Blood on My Hands by Todd Strasser
This just didn’t work for me. I really should have abandoned it a few chapters in, but my curiosity got the best of me and I just had to find out who the killer was. (It wasn’t who I expected, but that doesn’t make up for the story overall.)
The writing was so disjointed–it skipped through time every chapter (present tense vs. past tense). While this created suspense and kept me reading, it also felt very uneven because I just wanted the writing style to be consistent.
Callie’s flight from the police was pretty far-fetched; I’m really supposed to believe that a 17-year-old can evade an entire police force? I know it’s a small town, but I don’t think so.
I had hoped that the resolution would be worth it, but it lacked credibility and the ending REALLY bothered me. I’m debating whether I want to read anything else by this author. I’ll probably give him one more shot, but unfortunately I just can’t recommended Blood on My Hands.
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Give a Boy a Gun by Todd Strasser
ok, so I gave Strasser one more try.
I think I’ve mentioned before that I gravitate toward dark novels and that includes books about school shootings, which is what Give a Boy a Gun is. This is disturbing subject matter, but the author didn’t make me care about the characters enough.
The fictional narrative is interspersed with actual statistics and anecdotes about real school shootings (in the form of footnotes), which are certainly relevant (and sad), but which also make the story feel disjointed. I think I’ll avoid this author in the future.
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Chilly Milly Moo by Fiona Ross
And now, for something completely different!
I read this (and the following children’s books) for storytime at the library and this one is so cute! It’s about a cow named Milly Moo who’s different from the other cows. They make fun of her because she’s always too hot to produce milk, but it turns out that there’s something very special about Milly Moo. 
I liked the story more than the illustrations–I feel like the pictures could have been more colorful and bright. But they were still fun and the book really is cute.
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A Dog is a Dog by Stephen Shaskan
I loved this one!
The story starts out with a dog, but then the dog changes into various animals (cat, squid, moose). It’s still the dog inside each different costume, but descriptions are given about the other types of animals. (This kind of makes more sense when you’re actually reading the book.) I’m not sure that the five-year-olds I read to understood that it was still the dog at the end of the story, but the rhymes are very fun and the pictures are nice and bright.
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Quiet Bunny & Noisy Puppy by Lisa McCue
oh my, this book is too sweet. I think it’s a bit longer than the previous two–I feel like it took me a while to read the whole thing to the kids–but it’s a really cute story.
Quiet Bunny doesn’t have anyone to play with since his friends are hibernating or migrating for the winter. Then he meets Noisy Puppy, who is obviously very different from him…but the two end up being best friends. The moral of the story, of course, is that everyone is different but we can still get along with each other in spite of that.
At the end of the story, it’s spring and Noisy Puppy has to go back to his farm (to be a working dog, I think?). But next winter, he visits Quiet Bunny again, this time as a bigger dog. Soooo adorable!
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Princess Super Kitty by Antoinette Portis
eh, this is an okay children’s book.
It’s about a girl named Maggie who likes to pretend she’s a kitty. The story is pretty straightforward–she pretends she’s a kitty, a princess, and a superhero.
It’s fun to read but it’s definitely my least favorite of the books I read to the kids. Overall, it’s cute but I feel like the story would have flowed better if it had been written in rhyme…or maybe had different illustrations? I don’t know, I just felt like something was missing. It’s a decent kids’ book, though.
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I like how my job at the library has got me reading things I don’t normally read–namely, children’s books! Since I don’t have kids, I usually don’t have the need to read things at this level. This is fun and different for me.
I am now two book reviews away from being all caught up, hurray!
M put it up while I was at work today. We still need to put the ornaments on it but look at the pretty bokeh!
I still had a sore throat when I woke up this morning. I just felt really yucky. I felt like my sinuses were acting up, so I took some meds…then both my sore throat and sinus pain went away! Hurray. Maybe that Airborne zapped my cold before it got really bad! I have just a little bit of a sore throat now, but hopefully I’m getting over this bug instead of coming down with it. I have to go back to work tomorrow, so I’m really hoping I’m not going to be sick over Christmas! That would suck.
