Crazy Adventure by A. McDormand, A. McDormand and M. Peddle

Well, this was my surprise read of the summer.

After spending a rainy afternoon playing some fill-in-the-blank story games, some of my day care crew decided they wanted to write a book themselves.  The next day, "Crazy Adventure" was born.

As the book was being written I was asked if I am troubled by nightmares.  I said that I had them from time to time.  The response was, "I hope this doesn't give you any tonight!"

This is the story of a day care, with a day care provider named Sue, who is afraid of snakes.  The kids find a treasure map and as they head out in search of the treasure, they run into some obstacles along the way.

As the adventure continues, they encounter crocodiles and snakes.  One of the snakes bites Sue and she is suddenly transformed into a snake.  They find some medicine that transforms snakes into humans, but (SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!) it doesn't work and Sue stays a snake forever.

This is a very funny story, with great characters.  There is fantastic art throughout the book as well.  I highly recommend this book, but seeing as how I have the only copy, you might need to swing by my house to have a read.  I hope these authors come up with more books, I'm looking forward to reading anything else they publish.

Be Careful What You Wish For by Jeffrey Archer

Picking up where Best Kept Secret left off, this is book #4 in Jeffrey Archer's Clifton Chronicles series.  At the end of the previous book there is a serious car accident and you know one of the young men travelling in the car has been killed and the other is alive.  But which one lives and which one dies?

You find out the answer pretty quickly once this book starts, and the story of Clifton/Barrington family continues.

I found this book to be much more enjoyable than the previous book.  Where the previous book seemed like a collection of short stories, this one had more threads that wove through the whole book, which helped keep my interest better.

But as far as Jeffrey Archer books, I would still say this is far from his best (First Among Equals).  This book is full of stock market trading and board room meetings which dragged a bit.  The family company decides to get into the luxury cruise ship business and their enemies start plotting to bring them to ruin.  Will the ship get built?  Will the business succeed or fail?  Who will be the chairman of the company to lead the business in the right direction.  I'm not a lover of books about big business, and I've hated being a part of board meetings when my previous job required them, so this really wasn't my thing.

Still, I've grown attached to these characters and it's interesting to see how their personal lives develop. But I feel like their stories are mostly told by now.  There will be a fifth book next year.  I hope this is the end of it.  If you're reading the series, keep going, but if you haven't started, I think you can find better series out there.

The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis

I am so sad that we are now done the whole Chronicles of Narnia.  We read the end of The Last Battle tonight and now the whole series is done.

I can't say enough about what an amazing experience it was to read these books again with my kids and to see their reactions to the stories that I've loved for so long.  They listened to every detail and loved trying to guess what was going to happen next in each book.  They fell in love with the characters and feel like they've made new Narnian friends.  There were times when they were jumping for joy, cheering, and clapping as we read a new victory for the "good guys".  There were times when they were sad, and even times when we had to think of funny stories before bed because they were scared by what we'd read (the description of Tash in The Last Battle for example).

This final book tells the story of the end of Narnia, after a battle with Shift the Ape and some Calormene soldiers who are trying to take over Narnia.  Shift dresses a donkey up to look like Aslan and so gets all the creatures doing his bidding.  There are only a few who remain loyal to the real Aslan, and Jill and Eustace are pulled in from England to help fight this final battle.

I think the last page of this book is one of my all-time favourite endings in any book I've read.  The last chapter was filled with so many reunions with characters from earlier books that the kids were going out of their minds with excitement.  It was just such a great way to finish the series.

Now I really don't know what to read next.  They just want to go back and start the whole series again, but I want to move onto something new.  I can't convince Wesley to go for Anne of Green Gables (too girly), so I'm trying to find something they'll both enjoy.  I'm thinking of Charlotte's Web.  I'm not a Tolkien fan myself, so I don't really want to do The Hobbit.  I'd appreciate any suggestions!

The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules by Catharina Ingelman-Sundberg

I enjoyed this book.  What a light, fun summer read.  It's not going to be a literary classic, but if you're looking for something light to take along on your vacation, I recommend this one.

Martha Andersson is a resident of the Diamond House nursing home in Stockholm.  After being taken over by new owners, there have been cutbacks to the care at Diamond House making life pretty miserable for Martha and the other residents there.  Some of her lifelong friends, Brains, Rake, Anna-Greta and Christina are in there with her, and they need to come up with a plan to make things better.  They've been cut back to one meal a day, with a few snacks, no alcohol, no outside time, no recreation and a limit on the amount of coffee they can drink!  How can they live like that?

One night, Martha and Brains watch a documentary about the prisons in Sweden and the quality of life experienced by the prisoners there.  The prisoners get three square meals a day, daily outside time and the opportunity to take classes.  Martha quickly realizes that life is better in prison than in the nursing home and starts making plans so that she and her friends can end up there.

