Book Review: Birds of Paradise

Birds of Paradise: A Novel by Diana Abu-Jaber

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Five years after their 13 year-old daughter Felice ran away, Brian and Avis Muir are still struggling to cope with their loss and feelings of failure. Avis is a gourmet pastry chef who immerses herself in her work to deal with her grief, using pastries as comfort and communication. (There are so many lush descriptions of pastries in this book – I was craving baked goods almost the whole time I listened to it!) Brian is a real estate lawyer and he and Avis’s oldest child, Stanley, owns a natural foods grocery store. Felice, who is almost 18 now, lives on the beach and earns money by doing sporadic modeling jobs.

The story alternates between Avis, Brian and Felice’s point of view. The reason that Felice ran away is slowly revealed through flashbacks. Abu-Jaber has a gift for metaphor and writes very lyrically. The main characters are well-developed. Although I didn’t agree with the choices that Avis made, I think there are mothers out there that would have made the same ones. There was one loose end regarding Avis’s neighbor that I wish would have been wrapped up at the end but I thought the rest of the plot lines ended in a good spot.

Felice works as a model, even shooting a Gap ad. I found myself wondering how accurate Abu-Jabar’s representation of the Miami modeling scene was. I dabble in modeling here in Kansas City and there is no way a major client here would hire a homeless kid who didn’t have an agent but maybe things are different in Miami. I was kind of drawn out of the story whenever modeling was brought up because I would start wondering about that.

I listened to the audio version of this book. I liked the narrator – she had a gentle, soothing voice. It was almost too soothing; a few times I was so relaxed that I realized I wasn’t paying attention and had to rewind.

After reading this lovely offering from Diana Abu-Jabar, I’m looking forward to reading more of her books.

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(I received this book courtesy of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.)

Karma

Yesterday’s post must have pissed of the fundraiser gods because guess what the boys brought home from school last night?? Another fundraiser!

So if you’d like to buy a Major Saver card let me know. Because the boys only have to sell 15 cards each to get a limo ride and pizza party. Sheesh.

You’ll Put Your Eye Out

I loathe school fundraisers. At the boys’ elementary school, they launch the fundraiser with a school wide assembly where they convince the kids that they actually COULD sell 80 tubs of cookie dough and win an MP3 player. The boys always come home super excited. (And Cash can’t even eat the cookie dough they sell because he’s allergic to peanuts and it’s all processed in the same plant as peanuts.)

Usually I just donate money instead of turning the boys into pint-sized door-to-door salesmen. This year, I decided that I would buy one tub of cookie from each boy so they could earn this spinner on a stick thing that they really wanted. So they came home with their spinner things and within about ten minutes West had spun his right into his eye. He cried for quite a while after it happened. He has a crazy high pain tolerance so if he cries like that then it really hurt. I took him into urgent care and it turned out he had a scratch on his cornea which required a couple days of drops in his eye.

My mom happened to be visiting when this whole thing happened. While we were waiting for the doctor, I was joking with her about who I should sue for this incident: the PTA for having the fundraiser, the cookie dough people for giving the spinner things out as a prize, the company that makes the spinner things or the school district. The boys overheard and wanted to know all about how this lawsuit thing works. Now whenever any little thing doesn’t go their way, they threaten to sue or tell me that I should sue – and they are not joking.

Of course nearly putting his eye out is not enough to discourage West from playing with something. He just made sure he took the proper safety precautions the next time he played with it:

Book Review: If Jack’s In Love

If Jack’s In Love by Stephen Wetta

My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars

Twelve-year old Jack has the misfortune of belonging to the Witcher family – the lowest family on the totem pole in the small Virginia town where he lives. His father is frequently out of work, leaving his overworked mother to provide for the family. Jack’s older brother Stan is the town bully.

Jack’s world gets even worse when his brother is the primary suspect in the disappearance of the son of one of the pillars of the community. Jack happens to be in love with the missing boy’s younger sister, Myra, who is not allowed to be seen with Jack. Jack enlists the help of his only friend, Mr. Goldstein, the town’s Jewish jeweler, to win Myra’s heart. Can Jack overcome all the obstacles stacked against him?

This novel is another great offering from Amy Einhorn Books. Jack is such a realistic and authentic character that I instantly connected with him. I was rooting for him throughout the whole book. Wetta’s writing is wonderful; he was able to incorporate scenes with humor, suspense and heartbreak equally well. If Jack’s In Love is a gripping, moving coming-of-age story that I thoroughly enjoyed.

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(I received this book courtesy of the Amazon Vine program.)

Breakfast At Cinderella’s Castle

We went on our first real family vacation last month. We spent seven days at Walt Disney World. One of the items on our must-do list was breakfast at Cinderella’s castle because West LOVES princesses. That’s totally fine with me and Travis, although I must admit that I find it funny because West is such an aggressive, rough and tumble boy most of the time.

West has a princess dress that he likes to wear whenever we go to a princess related occasion. He wore it when we went to the Princess Diana exhibit at Union Station last spring and he wore it to our meeting with the travel agent who helped us plan our Disney trip. You know, because we’d be talking about princesses with her and that’s a good enough reason to dress like a princess.

