The Wild Girls – A Review
Title: The Wild Girls
Author: Pat Murphy
Publisher: Speak (an imprint of Penguin Group)
Genre: Young Adult
Length: 288 pages
Dear Publishing Companies,
Allow me to tell you something you probably already know: Take a book, add a matte finish to it, trace some swirly-like-ivy lines about, and add a garden or forest scene – I will most likely take the book home on the spot.
At least that’s what happened with Pat Murphy’s The Wild Girls. And despite having an equally girly and gardeny looking book on my night stand (The Distant Hours
Even if the cover had not been so fabulous, the first line is:
“I met the Queen of the Foxes in 1972, when my family moved from Connecticut to California.”
How do you pass up a first line like that?
It’s a story about twelve year old girls for twelve year old girls, but at twenty-nine I was still dying to know all about the Queen of the Foxes and how interesting a girl would have to be to have the honor of meeting her.
My own wild girl, running, after we read in the park and took a boat ride, but before we had our picnic in the grass.
Joan meets Sarah in the woods behind an old orchard and immediately takes to her even though Sarah is malicious and contemplating throwing rocks at her. She can hit a kid dead on from about thirty feet away, too. Soon the girls are fast friends with woodsy aliases Newt and Fox, telling and writing stories together as they each escape their lives in the comfort and enchanting beauty of the woods and its wildlife.
In the spirit of Bridge to Terabithia (without the inevitable water works), The Secret Garden (without the invalid), and a dash of How to Buy a Love of Reading (or writing), The Wild Girls is a great coming of age story for girls harboring an inner Josephine March (Little Women).
I loved it. I read a lot of it to kiddo outside and she loved it as it served for a great book to welcome spring. I can’t wait to read it again when she is older and see what she thinks of it then.
In the mean time, I’m looking for more Pat Murphy titles, reading Kate Morton, and writing a novel.
Journaling at HPB Humble
Click image to see more on artistic journaling.
January 10t
h, 2013, I sat down for the very first journaling night at Half Price Books in Humble. My customers weren’t exactly sure what to expect, and honestly, neither was I. I brought my prisma colors, glue sticks, some fancy pens, and scrapbooking scissors. We had magazines, scrapbooking paper, free unlined journals for all who attended, and a whole lot of untapped creativity.
Hanging out with others while they drew, doodled, wrote, glued and pasted, was kind of awesome. It’s relaxing to be creative with others, pool your resources, and brainstorm techniques. Relaxing and stimulating, actually; so much so that we plan to gather monthly.
2nd Thursday of the Month from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm, plan to sit around a table and really tackle the art of journaling with art. This first meeting was a bit of an experimental night, but in the future I hope to incorporate some of those fabulous Pinterested projects that are floating around the web, possibly even start binding our own journals.
There are just so many things we could do at these gatherings and I can’t wait to dive in and pursue every avenue of this hobby.
Come be crafty with me.
Also, check this out: http://artsyville.blogspot.com/2012/11/a-village-in-my-mind-full-color-friday.html
Julie & Julia – & JJ
Some people are appalled at this, and some find it wonderfully convenient, but I have friend categories. With me, people always know where they stand, because that is what I appreciate most about my own interpersonal relationships. I have a ‘best friend’, a ‘best friend since kindergarten’, a ‘roomie’ (my college room-mate), a ‘sister-wife’ (a very bad long running joke with my bestie of a cousin, no we are not actually sister-wives), and a ‘favorite friend.’ I can proudly say that JJ Golightly, of the Tidbits from Miss Golightly, is my favorite friend.
Favorite friends are those people you can go lengthy times without seeing, but once you see them again they are like crack to your system and you want them more and more. Favorite friends are those friends that if you ever chose to be lesbians (which we are not) you’d spend your life with them, because they are the ones you call randomly and say in the most superfluous and hyperbolic way possible: “I have a longing for you!” Favorite friends are the ones that you’ll hold hands with in public and not care if people look at you funny or take it the wrong way, because like a surrogate sister, your favorite friend is someone you would love to have literally attached to your hip, or in your back pocket if you could keep a miniature of them. They are also the person you happen to see the least of, and maybe that’s why the magnetism toward them remains forever in tact.
I recently had a wonderful visit from both my Roomie (Coffee Cups in Trees) and my Favorite Friend (Miss Golightly). What happens on these trips is this:
Roomie drinks coffee at the table, Favorite Friend bakes and cooks all sorts of goodies and photographs the results, I scurry back and forth trying to decide which I’d rather do, help cook or be lazy and drink coffee. The coffee usually wins.
