Hold Your Breath, Make a Wish…
Title: Storyteller
Author: Donald Sturrock
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Genre: Biography/ Literature
Length: 656 pages
“…Count to three…
Come with me and you’ll be in a world of pure imagination.
Take a look and you’ll see into your imagination.
We’ll begin with a spin…
Traveling in a world of my creation.
What we’ll see will defy explanation!”
I don’t know anyone who didn’t grow up enthralled with Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (the movie). I know many who were equally amazed by the books below, though obviously less because after all there aren’t as many book-nerds as there are movie goers.
I dreamed of writing books like these as a child. As an adult, though I am an aspiring novelist with a novella recently published, however, I find myself longing to be a biographer. That’s where the real talent lies.
Donald Sturrock’s Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl is fascinating. You wouldn’t think reading a biography on a man who hated biographies would be so riveting, but it is. I also never expected the man who had such a vivid imagination to have such an involved life. For some reason I usually expect people who imagine much to live little. I am constantly being proven wrong.
When reading the opening pages, I was at first struck with how much I previously didn’t know about Dahl at all. Little things, like his height. I didn’t know that Dahl was so tall, six foot five! Then describe his personality: a witty bit of a curmudgeon… an entertainer, someone always intrigued by the best of things… in those early pages I thought I might fall in love with him! Too bad he was married, would be far too old if he were living, and by the way is also dead.
Further into the biography, the magic wears off as he becomes more and more a real person. Everyone has flaws. I find his attachment to celebrity and his name-dropping a huge turn off as a human, but I still adore him. However, rather than continue to adore Dahl the way I did from the start of the book, I find myself completely compelled to discover more about this biographer.
The life of researchers ever pique my interest. I am an amateur. I read and read and read, take notes, and then hop and skip over to a new topic. I rarely develop ideas as thoroughly as I should, and though I never become bored with a topic I quite frequently find myself distracted by the shiny newness of others. A biographer – a good biographer – can’t be so willy-nilly. I respect that. I am envious of that.
In regards to Roald Dahl, all I can say is that you should read Sturrock’s biography. I don’t like giving away spoilers, but I think the year 2014 will be full of Dahl titles, both because I am newly inspired to read them and my kiddo is ready to hear me read the children’s titles aloud, I think.
Dahl died November 23, 1990. In honor of his Death-aversary, Good Books in the Woods held a chocolate tasting (compliments of Schaokolad in The Woodlands). One of the patrons had actually met Dahl in person before his death so the discussion, as all discussion at Good Books, was exciting and rather involved.
Book Release Party Success!
For those of you who follow my blog, but are unaware of my very small time secondary blog… the one responsible for me now being published… Here is a post about my book release party.
Authors Bethany MacManus and A.K. Klemm
A.K. Klemm & Editor/Co-Author Katie Lavois
A.K. Klemm among friends.
This Weekend at Good Books in the Woods
I’m pretty excited about this. In preparation and celebration, I am currently reading Storyteller
Seed Savers: Heirloom Book Blog Tour
The whole tour itinerary… so excited and honored to be first and last.
Here is the schedule for the Seed Savers: Heirloom blog tour and launch. I will update it as needed.
Heirloom Blog Tour – November 14 – December 2
| 11/14 Anakalian Whims | Launch/Seed Savers Reflection |
| 11/15 Laurie’s Thoughts and Reviews | Character Interview (Lily) |
| 11/16 Virginia Ripple | Excerpt |
| 11/17 Michelle Isenhoff – Bookworm Blather | Book Review |
| 11/18 The Garden of Books | 10 Favorite Things to Grow in a Garden |
| 11/19 This Kid Reviews Books | Book Review |
| 11/20 Mother Daughter Book Reviews | Heirloom: Fact or Fiction |
| 11/21 Satisfaction for Insatiable Readers | Excerpt |
| 11/22 Valerie Comer | Series Promo/ Review of Treasure |
| 11/23 Shannon Thompson | Guest Post |
| 11/24 My Full Bookshelf | Book Review |
| 11/25 Shalini Boland | Excerpt |
| 11/26 Jemima Pett | Haiku/Mini-Interview |
| 11/27 Story Addict | Guest Post |
| 11/28 … |
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Seed Savers: Heirloom
Title: Heirloom
Author: S. Smith
Genre: Young Adult
Length: 300 pages
“I haven’t been this in love with a young adult series since Harry Potter,” I wrote after reading the first installment of the Seed Savers Series – Treasure – for the first time. Having now read the second and third installments – Lily and Heirloom – I can happily say that the statement still holds true.
No, there aren’t wizards or magic. The adventure doesn’t reach any of the same fantastical levels, but it is very epic. It is based in a truth that could easily lend itself to being our future. This dystopian society is so intense, because it’s so plausible.
