This is probably a book that benefits from close reading, or a discussion section. It failed to leave a huge impact, though I may have also been distracted by the number of notes left by students in the margins (and my suspicions that they were noticing the wrong things).

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I LOVED THIS BOOK! Or, more accurately, I loved Ove.

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This book was wonderful, but also had a lot of heaviness. Cancer. Divorce. Anger. Fear. I think I pushed myself to read it through the night because I wanted to get to the end of all the intensity. BUT it was very honest and funny and hopeful and the conflicts seemed true to life. (Okay there was a romantic-comedy theme as well, but enough characters were messy/real enough that I WAS NOT MAD about the happy ending.)

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This book was adorable. It had a bossy French lady and a stubborn single mom. And a lot of other complex, sympathetic characters.

I read it on the plane, and found it on my kindle, so I’m guessing it was one of those free books offered at the beginning of the month through Amazon. (Does everyone else know about these? They offer you the option to take one of six free ebooks at the beginning of each month. I think they’re frequently new releases or pre-releases.)

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1. New Kindle Fire! Okay, it’s not VERY new. I bought it when I moved, so I could download Amazon shows and watch them in my internet-less home, but this is the first time I’ve read/finished any books on the the new Kindle Fire, and I love having FULL COLOR book covers!

2. I bought these before vacation, even though I had a string of unread ebooks sitting on the Kindle, mainly because I still live in the shadow of that one summer I ran out of books to read at the beach.

3. These were really good. Solid sci-fi series. One thing I enjoy about Butler in particular is that she’s not afraid to jump FAR ahead in time between one book and the other, or to have two books in a series about completely disconnected things so that she can draw them together in the finale.  I appreciate that she respects her readers enough to leave them hanging like this.

4. Though the theme of xenophobia is still present in these books, she didn’t follow that path as thoroughly as she has in others. I feel like there was an extra book missing, that went deeply into the connections between these two hybrid races. (Technically, there WAS a book missing – the series originally had five books, but Butler hated one of them and stopped re-publishing. I wonder if it moved in this direction, but didn’t do so in a satisfactory way.)

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