So of course he wore his dress to breakfast with Cinderella. (Cinderella was really nice but you would think they would have cast someone a little more photogenic since it’s her job to get her picture taken with kids all day. Sh looks a little scared.)

A lot of other Disney princesses stop by the breakfast to say hello and take pictures. I was really impressed that not one of them even batted an eye at the fact that West was wearing a dress. And Belle gave him an extra big hug and told him he was the cutest thing:

Ariel (The Little Mermaid) said she liked my red hair. She also told the boys they had beautiful blue eyes like her husband Eric:

This is Aurora from Sleeping Beauty:

And Snow White:

Even though West loves princesses in general, we haven’t actually seen any of the movies that these princesses are in. When they would come around the boys would ask who they were and it took me a minute to figure it out (except for Cinderella and Snow White). I’m sure if anyone sitting around us overheard, they thought we were nuts for being there when we didn’t even know who we were seeing!

The boys got a choice of a sword or magic wand before we left. Cash chose a sword of course and West went with the wand.

Flag Football

Yesterday was Cash’s last flag football game of the season. I was really surprised this summer when he told me that he wanted to sign up for football. He’s pretty non-confrontational and not an aggressive sports player. But I signed him up anyway so he could try it and hopefully get it out of his system. I don’t want my boys playing tackle football when they get older – the concussion thing scares me.

So either Travis and I took him to practice every Monday night and then the whole family went to his games on Saturday mornings to cheer him and his team on. And do you know many times he touched the ball in the six games he played in? Take a guess…

ONCE! One time in six games. At the game yesterday, Fabian, one of Cash’s teammates, had to sit out the whole game because he forgot his mouth guard and the league rules clearly state that you can’t play if you don’t have your mouth guard. When Cash sat out the fourth quarter to give other boys a chance to play and he saw Fabian on the sidelines, he asked Travis why Fabian was sitting out for more than just one quarter. When Travis told Cash that Fabian had to sit out for the whole game because he forgot his mouth guard, Cash said, “Wow, he’s really lucky right?”

Yeah, I don’t think we’ll be signing Cash up for football again.

National Adoption Month

November is National Adoption Month. It’s an initiative dedicated to raising awareness about the adoption of children in the foster care system. On November 8, my husband and I will celebrate our two-year anniversary of becoming licensed foster parents. Our ultimate goal is to adopt two children from the foster care system. If you’ve ever considered adoption or becoming a foster parent and you have any questions, please leave a comment with your question(s) and I’ll answer them in a future post. Even if you’re just curious, please ask – your question may help someone else considering adoption who was too shy to ask a question herself.

Extreme Used Book Sale

My friend NerdyApple and I went to the Friends of the Johnson County Library used book sale yesterday morning. It was the biggest, craziest used book sale I’ve ever been to. It’s being held in a mostly abandoned shopping mall. There were tables of books in four long hallways and filling up two storefronts. They had boxes of books under all the tables and as soon as people grabbed a book off the table to buy, a worker would fill a space with another book from one of the boxes. I saw people shopping the book sale with baskets, suitcases, and shopping carts they had borrowed from Sears. I saw a little old lady with two foot stack of books balanced on her walker. Most books were only one dollar and small mass-market paperbacks were only fifty cents so it was easy to just grab whatever looked vaguely appealing.

It runs through Saturday afternoon – if you’re in the area I highly recommend stopping by. Plan on spending some time there though. I was there for two hours and didn’t even get to look at half of what they had. Crazy! I found a few books to purchase in the time I spent there:

Have you read any of these? How’d I do? (I’ve already read the Jen Lancaster books but didn’t have my own copies of them.) I can’t believe I got a hardback copy of The Passage in perfect condition for only a dollar!

Any time I get the camera out, the boys become little hams and beg to have their picture taken so I’ll throw in a picture of them defending my new books from The Dark Side:

Book Review: Salvage the Bones

Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

My rating: 4.5 of 5 stars

Fifteen year old Esch just found she’s pregnant. She keeps this secret to herself while watching her brother Skeetah take care of his prize dog-fighting pit bull China, who just had puppies. Her oldest brother Randall struggles to take care of the family while their alcoholic father tries to prepare for a coming hurricane. Their mother died giving birth to their youngest brother Junior and the family’s life in rural Mississippi has been extra hard ever since.

This book was beautiful and raw, both uplifting and upsetting. It was a wonderful story about survival in the midst of poverty and adversity. Every character is really well-developed. I was both sympathetic to and frustrated with most of them at one time or the other. This novel is told in the first person by Esch and takes place over the twelve days leading up to Hurricane Katrina. As the storm grows closer, the tension builds. The descriptions are so vivid; it felt like I was there with them. I could not put this book down for the last two chapters as the storm grew closer.

I’m not the only who loved this book – it’s a National Book Award Finalist for Fiction this year. (Winners will be announced November 16.)

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National Blog Posting Month

I just found out today that November is National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo). The idea is to blog every day of the month including weekends. I’m going to give it a shot. Hopefully by the end of the month I’ll have blogged so much that I’ll be able to do it in my sleep! I don’t read enough to have book reviews every single day so I’ll have to get creative on the days that I don’t have a book review to post.