Summer Reading Book Review - For One more Day by Mitch Albom

While this book has been around for a few years, I have finally gotten around to reading it. Through his gifted storytelling ability, Mitch Albom takes us into the life of Charley Benetto at one of his darkest moments. After years of disappointment, Charley decides to end his life, and at that moment, has the chance to spend one more day with his deceased mother. On their journey, we witness the strength of a mother's love for her child and her adult child's ability to understand and appreciate the sacrifices and choices his mother made throughout her life. Charley gains the strength to return to his life to try to make things right with himself and with those he loves. This story was filled with nostalgia, love, sadness and joy and made me wish for the luxury of just one more day with both of my parents. An easy read that I would clearly recommend.

Note: Several copies of this book will be available at the Friends of the EWML Book Sale!

Reviewed by Lori Candela

Summer Reading Book Review - Raising Happiness by Christine Carter, PH.D.

Raising Happiness is a book about ways to raise happy children. The author tells us different steps for making ourselves better parents and in that way helping our children. She also gives techniques to use on your children to help them express themselves in a way that keeps them from getting frustrated and in that way keeps them from getting upset and destructive.
This book gave me some insight into helping children but since I have older children I don’t think a lot of the practices she recommends would work. I just can see my older children wanting to sit down and meditate as a family. If I had read this book when my children were infants I might have been able to use more of the practices on them. It did however give me some ideas on how to try and communicate with my children so that they will open up more and not feel pressured to tell me about their life and what is going on in it.
I did like the chapter on picking out daycares which I think a lot of us could always use more help with. If we all stick together and discuss what we want and need out of day care and then what we should watch out for then our children would be in better hands and we would not be as worried about them and be able to go about our day a little more relaxed.
The author doesn’t pretend to be the one with all the answers, she let you know that most of the things she learned by doing research and trial and error. She admits to many mistakes in her own life which makes her more real to me and what she says more interesting.
If you have very young children I think this is a book you should read and try and apply some if not all of what she says. For the older children I think parts of this book might be helpful but as stated above I don’t think teenagers are going to participate in some of the activities.

Submitted by Alice Fiorello

Summer Reading Book Review Eclipse by Stephanie Meyers

Eclipse is the third story in the Stephenie Meyers' Twilight series. In this story Bella Swan not only finds herself in a love triangle with her boyfriend, Edward Cullen, and her best friend, Jacob Black, but also a target of a newborn vampire army. Bella knows her decisions will be tough and will ultimately hurt someone she care about. In retrospect, her decision seems minor to the threat of the newborn vampire army that is wreaking havoc not far from her home town of Forks, Washington. Romance, vampires and werewolves make up this story of teen drama for Bella Swan. Readers of the Twilight and New Moon will be thirsting to learn what happens next for Bella, and what her future will bring to those around her. I enjoyed this book very much.

Reviewed by Kristen Rowinsky

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Find the Vawol, Read the Rime, Learn to Read; by Miriam Cherkes-Julkowski

Dr. Julkowski is a UCONN professor who has a really revolutionary, but simple approach to reading. Rather than learning tons of "rules" and the "exceptions" or trying to read left to right phonetically, this method involves recognizing the rime (from the vowel to the end of the syllable.)

To appreciate the reason why the phonetic approach creates dysfluencies, try reading the word ‘bought’ letter by letter left to right. Notice that you don’t recognize each sound from left to right in order to read this word, you recognize the rime ‘ought’ and add the initial ‘b’.

Here are the various vowel sounds for "o.”

Log
Loge
Long
Lounge
Loyal/spoil
Cough

If children are taught to start looking at letters and track them left to right - they start with the consonant L and then add the O. Since they have a long list of possible sounds for O, their reading becomes dysfluent as they run through the possibilities. Dr. Julkowski’s method is to recognize the sound of the vowel by reading the rime (reading the chunk from the vowel to the end of the syllable as a unit) and then go back and add on the initial consonant.

This book gave me a new appreciation for the process of reading.


Vicki Boshka

Summer Reading Review: Florida Roadkill, by Tim Dorsey

If you have ever thought of Florida as commercialized, over-developed, and full of basically crazy people, then the book Florida Roadkill, by Tim Dorsey, will confirm all of your (mis)conceptions. Dorsey lays out a seemingly random, yet interwoven, cast of characters that range from a manic-historian/serial killer to an Assistant States' Attorney to an evil insurance executive. Dorsey even throws in a deranged crack-whore and a incompetent partier on a road trip to find $5 million dollars of mis-appropriated drug money. If you are looking for serious literature, this book isn't it. But if you enjoy sarcasm interspersed with Florida-Americana, and find irony in a Satan-worshiper turned hit man getting hit by a Promise Keeper bus, this will be an interesting read. Just don't book your tickets to DisneyWorld just yet...

Lory Hammer-Young

Promises to Keep, by Jane Green - 1st Summer Reading Review!

This book was inspired by the author's real life experience caring for a terminally ill friend, Heidi Armitage. The story is about how family and friends rally around a vibrant young mother who is diagnosed with a rare complication following a long remission from breast cancer. Although she changed the details--and emphasizes that this is not "Heidi's story," the underlying themes of love and being there for others that Ms. Green experienced first hand as she saw her beloved friend through chemotherapy and coming to accept what turned out to be a fatal illness is authentic.

Promises to Keep is about two sisters--one who is a thirty-something wanderer. She is an excellent chef but floats from job to job and inappropirate boyfriend to even more inappropriate boyfriend who often come in guise of younger, rocker dudes. She knows that they are not the man of her dreams but she is nonetheless attracted to them. Coincidentally, she decides to move to the New York suburbs, closer to her sister Callie, the consummate suburban housewife and her family, a bit before her sister is rediagnosed with the terminal illness.

I was especially moved at the end of the book by Callie's strength when she knows she is dying. As a mother myself, I found tears coming to my eyes as I thought of how I would feel if I knew I would not be around to see my children grow up. There is a paragraph or two describing Callie's thoughts about living long enough to see her daughter hit adolescence. She would then be old enough to get on without a mother.

As I read that, I thought, when is the right time to leave our children? Is there ever a right time?

What I like about many of Ms. Green's characters in previous books is that their lives are never black and white but rather lie in that 'grey' area. Like many people today, her characters struggle with their flaws--knowing that they exist and yet being unwilling to make immediate changes.

Karen Dydzuhn

Summer Reading for Adults!

Join our Summer Reading Program for Adults! Sign up in the library and then fill out a raffle ticket for each book you read to win one of our grand prize baskets. You also get to choose a free gently used book every time you submit a book review for this blog. Link here to see our brochure.