Off On My Holidays

It's that time of year again. The Don is hearing the siren call of Sicily, and will be ogling the orange groves and sipping Amaro Averna during warm summer nights. The rest of us are taking advantage of his absence, and going our separate ways.

I'll be spending some time in the Cascade mountains of Washington State, and hosting my family from England and Australia. Thus, I'm not sure how much time I'll have to read middle grade novels and write reviews of them worthy of you, dear readers. So I'm going to be silent here until September.

See you when summer is over! I hope you have a great summer of your own.

Lovely to See You Again, My Dear

Summer vacations can drag on and on, it seems--and it was with perturbation I looked at the date of my last post and saw it was in July! Shocking!

It has been a very busy summer, what with almost two weeks in Orlando in August (gulp!) and the succeeding weeks being busy getting #1 Son ready for college. We drive up there next Friday, so that will be an interesting day...

I have been taking a break from middle grade fiction, and instead read THE BOYS IN THE BOAT by Daniel James Brown. Fascinating stuff, especially since I was a rower in my younger days--although I never feel quite so spiritual while slaving over my oars as did these young men in the 1930s. There were great insights, too, about life during the Depression years, and of pre-war Germany under Hitler.

I am almost done, too, with Michelle Knudsen's EVIL LIBRARIAN, which is a fun YA and which I may post about one of these days in my occasional "YA for a Day" series.

In two weeks, I will definitely be back full-time on Marvelous Middle Grade Monday, featuring Tricia Springstubb's MOONPENNY ISLAND

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What about you? How has your summer been, and what have you read? Do spill.