Maybe it was because of one of these visits (in which all three of us gain five pounds over night), or maybe it was because Glen at the HPB Humble Book Club meeting brought up Julie Powell in our discussion of The Old Curiosity Shop, or maybe it was because I’d had the book sitting open to page five on my coffee table for about a year, but I finally got around to reading Julie & Julia
Nothing like reading a memoir about a frazzled maniac with a serious obsession for obsessions and sci-fi shows – in the kitchen – writing a blog and book when you too are nearly 29, frazzled, obsessed (but not dedicated), writing a blog, and most recently lost your entire book (again) to a computer virus. It gives hope. It gives motivation.
I will write a book in the next 30 days. Not the one I intended, I’m too crushed right now, but a different, lighter book that is loitering in a journal in my cabinet just waiting to be properly edited and put into a computer. I have 30 days. If Julie Powell can cook 523 recipes in 365 days, get published, and not be a loser by age 30, damn it, so can I. Except I’m not cooking. I’ll be ‘writing’ a nearly already book (from paper to computer) in 30 days and getting it to Smashwords by my 29th birthday. This I do vow.
In the mean time, I will still be reading, writing this blog, eating if I can afford it, and teaching Kung Fu… because that’s who I am, that’s what I do. Funny, that I had to be reminded of that by a memoir about French cooking.
Which is a delightful, by the way, all the way down to her swearing like a sailor, something I wouldn’t have even noticed had she not pointed it out. She may live in Long Island City, but when it comes down to it she’s from Texas, and as a Texan I can say there are two kinds of Texas women… the kind that swear, and the southern belles who don’t.
I appreciate her kitchen woes, I love to eat but have many cooking woes myself. I appreciate her small and outlandish apartment, I have a once lovely home that has just been utterly broken by this recession and a foundation problem. There’s just so much to relate to, and frankly, Julie Powell is down right endearing. She’ll never be my Favorite Friend in real life, as that spot is forever taken and I doubt I’ll ever even meet her, but she is definitely a favorite on my bookshelf.
A Day With a Klemm
Klemm. When I looked up the meaning of my married name, I found a definition somewhat like this one:
German: from Middle High German klem ‘narrow’, ‘tight’, ‘scarce’, hence a
nickname for a thin or inhibited person, or alternatively a topographic name for
someone living in a narrow, precipitous place, from the Middle High German noun
form klemme ‘constriction’.Read more on FamilyEducation: http://genealogy.familyeducation.com/surname-origin/klemm#ixzz26eR2FcGy
So it should come as no surprise that we have some very interesting daily habits that coincide with being a small, introverted, hobbit-like soul, that does not emerge from the house for days at a time. First of all, we eat like hobbits:
- Breakfast – 7am
- Second breakfast – 9 am
- Elevenses – 11 am
- Lunch – 1 pm
- Afternoon tea – 3pm
- Dinner – 6 pm
- Supper – 9 pm
In between all these meal times is a whole lot of coffee, a morning cleaning ritual, and lots of reading.
I get really into my books and the characters involved. And with that engagement comes an intense need to invite them in my home the same way I would a welcomed but unknown guest. I prepare coffee, make sure we have had our meals and have later meals prepared, clean the house (sweep, mop, vacuum, do the dishes and wipe down counters) and then I am ready to sit down with my future new friends – the lovely people portrayed in books.
So, I’m writing this blog post in between Elevenses and mopping the floor. My coffee is ready (more than ready, I’m on cup two – and my cups are overly large mugs that fit about half a French press in each serving) thinking about Louise de la Baume le Blanc de la Valliere and how we are going to enjoy some afternoon sandwiches together. That’s crazy book nerd talk for: I am going to be reading more of Karleen Koen’s Before Versailles while I munch on chicken salad sandwiches (I’m addicted to HEB’s Rotisserie Chicken Salad) and sip even more coffee.
I do the same thing before I write. Which is probably why I’ve been working on the same novel since I was 14 years old. Karleen said yesterday that it takes her a long time to complete a book, and all I could think was: Thank God, I am not alone, because I am taking forever. If my debut novel is half as good as hers (Through a Glass Darkly) I feel as though I will have accomplished something in life. I just want to finish it, get it in print, and have a completed work that someone – anyone – will remember.
I spend days on end reading and writing and eating with my daughter. It is only for events, planned activities for her benefit, and my random extreme extrovert days that get me out of the house. (One day, my daughter will probably tell you her mother was a bit wacky, as when I take personality tests I come out equally extroverted and introverted depending on the day. Some have misused the term bipolar on me, but I got that checked out and I’m not.) Yesterday I spent the whole day at Half Price Books running around and giving things away… today I will huddle up with Louise and Louis XIV and whoever my daughter interupts me with (LadyBug Girl a constant play friend in our house).
Anakalian Whims 