Treasure featured two runaway kids (Clare and Dante) after their discovery of the wonderful world of planting your own seeds and growing your own food, in a government where that is forbidden. They flee for their safety. They flee to learn more.
Lily is where you get to know another character, Clare and Dante’s friend and fellow cohort in the Seed Saving excitement. In this book she blossoms before our eyes into less of a sidekick and more the hero. I was pleasantly surprised to find she had such a huge role in the story. She’s not just the key to almost everything, but the narrator as well! Who knew?
After a long alienation from Clare and Dante, Smith is wise enough to bring us back and feed our curiosity. Heirloom is told back and forth between what’s happening with Clare and Dante, and the world according to Lily. I loved this pattern for a third in a series. It wrapped up some lo0se ends, it led us into asking more questions, and we were able to adventure cross country and learn more about growing plants in a cozy environment in the same book. My brain needed this.
Heirloom, even more than the other two in the series, is full of interesting facts about how a society would get from where it was in the 1980’s to what it is in Smith’s novels. In a time when we are debating GMOs, organics, seeds, and patents, this book is a must have to help middle grade students grasp all the political nuances decisions of today will have on tomorrow. I love that Smith was able to take an intense political topic and weave it into a fascinating (and fun) story.
The fun comes into play, I think, because Smith did not intend to strictly bark all this information at us. It comes from love, and you can sense that as you read. Love for what? “[M]y love of good food,” she said in a blog interview with me once, “Seed Savers is a love story starring home-grown food. I love food—growing, harvesting, cooking, eating, and sharing it. And I think a lot of people these days maybe are missing out on that.”
If you’ve read books one and two, you cannot miss this third part of the series! It’s essential. It has propelled us so much deeper into the story and I’m jittery waiting on the fourth! It didn’t maintain the same read in one sitting quality of books one and two, but I believe that’s because the characters demand more of your time. There is so much more going on, and in the midst of it all they want to teach you as well. That takes more than a day. Clare, Dante, and Lily are growing and stretching their legs, and with them Smith is becoming more detailed and dynamic in her tale. Like good food, Heirloom was made to be savored.
If you haven’t read any of the series, you must. Purchase it for yourself, purchase it for your children for Christmas and read them together – or just swipe the copies and read them yourself. They are so good.
A Homeschool Mom Meets Seed Savers
Click to follow the tour and visit the next blog.
The thing about homeschooling – the awesome thing – is that plans are made, expectations logged, and as a parent you do a lot of letting go of both of those things as your child sort of takes over.
I personally planned on going full force into the alphabet and phonics, drill numbers and be sure my three year old was the smartest on the block. At age two she already knew all the states on the U.S. map south of the Mason Dixon line.
Kiddo, God, and the universe, had other plans. And I like them.
With the help of S. Smith’s Seed Savers series, some extreme budgeting issues (I’ve been the poorest person I know for the last twelve months), and Merriweather’s fabulous foraging site (see the links on the right), we’ve pretty much spent our ‘school days’ in the woods.
It all started many, many moons ago (as I like to say to my kiddo when telling stories)… somehow I was lucky enough to receive a copy of Seed Savers: Treasure from S. Smith by mail. I remember reading some of it out loud, but then giving up and devouring it all alone. I gave up because I wanted to read it faster, I wanted it all to myself, not because Kiddo was anything but cooperative.
What resulted is a long standing admiration for S. Smith, requests for her to participate in Earth Day 2013 (which she graciously accepted from 3000 miles away) and taking Kiddo to said Earth Day celebration. Before Seed Savers, I was already on a mission to be more self-sufficient and have my own garden, but Seed Savers really solidified that need in my heart. Instead of *wanting* to do it, I got my butt in gear and did it. This shift in my mentality eased over into the preferences of my daughter.
She loved the Earth Day celebration. She got to plant seeds with volunteers from the Mercer Arboretum. She got to watch me raffle off S. Smith’s first two books (Treasure & Lily), and it was all over – these Fall plans I had noted during my pregnancy were half out the window. Without hearing the entire Seed Savers story, Kiddo fell in love with seeds. S. Smith’s words are so powerful they radiate into every aspect of our house just by sitting on the shelf.
We have seen and read The Lorax more times than I can count. On her third birthday her great-grandmother gave her spending money and she spent it at Good Books in the Woods on two Cat in the Hat Learning Library books. One is on Rainforests and the other on Seed Planting.
We spend our days looking for birds on the trails, foraging for produce, growing our own bell peppers and okra, and now reading Heirloom as we tromp through the woods.
However, you don’t have to be a mom, a conservative, a homeschooler, a toddler, or a hippie to enjoy the Seed Savers Series. Seed Savers, including the latest – Heirloom – is full of courageous characters, a rich adventure, and exciting philosophical food for thought.
