This would be a great book for reading aloud to kids—there’s a lot of witty bits to keep adults chuckling to themselves.

I loved the main character in this book, Evelyn Bucknow. The book follows Evelyn from elementary school up until the end of high school, and the author perfectly captured the emotions you feel at those stages of your life. Evelyn’s very religious and very conservative grandmother has a lot of influence on her throughout most of the book. Evelyn’s thoughts about that were very interesting for me to read because I sometimes have trouble understanding those viewpoints. There were a couple points when I didn’t believe her character would just adopt her grandmother’s opinions as her own, but I’m not sure if that’s a reflection on the writing or my own difficulty in understanding the logic behind those opinions. But the book was a great read, and I gobbled it up faster than any other “adult” book I’ve read lately.

This is the second middle grade book by Konigsburg that I’ve read. She’s such a wonderful writer.

What’s interesting is both this one and the last one I read (The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place) start off with an adult character rather than the main kid character. This book didn’t really have one main kid character (it had four), so it didn’t bother me as much with this book, although it still took me a little bit to get into it.

But even so, I very much enjoyed the story and getting to know the characters (even the adults).

This YA book is in screenplay format, so it took a little bit for me to get into reading it that way, but I really enjoyed it. It’s an interesting perspective to read about - that is, the non-white kid who gets tangled up in a crime without ever really doing much of anything or even making a deliberate decision to be involved. But even the prisoners in the book who had more involvement in a crime tried to explain away their responsibility and come up with a reason why it wasn’t really their fault. I think a lot of people do this when they make a mistake (myself included) - you try to come up with a reason why it wasn’t your fault. “I wouldn’t have cut them off if they weren’t hanging out in my blind spot!” or “I wouldn’t have messed up dinner if the instructions were written better.”

I found myself empathizing with these prisoners who didn’t really want to believe they were “bad” people, which was both a little unnerving for me and a good thing. Maybe we don’t put ourselves in others’ shoes often enough.

I wish I had read this book sooner than I did. Ignorance was bliss, but learning how the food I put in my body is made has opened my eyes. I haven’t been eating meat for a couple years, but reading about how meat gets to the plate was still very disturbing. I certainly didn’t know that most of the meat Americans consume has feces in it, not to mention a high occurrence of food-borne pathogens like E coli. And while I could’ve guessed that conditions at slaughterhouses aren’t all that humane for the animals, I had no idea there are so many recent examples of the workers being injured or killed simply by doing their jobs and trying to meet the dangerous and unreasonable speed requirements.

But the most disturbing thing of all was the link between the rise of fast food in this country and the rise in obesity in our children. This is no mistake—it’s not a secret that the fast food companies have purposefully targeted children in their advertising campaigns. They learned from marketing experts that if you can get a kid to start eating your food at a young age, you’ve got a customer for life. And that customer is most likely going to be overweight, if not obese, and have an increased risk of health disease and cancer (among other things) and a decrease in life expectancy.

We should not stand for this any longer. Fast food companies need to stop marketing unhealthy food to children. They need to get out of our schools or change their in-school menus to have only healthy, nutritious foods.

We need to take back our kids—and not just our own kids. Kids from low-income families don’t have adults in their lives who are reading things like Fast Food Nation. So when you’re asking your school to make improvements, think about the school on the other side of town and who’ll be asking for improvements there.

I read this book as part of a small book club with some friends, none of us with school-age children. When we were discussing it, we decided to look into starting a garden at a school where kids can learn about how food grows and what’s healthy to put in their bodies. We found out there’s already a garden at a school on the other side of town (literally) that desperately needs volunteers, so we’re going to get together and do what we can to help.

This was an enjoyable story. All the characters were so vivid and distinct. I especially loved the parts describing the spelling bees. It reminded me a little of that documentary Spellbound. And maybe this is because I’ve been reading so many kids’ books lately, but I kind of wished the book would’ve stayed in that realm. It started getting depressing around the middle (yeah, yeah, I know that’s life sometimes) but it was a little too much for my taste. I didn’t feel like the payoff at the end was enough to compensate for all that pain and sadness in the main character’s family. But still, I did enjoy the story and I’m probably just not calibrated to adult novels right now.

Before I read this book, “attachment parenting” was just a phrase I’d heard thrown around—with good and bad connotations. This book explains the principles of attachment parenting, the benefits of it, and the challenges. When I reach a time in my life where I’m ready to have a baby, I am definitely going to try out some of these techniques. I already knew I was going to try breastfeeding for at least a year, but now I’ll add to that trying out the baby sling and bed sharing.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who’s heard about attachment parenting (especially if all you’ve heard is other peoples’ opinions). Read this book and decide for yourself what parenting style you’d like to try.

This was a wonderfully written fantasy novel. I immediately fell in love with the main character and her world. I would highly recommend it to kids and adults!

I found myself consumed by this book and wanting to read it in any spare moment I had. And overall, I think it was good, but not great.

I kept waiting for something big and meaningful to happen, but it was very episodic, which maybe was the point. It is about high school, after all. The main character’s thoughts and feelings were painfully close to some of the feelings I had in high school, so I enjoyed it in the sense of knowing I wasn’t alone in what I felt then. What was kind of depressing about it though was that it also made me realize that remnants of those feelings are still with me—some of the character’s thoughts and behaviors reminded me of some of my own recent thoughts and behaviors. I have come a long way since high school, but seeing my current self in a high school character is definitely a kick in the pants to “get confident, stupid”, if you know what I mean.

I can’t believe I never read this book as a girl! I really missed out. It’s a bit dated now (and the hired help parts really bother me), but I can see why girls love it. I wonder if there’s anything similar but more modern?