Ferris by Kate DiCamillo

In the 1970's south, Ferris and her family are having a crazy summer. There are raccoons in the attic, Ferris' artistic uncle in the basement, and Ferris' sister is determined to become an outlaw.  Most of all Ferris' grandmother, Charrise, is seeing a ghost. Ferris is worried about her grandmother who has been ill, and so she and her best friend, Billy, undertake to fulfill her grandmother's and the ghost's greatest wish.

Kate DiCamillo has had such a wonderful career. She has written two Newbery winners, one honor and two Theodore Geisel winners.  The thing that she is good at is writing heartwarming relationships between children and the adults in their lives. This book is along the same vein.  The main relationship in the story is between Ferris and her grandmother.  It is a sweet relationship and the book, as a whole, is a feel-good type of book.  The writing is very lyrical. If you have a poetic heart, you will enjoy reading it.  It is so poetical that I never really felt like Ferris was a real child. Her thoughts are all too deep and self-aware.  It is if Ms DiCamillo was trying to take her own thoughts and musings about life and cram them into a 10-year-old's mind. I enjoyed reading the book, and I think a lot of children who have sensitive spirits would enjoy it, but it felt more like her Tale of Despereaux than Because of Winn Dixie.  It is a fairytale set in a retro US south setting. (240 p. 2024)

The Masqueraders by Georgette Heyer

 Robin, Prudence and their father fought for the wrong side in the Jacobite Rising in 1745.  After its failure, their lives were in danger if anyone found them in England, so their father devised a plan to keep them safe.  Prudence, who has a sturdy build, dresses as a young man, and Robin, who has a delicate frame for a man, as a woman. Their plan is to lay low in London, but a chance experience pulls them into the spotlight of the Ton. It also brings them to the attention of the large but handsome Sir Anthony Fanshawe, and the charming young heiress, Leticia Grayson. Both siblings start falling for their unknowing companions. Can their father's crazy plans free them from the masquerade they are forced to play?

Here is another Georgette Heyer.  It is set earlier than many of her books, and it seems she felt like she had to change the dialog to suggest the time period.  The result, combined with a very expressive narrator, made the story sound like a melodrama. Almost every line is  overstated and the characters seem more like caricatures than real people. Reading it is a little like watching and old black-and-white movie. This is not necessarily bad, but it took some getting used to. Still I ended up enjoying the book.  It has some very funny scenes, and some rollicking action sequences. The character of the father is a bit extreme but I found him amusing. It is not my favorite Georgette Heyer book, but it is a fun read. (1928, 416 p.)

Once Enchanted Evening by Trish LeBaron

 Thea Halliwell has made a good life for herself on Moonrise Cove. She lives with her mother and grandmother and helps them run the quaint bookshop in town.  One of her biggest disappointments is that, on an island where many of the natives have magical powers, her magical ability has not yet manifested. She decides to enroll in a class that promises to help magical abilities to manifest, even though the class is run by one of her least favorite people on the island.  Then on the first day of class, the teacher's son, Thea's old flame who has lived off of the island since the miscarriage of their love child 10 years ago, shows up and takes over the class.  Mason Tuttle is the last person on earth that Thea wants to see on a regular basis, but she decides, after having saved up for the expensive class, to continue.  Over the 10 weeks of the class they discover that the sparks that were between them as teens have not entirely extinguished.  Can Thea bring herself to forgive Mason for abandoning her after their baby's death, and give herself over to the attraction they still feel for each other?

This is one of the Moonrise Cove books self-published by my friend's writer's group. Despite the very serious element of the miscarriage of their baby, the story is mostly a light and fluffy romance with a sprinkling of relational sizzle and some pretty random magical events. There is no real depth to any of the characters or in their relationship.  LeBaron mostly discusses the "tingling at their touch" and "tightening of her gut" whenever they are together, but not much is said about what they like about each other's personalities. In addition to the romance, there was a bunch of magical occurrences that don't really match the magic system established in the other books. Still, after reading the super depressing Covenant of Water, I was ready for some cotton candy, and I boldly admit I enjoyed reading it very much. (316 p. 2024)

The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

 Around 1900 a 12-year-old girl is sent in a boat to meet her new husband, a fairly well-off 42-year-old farmer.  The story follows the girl and her offspring for three generations as they face heartache and find love in a harsh social environment. It also follows two other men, one a surgeon from Glasgow and another, a doctor from India who sets up a leper colony. Both men make good decisions and bad, and have to deal the consequences their decisions bring.  

