I savored this account of a boy’s Christmas visit to his
two sets of grandparents. The key to the exquisiteness of this book is its
point of view. The narrator is nobody
special.
Yet he, like all of us past a certain age, brings the perspective of maturity.
He pulls back the curtain and shows readers the quiet love in an ordinary
family.
Andy Catlett showed me that wisdom is a treasure painfully
earned, which can be shared with those willing to receive it. Berry’s narrative is slow, rich, and beautiful.
A young boy takes a trip on his own to visit his grandparents in Kentucky in this luminous entry in the acclaimed Port William series.
In this “eloquent distillation of Berry’s favorite themes: the importance of family, community and respect for the land” (Kirkus Reviews), nine-year-old Andy Catlett embarks on a solo trip by bus to visit his grandparents in Port William, Kentucky, during the Christmas of 1943. Full of “nostalgic, admiring detail” (Publishers Weekly), Andy observes the modern world crowding out the old ways, and the people he encounters become touchstones for his understanding of a precious and imperiled…
More
than anything, this book put me in the shoes of a young person who has no idea
how to know the difference between truth and lies. He doesn’t know who to
trust. I was fully immersed in this terrifying world.
Šepetys made me feel what
it was like to live during a dictatorship leading
up to the Romanian Revolution in 1989.
I came away feeling profoundly grateful
for my freedom and in awe of those who fought for theirs.
A gut-wrenching, startling historical thriller about communist Romania and the citizen spy network that devastated a nation, from the #1 New York Times bestselling, award-winning author of Salt to the Sea and Between Shades of Gray.
Romania, 1989. Communist regimes are crumbling across Europe. Seventeen-year-old Cristian Florescu dreams of becoming a writer, but Romanians aren’t free to dream; they are bound by rules and force.
Amidst the tyrannical dictatorship of Nicolae Ceaușescu in a country governed by isolation and fear, Cristian is blackmailed by the secret police to become an informer. He’s…
Until
I read this book, I never fully appreciated how rotten life would be like if I
were a working-class person living in England in the 19th century: grueling work, inadequate clothing, contaminated milk, and no hope for
improving my lot.
Goodman doesn’t complain; she gives (copious) facts. What
an eye-opening book for people accustomed to books and movies that portray
upper-class life of the period!
I came away grateful for freedom and social
mobility.
Ruth Goodman believes in getting her hands dirty. Drawing on her own adventures living in re-created Victorian conditions, Goodman serves as our bustling and fanciful guide to nineteenth-century life. Proceeding from daybreak to bedtime, this charming, illustrative work celebrates the ordinary lives of the most perennially fascinating era of British history. From waking up to the rapping of a "knocker-upper man" on the window pane to lacing into a corset after a round of calisthenics, from slipping opium to the little ones to finally retiring to the bedroom for the ideal combination of "love, consideration, control and pleasure," the weird,…
Bringing Mom Home is my boots-on-the-linoleum
account of how God challenged me and changed me as my sister and I combined our
households and moved in together to care of our mother, who had Alzheimer’s
Disease.
This book is less of a “how to” and more of a “why to” tale exploring the
idea that God uses challenges and difficulties, often in one-of-a-kind ways, to
change people.
