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August 26, 2014

Blossoming Universe

I'm not proud of it, but I'm a difficult reader to please. I have catholic tastes, but it's difficult for me to pin down what I like. I loved Brenda Woods' new children's book about a biracial 11-year old living in a family of blonds. Her African American father died before she was born and she has never met her paternal grandparents.

There is such magical, descriptive language in this book. There's a specificity that makes you feel like you're in a special, but very real world. Violet's experience couldn't be more different from mine but she feels like she doesn't belong, which is something everyone can identify with at some point.

She is an interested and curious kid, a little precocious, a collector of new vocabulary words, and she is direct in that way that girls are before they become teenagers. However, she is not annoying. You feel for her and admire her. She is figuring out how to navigate in a confusing and complicated world, in which adults are still evolving and growing up and sometimes say stupid things.

"If boredom was like macaroni without cheese, what I felt right then was worse. Lemonade without sugar, soda without the fizz. Pitiful."


Posted by kathryn at August 26, 2014 03:55 PM