Scaredy Squirrel: Short & Sweet Review

I just read a great book: Scaredy Squirrel by Melanie Watts.

It's about a very anxious squirrel and what happens when he (accidentally) leaves the safety of his tree-home and routine.

Read it!

Owly

I can't say enough good things about Owly.

A friend gave me a signed copy of the first book in the Owly series a couple years ago and it was love at first owl. It's a series of graphic novels that tells stories through pictures only - no text. The stories are sweet, sad, and hopeful. Friendship features prominently. These would be good for any age, I think. They're fantastic.

Here's the first one: Owly: The Way Home & The Bittersweet Summer by Andy Runton.

The End of Mr Y: An Attempted Review

I recently finished reading The End of Mr Y by Scarlett Thomas, which is really quite good. My enjoyment of it was somewhat uneven, though, because I found some parts of the book very interesting and others...not un-interesting, but scannable. There's a major mystery in the book and details about this mystery are revealed more and more as the story progresses. The thing is - the details about the mystery were probably the least engaging parts for me. I'd have preferred to just read about the narrator's thoughts and life. That's still a positive review. (It's a hard book to talk about, because I think it's really a novel with surprises/suspense that a review could deflate a bit. It is suspenseful in a smart and interesting way.)

Somehow, Scarlett Thomas manages to mix a complex, suspensful story with the narrator's thoughts and conversations about topics in the fields of (strange) science, religion, philosophy, and linguistics without those two elements feeling disjointed.

Oh, and I want the job Scarlett has at the start of the book - writing a column for a magazine where she picks one topic, thoroughly researches it, writes about it, and then uses some link from that topic to find the topic for the next issue. Whatever she's interested in - that's her subject. Pretty great.

But anyway - all that to say...I enjoyed it!