I love big, coffee table-sized books that are full of luscious illustrations. If a book has interesting and well-written text to go along with those illustrations, so much the better.
Enter Trees: A Rooted History, by Piotr Socha and Wojceich Grajkowski.
I recently read The Queen of Nothing, by Holly Black, and Imposters, by Scott Westerfeld. I wanted to throw them together into one post because while they are fairly different from each other, they are from the same genre, and both books feature twin sisters as the main characters.
Last Train To London, by Meg Waite Clayton, was recommended by my mom and took me back to one of my first loves, historical fiction around the time of World War II.
This book is huge, and it took me a while to get into it. I had to get used to jumping in between the different plot lines that are braided together in the story, and honestly, I’m short on time and get intimidated by huge books. But soon, I couldn’t stop reading.
The Remarkables, by Margaret Peterson Haddix, was sitting in the middle grade section of our library on an open shelf. The teaser phrase on the cover reads, “There’s a mystery next door.”
There was something compelling and a little spooky about the cover art. With a little hesitation, because I don’t like to be spooked, I grabbed it.
It took several weeks to get to – the reading list is so long these days. But it was SO. GOOD.
The Serpent King, by Jeff Zentner, is the second book I read for the YA Book Club I joined at my library. (The last book I read for the book club was The Cruel Prince, by Holly Black).
I started The Serpent King at a tender time. I was spending a second weekend at the bedside of my grandmother, who was dying. Many of my most vivid memories of my time spent at her home were from my teenage years, when my friendships with my cousins were one of the most important things in my life and the summer visits, full of new experiences, were larger than life.
The house itself is full of senior photos of the cousins and grandkids, all of us gathered on shelves and side tables, frozen in time as 17 and 18-year-olds, and the home’s interior has barely changed over the course of the time I visited there from childhood until I was an adult.
