Rated 5 stars ***** Alfred A. Knopf (Penguin Random House). 402 p. Includes “Author’s notes.” 2015.
In a 58-day period between December 1951 and February 1952, three planes crashed in the city of Elizabeth New Jersey. The first killed all 56 on board. The next happened in January 1952, where all 23 on board were killed and seven on the ground. Outrage, fear and confusion followed with calls for Newark Airport to be closed. Unfortunately business went on as usual and, in February, another plane crashed. It had survivors, but a loss of 29 passengers and four people on the ground. With this latest tragedy, the airport was closed.
Judy Blume was in junior high school when the crashes happened, and uses period newspapers, interviews and more to recreate that timeframe from the points of view of those who lived in Elizabeth as well as from the passengers and their family members. There are so many stories to tell that I’m grateful Blume puts the name of the character being discussed at the forefront of that particular chapter. Loves lost and gained, tears, hope in the midst of heartache and more are gathered in this book that brings to life voices from the past. Though Blume noted the characters and events are fictional, it reads as true-to-life.
Highly recommended for Adults.
The story of who killed Evelyn, seventeen-year-old Raven’s evil stepmother, is told through the alternating voices and memories of Raven, his stepsister Lily, and his best friends Poppy and Bella. Three years earlier Poppy and Bella hated how Evelyn was mentally and emotionally torturing Raven. Bella, Poppy and Raven had role played fairy tales, with Bella taking the part of a witch so she wrote down a deadly brew for killing Evelyn that would involve poisoning her tea with petals from deadly belladonna and poppy plants. Lily insisted on being part of the plan, having her own reasons for wanting her mother dead. She suggested they also include lily petals and took Bella’s original recipe for safekeeping. However nothing happened because they backed out of the plan at the last minute.
A bunch of rich girls are in a boarding school somewhere in England, where they rule the school. They spend all their time thinking about ways to avoid eating, measuring nonexistent body fat, and weighing themselves since almost all of them are anorexic. The tepid storyline of “Oligarchy” goes on and on with anorexia as its main theme, jumping disjointedly and dispiritedly from character to character.
Rated 4 stars **** ARC. To be published Sept. 17, 2019. Smile #3. 213 p. (Includes “Author’s note.”)
After her mother died when she was 11-years-old, Libby Strout felt so sad and burdened with grief that only food could lessen her pain. Her father used cooking to assuage his own grief, and the combination soon caused her to balloon to 653 pounds.
Using a poetic style of writing, along with text messages, St. Vil tells the story of Shay, a lonely, overweight 15-year-old girl. Shay has learned to constantly eat to cope with the pain of bullying and missing her dead father, as it helps her forget she’s fat and alone with her evil stepmother. Her gay best friend Dash, and her dying-of-cancer friend Boots assure her she is beautiful and funny, but even they can’t give her the help and support she finds from eating.
As a little girl, Mercy’s mother caught her eating sugar out of a bag and nicknamed her “Sugar.” She and her brothers were encouraged to eat more than normal because their mother didn’t want skinny kids. As a result they grew fat, while their morbidly obese mother was confined to bed with various ailments.
You Decide: Should I Read it or Not? 