What I'm reading now...

The Red Kayak by Pricilla Cummings

Synopsis: Brady Parks faces a life-changing moral dilemma in this coming-of-age story of redemption.  Set in a tiny fishing/crabbing town, the story follows Brady, a 9th grader who is called to help in the search for a woman and her young child who have gone missing while kayaking.

The story isn't as much about his heroic attempt to rescue the child.  Rather, it's about the moral obligation to "do the right thing" in the face of losing everything - your friends, your family's respect, and your freedom.  More than that, it's a story about guilt and redemption, loss and acceptance, trust and responsibility.

Brady learns that harboring secrets and trying to face the unimaginable on one's own can only do harm, and that revealing the truth, while painful and scary, has the very real power to set everyone free from the prisons they create in their own minds.

Genre:  Realistic Fiction

Pages: 208

Level: easy/intermediate

Author's website

The Sequel to this book is The Journey Back.

Opening paragraphs of The Red Kayak:

After all this time, I still ask myself: Was it my fault?

Maybe.  Maybe not.

Either way, I wonder what would have happened if I'd called out a warning.  Or kept my mouth shut later.  Would J.T. and Digger still be my best friends?  Would the DiAngelos still be living next door?

One thing's for sure: If none of this had happened, I'd be out there crabbing every day, baiting my pots in the morning and pulling them in after school.  Fall's a great time for catching crabs before the females head south and the males burrow into the mud.  I could fix the engine on the boat easy if I wanted.  It's not broken like I told Dad.  Probably nothing but some air in the lines from settin' there so long.  I could bleed the engine tonight, set my alarm for 4 a.m., and be on the river before the sun was up over the tree line.

Don't think it didn't bother me, the way those traps sat all summer, stacked four deep against the back of Dad's tool-shed. Some never even got hosed off, they were stashed in such a hurry.  Be a lot of work to clean 'em up and rezinc them, too, so they don't corrode.  In just a few days, though, I could have four rows of twenty-five sunken pots out there, each one marked with a fresh-painted orange buoy, and all one hundred of those pots soaked and baited with razor clams.  Afternoons, I could be hauling in crabs hand over fist, and right now, a bushel of big number-one jimmies would fetch me seventy dollars from the wholesaler -- maybe even more, since the price of crabs has gone through the roof.

But, this is all so complicated.  I can't go back out on the water.  Not yet anyway.  I can't help it; I keep asking myself, What if this, what if that?  And then in my mind I see that red kayak...

Read More

Wonder

Synopsis:  This book has been receiving rave reviews from all over the place.  And since it's appropriate for virtually every audience, it's been reviewed from a lot of angles.  Teachers seem to be loving it...using it as a read-aloud or class novel for anywhere from 3rd grade on up.  And since the themes of self-esteem, friendship, family, and bullying are so important throughout life, there really isn't a person out there I wouldn't recommend this book to.

August Pullman was born with a facial deformity.  In this story, he's 10, and he's entering public school for the first time.  But, 5th grade isn't all it's cracked up to be.  August has a tough time making friends and convincing his classmates that he's ordinary just like them.

Being accepted for who we are - that's what this story is about.  No matter what we look like.




Genre:  realistic fiction

Pages:  320 pages

Level:  easy/intermediate, any

Author website

I know I'm not an ordinary ten-year-old kid.  I mean, sure, I do ordinary things.  I eat ice cream.  I ride my bike.  I play ball.  I have an XBox.  Stuff like that makes me ordinary.  I guess.  And I feel ordinary.  Inside.  But I know ordinary kids don't make other ordinary kids run away screaming on playgrounds.  I know ordinary kids don't get started at wherever they go.

If I found a magic lamp and I could have one wish, I would wish that I had a normal face that no one ever noticed at all.  I would wish that I could walk down the street without people seeing me and then doing that look-away thing.  Here's what I think:  the only reason I'm not ordinary is that no one else sees me that way.

But I'm kind of used to how I look by now.  I know how to pretend I don't see the faces people make.  We've all gotten pretty good at that sort of thing:  me, Mom and Dad, Via.  Actually, I take that back:  Via's not so good at it.  She can get really annoyed when people do something rude.  Like, for instance, on time in the playground some older kids made some noises.  I don't even know what the noises were exactly because I didn't hear them well myself, but Via hear and she just started yelling at the kids.  That's the way she is.  I'm not that way.

Via doesn't see me as ordinary.  She says she does, but if I were ordinary, she wouldn't feel like she needs to protect me as much.  And Mom and Dad don't see me as ordinary, either.  They see me as extraordinary.  I think the only person in the world who realizes how ordinary I am is me.

My name is August, by the way.  I won't describe what I look like.  Whatever you're thinking, it's probably worse.

Read more...