This appears on the 100 books to read before you grow up so I've picked up a copy for my class set and here I am reading it. It's autobiographical in the main part, which is of real interest to me, and tell the story of the author's trials and tribulations around knocking her teeth out. The artwork is delightful, the story engaging and the discussion it has raised in my class this week is fantastic, I highly recommend this book to sit in your class library and to be enjoyed by all ages.
Synopsis
Family, friends, boys... dental drama?!
A True Story
Raina just wants to be a normal sixth grader. But one night after Girl Scouts she trips and falls, severely injuring her two front teeth. What follows is a long and frustrating journey with on-again, off-again braces, surgury, embarrassing headgear, and even a retainer with fake teeth attached. And on top of all that, there's still more to deal with: a major earthquake, boy confusion, and friends who turn out to be not so friendly. Raina's story takes us from middle school to high school, where she discovers her artistic voice , finds out what true friendship really means, and where she can finally... smile.
Author
Raina
Telgemeier is an American cartoonist whose works include the
autobiographic webcomic Smile, which was published by Scholastic Press's
Graphix imprint as a full-color graphic novel in February 2010.Wikipedia
This is possibly one of the hardest reads that I've done in the last two years. It was interesting to go on the journey with the author and her family but I find Russian/ Soviet politics difficult. Have done ever since school. But don't let that put you off, I was one of the only people in my book club who did not care for this book. So it might be something you are right into, especially if you enjoy the food and historical nature of such works... наслаждаться
Synopsis
I had to return this book before I could accurately copy the synopsis from the back. Alternatively I have copied the synopsis from GoodReads ... I really hope they don't mind.
A celebrated food
writer captures the flavors of the Soviet experience in a sweeping,
tragicomic, multi-generational memoir that brilliantly illuminates the
history and culture of a vanished empire.
Proust had his
madeleine; Narnia's Edmund had his Turkish delight. Anya von Bremzen has
vobla-rock-hard, salt-cured dried Caspian roach fish. Lovers of vobla
risk breaking a tooth or puncturing a gum on the once-popular snack, but
for Anya it's transporting. Like kotleti (Soviet burgers) or the
festive Salat Olivier, it summons up the complex, bittersweet flavors of
life in that vanished Atlantis called the USSR. There, born in 1963 in a
Kafkaesque communal apartment where eighteen families shared one
kitchen, Anya grew up singing odes to Lenin, black-marketeering Juicy
Fruit gum at her school, and, like most Soviet citizens, longing for a
taste of the mythical West. It was a life by turns absurd, drab, naively
joyous, melancholy-and, finally, intolerable to her anti-Soviet mother.
When she was ten, the two of them fled the political repression of
Brezhnev-era Russia, arriving in Philadelphia with no winter coats and
no right of return.
These days Anya lives in two parallel food
universes: one in which she writes about four-star restaurants, the
other in which a simple banana-a once a year treat back in the
USSR-still holds an almost talismanic sway over her psyche. To make
sense of that past, she and her mother decided to eat and cook their way
through seven decades of the Soviet experience. Through the meals she
and her mother re-create, Anya tells the story of three generations-her
grandparents', her mother's, and her own. Her family's stories are
embedded in a larger historical epic: of Lenin's bloody grain
requisitioning, World War II hunger and survival, Stalin's table
manners, Khrushchev's kitchen debates, Gorbachev's anti-alcohol
policies, and the ultimate collapse of the USSR. And all of it is bound
together by Anya's sardonic wit, passionate nostalgia, and piercing
observations.
Author
Anya von Bremzen is a three-time James Beard Award-winning
culinary writer. She was born in 1963 in Soviet Russia, and her works
include The New Spanish Table, The Greatest Dishes: Around the World in
80 Recipes, and Please to the Table: The Russian Cookbook.
What a heart warming, beautifully written book. When I borrowed this book a few weeks ago I thought "This is gonna be a bit of chick-lit". But it's not. Not really. It a honest telling of the highs and lows of an individual who gave up the day job to chase the dream of performing on stage. I loved the honesty. It just goes to show that through grit and determination anything is possible. I highly recommend you give it a read. Especially, if you feel like you're reaching the point in your life when you feel those dreams you had at were sixteen/ seventeen are starting to slip away.
