The theme of this month was my public library. I truly took advantage of my library for print and audiobooks, especially for mysteries and thrillers. I also read across many countries! This month I read:

• Olivetti by Allie Millington [audiobook] – This is a sweet middle grades story about a typewriter, Olivetti, who is able to retell the stories that have been typed on him, in order to help a family in need. Olivetti and Ernest, one of the children, are alternating narrators as we meet a fun and loveable cast of characters on an adventure fueled by love.
• The Reappearance of Rachel Price by Holly Jackson – I loved this fast-paced mystery/thriller! The story starts with Bel and her father participating in a documentary about Bel’s mother’s sudden disappearance 16 years ago. Then i morphs quickly when Rachel, the mother, suddenly returns (no spoilers, that happens pretty quickly and it’s in the title!). Everything after that is a mystery to figure out what happened then and what’s happening now, who is responsible, who is guilty, and no one can be trusted.
• Competency-Based Education Ignited: A Transformational Systemwide Approach for Leaders by Richard A. DeLorenzo and Roxanne Mourant – I chose to read this book as part of my quarterly book review for AASA, so I was given a copy. Because I get to select the books I want to read and review, I was actively looking for my educational books about competency-based education, a journey we are embarking on. I enjoyed this book, as it gives a very realisitic picture of the multi-year plans you need to create in order to make this seismic systemic change. There are many resources and examples shared, though more from secondary than elemtary. This book sparked me to begin researching Learning Management Systems (LMS) that will align with competency-based assessments in the future. I appreciated the questions it brought up and the advice for the next phases of our journey.
• Colored Television by Danzy Senna – This is the February pick for my book club. When I got it, I didn’t realize the author is married to Percival Everett, the author of James. They have some similiar writing traits, but Danzy has her own voice for sure. In this story we follow Jane, a self-named Mulatto, who wants to see more representation of biracial people in literature. She is writing an epic novel, and during a year-long sabbatical we see her process, her struggles, her family woes, and more. Married to starving artist, trying to raise two children, one of whom is having significant challenges, Jane just wants to own a house in the beautiful multicultural neighborhood in LA. We go on quite an internal struggle journey with Jane, through beautiful, tortured writing, and hard choices about money and family and trust.
• The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman [audiobook] – This Thursday Murder Club series is so intriguing! I love the premise- a group of 4 people in a retirement community come together and end up solving local murders. I’ve read two in the series now, and I truly enjoy the story and the funny characters. But both times I started reading the hard copy of these books (from my library), the writing has felt so slow. When I switch over to the audiobook version, the story flies by and it’s amusing. For some reason, this author’s writing style is too dry for me in print, but when I can speed up the story, I love it. So, I will only listen to the rest of the series that way! In this book, our gang (Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron, and Ibrahim) are helping Ibrahim recover from a mugging, while also helping Elizabeth’s ex-husband, another former spy. There are stolen diamonds, a love story, and more hijinx!
• The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz – I knew I loved The Plot by this author, but when I started this, I had to Google the details from the first book to truly remember what happened. This book picks up soon after the first. Anna, the widow of Jacob, is going on tour to help sell her husband’s last book after his surprising death by suicide. During interviews, she tells people she might like to write a book. Then she goes off and quickly writes one, which her husband’s editor is only too happy to publish. As we follow Anna’s rise, we see she is still haunted by the anonymous critics who say Jacob stole the idea for his famous work. As Anna goes on a wild chase to solve the mystery, her own mysterious story comes to light.
• The Teacher by Freida McFadden [audiobook]- I was reminded of this author recently, so I searched my library’s catalog for any audiobooks available by her. This was propulsive yet disturbing. The story begins with chapters narrators by Addie and Eve. Addie is a high school junior who has no friends, whose father recently died, and who had some trouble with a male teacher the year before. Eve is a math teacher at Addie’s school. Eve is known as a strict teacher while her husband Nate is known as both fun and the best looking teacher at school. Throughout the book, I found each of these characters annoying and unreliable, yet I was enthralled enough in the story to want to know how it was going to end. There are a number of twists that surprised me, up until the very last page. There are hints of inappropriate student-teacher relationships in this book from beginning that disturbed me. That theme made me want to stop reading, but the propulsive story kept me reading until the end.
