapless Milliner by Jessica Bull

 Jane Austen is reimagined in this story to be a young amateur sleuth trying to solve a murder that has taken place in an adjacent manor to where she lives with her clergy father, mother and siblings.  Jane is a intelligent and head strong young adult caught up in her first real romance, when a woman is found dead in a closet at a ball she is attending. Her mentally disabled brother is implicated in the crime, so Jane uses all her passion and wits to try to discover the real murder and save her brother from the hangman's noose. As she precipitously delves into the private lives of her suspects, she discovers that little in the high society of her small community is as it seems.  

It is an interesting idea to imagine Jane Austen as the hero of a mystery novel, but in this case, I think Ms Bull missed the mark. I was never convinced that the character Jane in the book was at all like the author Jane Austen. There were a few times that Bull incorporated phrases or ideas from the Austen's novels into the mystery, but to no real affect. I think I would have enjoyed the mystery more if the main character where just a random Victorian instead of the famous author.  That being said, it isn't a bad mystery.  The plot is fairly complex, and the resolution is well supported. I liked the way that the author set up several viable suspects, and then found ways to show their innocence one by one until she hit upon the true culprit. I know very little about Austen's real life, but a note at the end of the book explained which elements of the story were based on actual people and incidents. Now I want to find a good Jane Austen biography and read it (2024, 368 p)