Saturday 26 January 2019

Charms for the Easy Life - Kaye Gibbons



I loved this American tale, set in the 1930s and 40s, of three women in one family.    The Daughter narrates and tells of of how her grandmother became a midwife, an unregistered doctor with an opinion on everything;   and how her mother married the wrong man early in life – a union which resulted in the daughter who loves both her grandmother and mother, but her grandmother just a little more. 

This is not the first book by Kaye Gibbons I have read, nor will it be the last.  She is a delight to read because she talks of real people.  Not people who have seen something iffy from a train, not people who wake up with the wrong man in the bed, not dead bodies found in boots of cars.  Just real life, real people.  The kind your grandmother told you about, the kind your mother warned you  about, the kind that you have come across yourself. 




Wednesday 16 January 2019

How to Look For A Lost Dog - Ann M Martin









 Rose is an autistic child, her mother left when she was two, and her father, a man of a few words drinks too much.  He can’t (or won’t) understand autism either.    But one night he brings her a gift – a dog – and Rose’s world is turned upside down for a while. 

Rose calls the dog Rain because she arrived on a rainy day, and she changes the life of this child.  But when she finds out that her father didn't get her from the dog pound, or from an animal rescue centre, she decides that Rain has another family out there somewhere.  A family whose hearts are broken because their beloved dog has gone;  just as Rose's heart will break if she finds the family - because she will have to give Rain up.  Fortunately she is helped in the task by a lovely uncle, who really is more of a father than her own has ever been.  The reason for this is made clear, but  not until very near the end of the book, and there are a lot of smiles and a lot of tears for us us before we get there.  There are certainly more books about autistic boys than girls, but we need to know about girls too - what makes them tick;  what their coping mechanisms are.  Also how others cope.  For Rose can lose her temper, and when she does, instead of swearing she shouts prime numbers, one after the other, and this is not only disconcerting, but at school very disruptive..... "would you care to step into the corridor for a while, Rose?"    Wonderful.

Tuesday 1 January 2019

Mrs Mac Suggests - What to read in JANUARY 19

Happy New Year!!

Here's to some good stuff in 2019, but majorly, good health and no money problems are my two  wishes to you all.

My suggestion for a January read?  I have just read a book written for children (How to look for a lost dog - Ann M Martin), which has as it's lead character a high functioning autistic child.  It made me think, a lot, about how that child functioned in the world with people  who did not really understand how her brain worked.  So my suggestion to you is to
 
look for and read a book about autism

either fiction or non fiction, long or short - you may find that like me, you laughed because of the way the child dealt with life, and cried for the same reason.  And you will be drawn into a world where you begin to understand that we are not all the same, but perhaps underneath we are mostly no different.                                                                                                                                                      

Early One Morning - Virginia Baily

I was attracted to this novel purely by the cover (as I suppose this is meant to happen!) and it has very little about the contents on the b...