• The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope by William Kamkwamba, Bryan Mealer – I have seen this book in a few 6th grade classrooms in my district, so I wanted to read it. This is a memoir written by William, a young man from Malawi, who created his very own windmill to help bring electricity to his home and village. The first three quarters of this book document many years of corrupt government and famine in Malawi that led to wide-spread devastation. The details are hard to read, especially when you think that it was the 1990’s, not the 1700’s, that were being described. Due to the famine, William’s family couldn’t afford for him to attend secondary school, so he used his village’s small library to attemp to keep up with his learing. A natural scientist and tinkerer, Williams finds science books that teach him how to harness the power of the wind, one of the few reliable resources available in Malawi. This is a beautiful story of hard work, innovation and inventiveness, and telling your own story.
• The Woman Who Lied by Claire Douglas – I found this book as a “Blind Date with a book” selection at my library. It was wrapped in brown paper with these hints on it: psychological suspense, London, missing person, serial murders, and books about books. These were intriguing enough for me to check it out and I’m so glad I did. I LOVED this! It was a fast-paced thriller, and a 5 star read for me. Author Emilia has just finished the final novel in her crimer series, where she decided to kill off her lead detective. Suddendly odd things start happening to Emilia and her family, and it all comes from plot points in her novels. Emilia is worried that something sinister is happening and that she might be the final target. We follow her as she tries to solve her own mystery, and we suspect everyone around her as she does. This was so good, with lots of twists!
• Zero Days by Ruth Ware [audiobook] – I recently did a big search in my library’s online catalog and put a bunch of audiobooks on hold. I’ve finally found a rhythm to enjoy listening to some fiction (mostly mystery) on my commute. This was an incredible, fast-paced thriller that I ended up listening to while sitting on my couch just to find out how it ended. Jack and Gabe are a married couple who run a company to help other companies know if their physical and digital worlds are safe from hackers. While Jack is out on a job, Gabe is murdered in their house. When Jack returns to find his body, everything turns upside down. We follow Jack as she attempts to figure out what happened without getting accused of her husband’s murder. This was such a ride!
• The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich – I love Erdrich’s lyrical writing. She creates very real, flawed characters and shows us their average, daily lives with poetic, beautiful language. The mighty red is a river in North Dakota, where we meet a small town of sugar beet farmers and haulers and their teenage children. Kismet and Gary are being pushed into an early, quick marriage and everyone has opinions about them and their families. Kismet’s mother Crystal was the best character in this story! This book had the least historical context or connections to Native American culture I’ve read in an Erdrich book, which is part of what I love about her stories.
• Braver Than You Think by Maggie Downs – Thanks to my Aunt Ellen, who sent me her copy of this book after she read it. In this memoir, we follow Maggie for a year of international travel. There are some unique aspects of this journey. First, Maggie leaves on her travels days after she gets married, and then spends most of her first year of marriage apart form her husband. Second, Maggie’s mother is dying of Alzheimer’s disease, and Maggie is trying to grapple with the last decade of watching her mom’s decline, and preparing for her inevitable death. This was a lot about grief – anticipatory grief, avoiding grief, and simply experiencing grief. Along the way, we get glimpses into Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, South Africa, Ethiopia, Egypt, India, Cambodia, and more places around the globe. Through her descriptions of people, places, and volunteer work, I learned that I never need to visit some of these places and I can’t wait to visit others. This was a sad, bittersweet, honest view of grief with some incredible travel adventures mixed in. [I have this in paperback ready to loan if anyone I know wants to read this.]
• The Wife Upstairs by Freida McFadden [audiobook] – I have found that Freida McFadden’s thrillers are easy to listen to on audio and I can fly through one a week, using my library as much as possible! In this book (I read another book by this exact same title, different author, a few years ago!), we meet Sylvia as she is hired to be a live-in support to a woman, Victoria, with significant brain damage from an accident. We get to know Victoria through a journal that Sylvia found, as we are getting to know Victoria’s husband and their marriage. There are the usual twists and turns and I wasn’t sure who to suspect throughout each twist.

Favorite Books

The Woman Who Lied – Best thriller about ideas from a book coming to life in horrifying ways!

The Sequel – Best second book in a mystery series I’ve read in awhile, as long as your [old] brain can remember what happened in the first of the series!

Zero Days – Best propulsive murder mystery with fugitive on the run vibes!