What started out as a really unique young adult dystopian society concept on Smith’s part, has evolved into something more than we initially bargained for. The story is more complex than I anticipated. The effect on our lives has more reach. Smith has matured as a writer along with the growth of her characters. I’m a little disappointed that the stories will, at some point, come to an end…
If you don’t believe me, find out for yourself.
Purchase the Seed Savers Series from Amazon
Visit the Author’s Website: http://authorssmith.com
Go Like Her on Facebook: http://facebook.com/AuthorSSmith
Follow S. Smith on Twitter: http://twitter.com/AuthorSSmith
I Am… Therefore I Read…
Someone once told me I was the “most fascinating dichotomy” he’d ever met. I remember feeling bashful by this statement, not quite understanding what that meant, but nevertheless naked. It’s been an echo in my head for nearly a decade, and I can’t even remember his name. But I have a tendency to mull over echoes and since then I think I’ve pieced together a bit of what he must have noticed.
It’s something that I will always relate back to my heart – both physically and spiritually.
Physically, I have an arrhythmia. It is something that shouldn’t affect me as much as it does except that I identify with it so completely. It doesn’t hurt anymore, but I remember the pain and panic it inflicted in my childhood. It almost always startles me, but I know how to correct it. It is the ever present reality that my heart does not beat in rhythm with anyone else’s and most likely never will. It is the feeling of constantly having to search for a rhythm so much harder than everyone else, whether that be when singing, when running, or when cycling. I do not have an internal clock. I do not keep time or pace. I have to find a pace in others and struggle to match it. This is not a complaint, this is reality. This is what it feels like to be inside my ribcage. The only person who might understand this best (although she obviously won’t remember), is my daughter. For 40 weeks she lived inside that ribcage. Her heartbeat was steady and sure, completely healthy, and mine was obviously off. It was literally breath taking – as in I had to stop to catch my breath – because my heart was off kilter and it was instinctively trrying to match her steady, beautiful rhythm.
Spiritually – To my psyche, this minor detail of my life seems to bleed into everything. I was the girl in the top choirs who could not keep time. I remember my dance partner with his hands on my hip (forceful, not sexually) helping me sway… left… right… left… right… and when I got out of sync the gentle double tap and jerk and the whisper in my ear, “Left!” I am never in tune with the people around me.
I am good at calming myself down and remaining calm when necessary, but am completely startled and thrown off by surprises. I can pass dead bodies in the street after a car accident, see a decapitation, work in a bar, and deal with psychos in downtown ghettos more easily than I can choose something to eat off a menu of a restaurant I was not expecting to visit. I can seamlessly function in chaos, but a surprise from a friend, even if pleasant, can throw my whole day. I am adventurous but rarely impromptu. I am impulsive and simultaneously reserved. I am a sanguine melancholy.
I am often the one at the funeral unable to shed tears, put in charge of something practical. Yet, I’m also the one years later still nostalgic over the deceased when everyone else seems to have ‘gotten over it.’ I am excitable, and therefore perceived as sensitive; but was rarely in relationships prior to my marriage because those romantically interested in me thought I had no heart. I run hot and cold. I either like you instantly, or dismiss you altogether.
I find myself curling up with books most often, I think, because like singing and running and cycling and Kung Fu – there is a rhythm. There is a rhythm of words, a pattern. There is a goal – to understand the author, to live the story, to learn something new, to get to your destination (the far off place in the pages of the book if it is a good one, or simply to the last page if it is a bad one). Again, as I read, I hear the echo of that long lost person… I understand characters so well, and have little understanding of people.
My father in law saw my books once and said, “So you read to escape.” I was mildly offended. No, I thought, I read to accomplish. I read to learn. I read because reading is important. But last night, I realized, in a lot of ways he is right. I read because I have control over the circumstances in which I dive into information. I read to settle my nerves. I read to avoid decisions. I read because in theory it should be easier to be let down by a character than by a person. I read because sharing the friends I meet in books is up to me, I am somewhat in control of the chaos. I read because I can take a few days to figure out what a character means before I am faced with that character again – it’s easy, leave him/her on the nightstand until I’m ready again. You can’t do that with real people. There’s no time. You have to have feelings or not have them immediately, and to master in what degree. You have to decide what everything means immediately. And you have to react accordingly.
Scarlet O’Hara doesn’t care if I think she’s a bitch. It doesn’t matter that I am in love with Captain Wentworth and Howard Roarke, and neither one is saddened, happy, or jealous. Holden Caulfield is unaffected by my disdain for him and what I say about him or to him will not cause him to stumble – or grow. And I can get to know all of them as quickly or slowly as I like. Jay Gatsby is not going anywhere, I can soak up every nuance from now until eternity and not miss a beat.
Not missing a beat is important to someone who misses them all the time.
Anakalian Whims 