Good Reads - October 2013

 I only finished one book this month, but it was along one so I'm ok with it.

Someone Knows My Name by Lawrence Hill

Y'all. This book was good. Really, really good. I always like history books that are able to transform me to a totally different era. This is that kind of book. It's almost 500 pages and had quite a few parts that I had to put it down and process what I was learning about our countries history. I totally get that it is a fictional story, but it still shows what I assume to be a very close to reality depiction. 

The story starts out with an old black woman who is serving as an ambassador for human rights in the early 1800s. From there it flashes back to when she was a young girl in a village in Africa. The book tells her entire life story, from her relationship with her parents, to getting kidnapped by African slave traders, to the voyage across the ocean to America, life on a plantation, to her escape to freedom. From there it shows how hard freedom was and what daily life was like for both races in that time. It follows her all the way to the end of her life and left me super satisfied with how it ended.  It was a good read. 

Desperate by Sarah Mae and Sally Clarkson

I'm counting this one since I technically did finish it thus month. I've been reading this one at a chapter a week with my small group at church. It is a parenting book with a Christian emphasis. The authors do a great job of making you feel normal even with all the crazy struggles we deal with on a daily basis. They focus a lot on giving yourself permission to not be good at all aspets of mothering.  It was good. Like most parenting books I've read, it started off rocking my world, but about halfway through started to feel repetitive and not as insightful. 

Josie's Read Alouds:

Gooney Bird Greene by Lois Lowry

Josie and I are working through Sonlight's first grade read aloud list. So far we've loved every book from it. This month we read Gooney Burd. She. Is a second grader who just moved to a new school. It turns out she loves to tell stories, only absolutely true stories. Each chapter is a different story that she is telling the class. They are all funny stories and Josie loved them. As an added bonus, this boom also teaches kids the parts of a good story as well as how to add suspense and keep readers interested. Josie is working on writing her own Gooney Bird type story using the tips we learned in the book.  Warning: the chapters are on the long side.

There are 4 in the series so we went and picked up the next one last week.