Full, disclosure, I didn't finish this book.  I got about half the way through and decided I was done. In my defense, the book is 972 pages long, so I actually listened to 15 hours out of 30 before calling it quits.  There were things I liked about the book, but, clearly there were things I didn't like about the book.  The thing I liked was the immersive picture it draws of life in rural India in the 1900's.  The reader and almost see, smell, and taste the world where Big Ammachi lives.  I also liked watching the relationship of Big Ammachi and her husband slowly develop as the frightened 12-year-old girl grows up and wins the heart of the heart-broken widower.  What I didn't like about the book was that I felt like the author was manipulating my emotions.  It was like he was saying, "how can I make this as sad a possible."  (spoiler alert, if you plan to read this book, don't read on)  When the first generation lost their first born son to a tragic accident, it was like, OK, things like that happen, and it was sweet to see how the couple managed to heal.  Then other tragic deaths kept happening and it became apparent that the author was killing off the characters to make the story more symbolic. The married girlfriend of the doctor dies right after they give into their passion and commit adultery.  The toddler son of the second generation dies when he is impaled on the branch of a tree the father had promised his wife to cut down, but couldn't bring himself to cut down all the way.  Then his wife left and the husband became an opium addict, and I thought, "this author is now just messing with me and I don't want to read this anymore."  I am a bit curious to know how the author brings the three different story lines together in the end but not enough to listen to another 15 hours of ritual death and heart-wrenching tragedy.  Maybe I will go read a summary somewhere. (972 p, 2023)

The Queen and the Knave by Sarah Eden

In this latest installment of the Dread Penny Society, the secret is out that Moirin Donnelly is actually the Dread Master. The society has been thrown into chaos due the the cruel attacks of the Tempest. Most have gone into hiding but one by one they have been discovered and kidnapped by the Tempest's thugs. Moirin is forced to team up with a detective from Scotland Yard, Fitzgerald Parkington, to try to track down the Tempest and end her reign of terror. As the two work together, an admiration and then an attraction form between them. But what room is there for romance, when such terrible threats face both the Dread Penny Society and all England?

This has been a fun series, and this one is much like the others, except in this one the stakes are higher.  The feeling of the whole book is more intense as Moirin gets outsmarted over and over again.  The reader gets the idea that the Tempest is a "Moriarty" to Moirin's "Sherlock". By the end you are wondering how she can ever win, but, of course, she does. I liked the book, but I feel a little like Eden weakened Moirin's character a little in order to frame it into a romance.  In the earlier books you wouldn't imagine Moirin leaning on a man for help and support, but in this book she does. I think it is realistic enough, and maybe the reader is finally seeing past Moirin's tough exterior, but I do think Eden could have kept a little more of Moirin's swagger and still make the story and the romance work. That being said, I enjoyed the book a lot and wonder if she is done, or if there will be more stories from the Dread Penny society to come. (2023, 386 p)

Great Courses: Conquest of the Americas by Marshall Eakin

 In 1491 both North and South America were full of thousands of native civilizations.  Some were large like the Mayas and the Incas.  Most were smaller, and ranged from primitive hunter/gather's to agrarian cultures to societies rivaling Western cultures in their achievements.  Then Columbus crossed the Atlantic and arrived in the islands of the Caribbean. Everything started to change, and within two centuries the demographics of the Americas had totally changed.  Professor Eakin discusses this process of the conquering of the Americas by the Europeans in 24 lectures.  His main premise is that there were three groups of people who came together to form what we know now as Americans: the native people, the Europeans, and Africans brought to the Americas as slaves. He talks at length about how each groups played significant roles in the creation of the modern Americas. 

In the past few months I listened to Great Courses lectures on the history of the Middle East, Italy, and now the Americas during the period of the late medieval and early renaissance periods.  I feel like each one helped me fit another piece in place for understanding this time period.  I learned so much from this series that I didn't know before.  For example, I hadn't understood that only 6% of all Africans who served as slaves in the Americas were in what was to become the United States. Most were enslaved in Central and South America to work on plantations and in mines. I had heard that 90% of native peoples died of disease after the Europeans arrived, but I didn't understand that that die-off had already taken place in North America before the Pilgrims arrived. The diseases had spread north from the Spanish colonies of Mexico, and so when Europeans arrived in what was to become the United States, it was mostly an empty land. There was so much I found interesting but this review is already getting too long.  I know the title of this lecture series sounds like a bit of a downer, and it is, a little, but it is fascinating. (12 hrs, 2002)