Being new to the crime lifestyle in their late-70's and early-80's, they've got a lot to learn, but they learn quickly and soon begin their life of crime.  This funny story follows their escapades through their successes, failures and the attempts by police to determine who is behind this new crime ring.

Again, it's not classic literature, but it's fun.  If you liked, "The 100-Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and then Disappeared", you'll like this one.

The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis

We are sad to be approaching the end of the Chronicles of Narnia as we finished this book.  Only one book remains.  As with the others, we loved this book and the adventures we read about along the way.

I know I've read this book before, but as we started it, I had very little recollection of what the story was.  We found it to be one of the darkest books of the series.

My guest reviewer, Darcy, found the book to be terrifying in some spots. There was even one night after we'd done our pre-bedtime reading, that I needed to tell them some funny stories to lighten the mood because they were a bit freaked out by what we'd read.

Picking up where The Voyage of the Dawn Treader leaves off, this book follows Eustace and his new friend Jill as they enter Narnia after running away from some bullies at their awful school.  Once there, a scuffle between the two friends ends with Eustace falling off a mountain and Jill meeting with Aslan.  He tells her it is her job to find King Caspian's missing son, Prince Rilian, and gives her signs to follow that will help her in her quest.  Jill manages to mess up the first few signs, which makes their task even harder.

Once she meets up with Eustace (who Aslan had guided safely to the bottom of the mountain) they set off on their quest along with their new friend, the eternal pessimist, Puddleglum.

A long journey follows, including a trip to the middle of the earth.  There are funny times, scary times and sad times along the way.  But there were times that were so exciting that Wesley was jumping out of his chair and clapping and cheering.  I love seeing him so excited about a book.

So, now we've begun The Last Battle and we will be sad to see the end of it.  Any suggestions for what we should read next?

The Day the Falls Stood Still by Cathy Marie Buchanan

This was another selection for my book club, and I just didn't enjoy this one at all.  It took me a long time to get interested in the book, and even then, I still wasn't all that interested.

This is the story of Bess Heath, a young woman growing up in Niagara Falls in the early 1900's, just leading into World War I.  Bess's family is one of wealth and privilege until her father suddenly loses his job and the family finds themselves falling on hard times.  While struggling to keep her family afloat, Bess meets and falls in love with Tom Cole.  Tom is not in the same league as Bess's family, but he is a man who knows the Falls and the river and has special abilities to see dangers there that others cannot see.

Their story is sweet and endearing, but it is buried beneath a story of the development of Niagara Falls, the building of hydroelectric plants, and how the development is beginning to destroy the natural beauty and majesty of the falls.  Tom struggles to fight against that development while needing to work for the plants to support his family after his return from the war.  I found the details of this struggle to be really, truthfully, uninteresting.  I normally enjoy historical fiction, but I really found it hard to get emotionally invested in this story.  I also felt the tragedy that happened at the end of the book was heavily foreshadowed, so it wasn't surprising when it happened.

The woman in our group who chose this book is from the Niagara region, and I can see why she would find it interesting for that reason.  There is a lot of talk about the different areas of Niagara Falls and if you were really familiar with that area, it would be fun to read about that.  But with me having only a tourist's knowledge of the area, that wasn't an important feature for me.

It's a fairly light book, but definitely not a page turner.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C.S. Lewis

Continuing on in the Chronicles of Narnia series, we finished The Voyage of the Dawn Treader tonight.  When I asked the kids what they thought I should say about it on my blog, Darcy said, "It's amazing!" and Wesley said, "It felt like it went on forever!"  When I asked him what he meant by that, he said that they had so many amazing adventures in this book, that it seemed like it went on forever, but in the best way.  He loved every minute of it.

I found this one difficult to read aloud, because of some of the nautical terms that I'm not familiar with (we had a lot of giggling every time the book made reference to the "poop" of the ship), but it's a great story.

Lucy and Edmund Pevensie are sent to spend the summer at the house of their nasty cousin Eustace.  One afternoon a painting of a sailing ship comes to life, filling the room with water, taking Lucy, Edmund and Eustace to Narnia.  There they encounter their friend King Caspian, who is on a journey to find seven missing Lords who were loyal to Caspian's father.  Along the way they encounter some strange lands, some strange people, and lots of magic.  Eustace spends some time as a dragon and it goes a long way to improving his personality.

We made the mistake of watching the movie before reading the book.  The movie changed the story in a lot of ways, but because the kids saw the movie first, they thought that was the right way to tell the story. It took a bit of convincing on my part to get them to believe that the book is actually the way the story is meant to be told.

Wesley says that this is his favourite book in the series so far (Darcy's is A Horse and His Boy).  That's not really surprising giving the pirate-like feel of a story told on a ship, with countless adventures to be had.  All in all, a really fun book that we had a lot of fun reading.