MotherReader

After a blissful five hours of sleep, I awake at the crack of dawn to take teen to meet the bus for a school trip to New York City. The good news is that I’m up to start the next part of my 48HBC, which I do at 6:00 a.m. with a Egg McMuffin in one hand and coffee close by.

After a half hour of social media time, I drive into the book everyone’s been talking about lately, Okay for Now, by Gary Schmidt. I was mentally prepared not to like it because of all the hype, but it didn’t take long for me to really fall for this book. So much so, in fact, that I’m going to talk about it later. ’Kay? Now, I actually had to split my reading into two parts, as I was scheduled to take my sixth-grade Girl Scouts to Medieval Times. Given that it was over an hour away, this was an event set to take up a nice chunk of my Saturday reading time, but at least the experience itself was more fun than I had thought it would be. I was also able to salvage an hour by listening to the first book of the Spiderwick Chronicles on the ride and then wrapped up Okay for Now when I returned.

Needing an easier read, I hoped to finish my next book in ninety minutes. Smalls Acts of Amazing Courage, by Gloria Whelan, fit the bill in being a shorter book and a quick read. It also was rather blah. Not bad, but rather forgettable. For me, it was more notable for filling out some of the back story of those British-kids-who-grew-up-in-India stories, like The Little Princess and The Secret Garden. I finished the book with a nice sense of what is was like to be a child and/or teen living in India in 1918, but I didn’t leave the book feeling moved by the characters.

After a brief break for dinner and an attempted evening nap, I gave a little time to blogging and blog-reading. Then with the night stretched out in front of me, and a scheduled pick-up of the teen at midnight, I dove into The Mermaid’s Mirror. To be honest, I picked this title up from the library because the author, Lisa Wolfson, was on my mind more than the book itself. I didn’t know her, but knew of her through other Young Adult authors, and her recent death from cancer was sudden and shocking — made perhaps even more difficult for the promise that she had as a writer, using the name L.K. Madigan. The Mermaid’s Mirror was a book born in her childhood writings and cultivated with the craft of a skilled author. I was riveted by the story of a teenage girl discovering new truths about herself, her family, and the magical world of the sea. A beautiful book, especially enchanting for those of us who are drawn to the ocean waves.

After this book, it was time to share in the stories of my teen’s big city adventure, and a little blogging before bed. Over the period of twenty-four hours, I spent ten hours reading and two hours blogging or networking.

Round 2: twelve hours