Summer Books to Grab

Here's a few more of the latest books I'd recommend:

• The End of Your Life Bookclub, Will Schwalbe - a man in NYC who shares a love of books with his mother through the last few years of her battle with cancer. This spoke to me because I lost my mother to cancer a few months ago, and I felt a lot of the things this son was expressing along his journey as well. Plus, it gave me a great variety of new books to look into.
• A Blind Eye, Julie Daines - a YA novel by my sister's friend here in Highland, Utah. A blind British girl has been kidnapped and escapes in Portland (where I'm from) and attaches herself to a boy who's having a rough life himself. I loved that it was written in Portland, was clean, and the characters seemed real to me.
• The Arrival, Shaun Tan - listing it as a graphic novel doesn't do this book justice. In sepia toned drawings, Tan brings us into an imaginary world similar to the immigration era of Ellis Island to explain to children, and all of us, what it was like to flee oppression from another land and be confused trying to make it here. More like a coffee table book if you ask me. I would love to own this one.
• The Penderwicks, Jeanne Birdsall - (Intermediate readers) We're through the second one and I love the true life these girls are given. She does write about very grown up topics, which happen in many lives, and so there was some explaining to do to my younger, sheltered children.
• The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, Edmund Morris - Pulitzer prize winning, very long, engrossing, took me four weeks. I loved most of the detail and wish we had a T.R. as president today.
• The Shoemaker's Wife, Adriana Trigiani - first off, the cover didn't match the book at all for me. I was a little embarassed bringing it home in front of my observant children. "Wow Mom, what's THIS book about????" However, the story line was good to follow, the characters were well written and broken sometimes, which always feels so healthy and normal to me.  A lifelong love story, but it is sad at the end. Glad I read it, but only gave it 3 out of 5 on goodreads.
• The Twenty-one Balloons, William Pene du Bois - (Intermediate Readers) where has this book been? A man wants to get away at the turn of the century so he takes a hot air balloon attached to a small house to sail around the world. When he's found on the other side of the ocean a few months later, breaking any travel records, with a fantastical story of a village of people living on Krakatoa surrounded by a volcano of diamonds, the world wants to hear! We were all glued to it and my 5 year old keeps asking me if we can read The Twenty-two Balloons.