Synopsis
ever felt like quitting your day job to chase a dream?
Lisa Nimmo did, and this daring musical adventure is proof that it's never too late to follow your heart, reinvent yourself and become the person you were born to be.
With no pior experience and armed with only her business savvy and determination, 32-year-old Lisa embarks on a bold quest to transform herself from closet-karaoke-singing salesperson to professional singer.
Six years on she's a mum, a recording artist and her band Pearl share the stage with Sir Elton John and Eric Clapton. She is living the dream. But what if this life, that she's worked so hard to create, isn't the life she wants now? What if it has all been a terrible mistake?
Author
Lisa Nimmo is a Wellington based author, songwriter and speaker with a proven history of personal transformation.
In her twenties she mustered the courage to overcome a debilitating fear of public speaking. In her thirties Lisa embarked on a radical career change in pursuit of a
childhood dream, transforming herself from closet-karaoke-singing
salesperson to professional musician. In her forties Lisa brought another dream to life by becoming an author.
Her memoir Blame It On Abba tells the story of her journey from fear to
freedom in pursuit of her childhood singing dream. (Full Bio)
This was Rob's choice of book for our book club this year. I was delighted it was a short book until I got into it and discovered it was short for a very good reason: the author dictated using the blink of the single eyelid which he had control over following his massive stroke. I can't imagine what it would be like to suffer such a catastrophic event. But through this very beautifully written book it is possible to have a small insight into that world of locked-in syndrome.
Synopsis
After suffering a massive stroke, Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor-in-chief of French Elle and the father of two young children, found himself completely paralysed and speechless. Anblt only to move one eyelid, he 'dictated' the remarkable book.
The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly records Bauby's lonely existence but also the ability to invent a life for oneself in the most appalling of circumstances. It is a remarkable book about the triumph of the human spirit.
Author
Jean-Dominique Bauby was a French actor, author and editor of the
French fashion magazine ELLE. He had two children with Sylvie de la
Rochefoucauld, a son named Théophile and a daughter named Céleste.
I'm so pleased I joined the two book clubs I did last year. I've met some great people I otherwise would never have really known. One of those friends recommended this book to me. It reads a chapter after chapter of close encounters with death. It begins with teenager on a lonely wilderness track narrowly avoiding a man making uncomfortable-advances and later discovering the same guy had throttled a young girl with a binocular strap on the same stretch some weeks later.
Synopsis
I AM, I AM, I AM is Maggie O'Farrell's electric and shocking memoir of the near-death experiences that have punctuated her life. The childhood illness she was not expected to survive. A teenage yearning to escape the nearly ended in disaster. A terrifying encounter on a remote path. A mismanaged labour in a understaffed hospital.
This is a memoir with a difference: seventeen encounters with Maggieat different ages, in different locations, reveal to us a whole life in a series of tense, visceral snapshots. Spare, elegant and utterly candid, it is a book to make you question yourself. What would you do if your life was in danger? How would you react? And what would you stand to lose?
I AM, I AM, I AM is a book you will finish newly conscious of your own vulnerability and determined to make every heartbeat count.
Author
Maggie O'Farrell is a Northern Irish novelist. Her book The Hand That First Held Mine won the 2010 Costa Novel Award. She appeared in Waterstones'25 Authors for the Future.
Wikipedia
Other Books
After You'd Gone (2000) My Lover's Lover (2002) The Distance Between Us (2004) The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (2007) The Hand That First Held Mine (2010) Instructions for a Heatwave (2013) This Must Be the Place (2016) I Am, I Am, I Am (2017)
