April 26 - May 2

Luckily...
I was able to get back on track this week, and it felt goooood. They were for school unfortunately, so they're not exactly the books I've had waiting for me on my shelf for so long, but I did choose them and they were good reads.

Love That Dog by Sharon Creech
I had to read a novel in verse for a project, and thought of this one immediately. It's a pretty popular one, and I had never read it, so I thought I would give it a try. I picked it up off the shelf at the library that evening and read it in about a half hour. I more or less knew the story, but I still enjoyed it. I think it did a pretty decent job showing the transition and reluctance people often have with poetry, and it did it in a pretty short amount of space. It seems like it would be a pretty good one to read with your kid before bed or something.

Make Lemonade by Virginia Euwer Wolff
So this is the book I chose for the actual novel-in-verse project I needed to do. I found a list on goodreads and was desperately trying to find something that wasn't 1)depressed teens or 2)love-struck teens or 3)depresssed love-struck teens. Amazingly, I did find it. Even more amazing though is that one of the quotes on the back from a reviewer was actually accurate! They never seem to help much. It more or less says that the book is interesting because it focuses not on a racial culture, but on the culture of poverty, which transcends all racial boundaries. It was an intriguing book for sure. A young girl being raised by her mother is working hard hard hard to be able to have enough money to go to college. She picks up a babysitting job for a seventeen-year-old girl named Jolly who has two young kids, about 5 and 2 years old. The narrator helps out at the home, experiences some really terrible things with this young mother, as well as some really amazing things, she tries to help, fails, succeeds... it's actually a quite well-written and moving story that feels very realistic and honest. The ending is not exactly happy, but again it's honest and realistic. It feels good. It's an optimistic, hopeful ending that made me feel ready to start my day full of an incredible load of work.