Reading in Quarantine

Do you have a personal library full of reading material to get you through this crazy time? Or are you in serious need of some new titles? Here are some titles I found on Amazon that may be of interest to you. Also, don't forget to check out my list of used books I have for sale. 

From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg

Available on Amazon

Rating (1-5) 📘📘📘
Genre - Children's Mystery, Detective, & Spy, Children's Classics, Children's Art Fiction
Format - Hardcover
Length - 168 pages

*Amazon Blurb*

When Claudia decided to run away, she planned very carefully. She would be gone just long enough to teach her parents a lesson in Claudia appreciation. And she would go in comfort-she would live at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She saved her money, and she invited her brother Jamie to go, mostly because be was a miser and would have money.

Claudia was a good organizer and Jamie bad some ideas, too; so the two took up residence at the museum right on schedule. But once the fun of settling in was over, Claudia had two unexpected problems: She felt just the same, and she wanted to feel different; and she found a statue at the Museum so beautiful she could not go home until she bad discovered its maker, a question that baffled the experts, too.

The former owner of the statue was Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Without her-well, without her, Claudia might never have found a way to go home.

*My Review* 

My 5 year old choose this book as her "blind date with a book" even though we tried to tell her that it was a book for an older kid. She insisted and so we started it. I think she listened to the first 2 chapters and then lost interest. Since I had started, I couldn't simply stop reading.
It turned out to be a pretty cute book. Claudia and her brother Jamie run away together. I was curious how they would make it in New York City, but Claudia was quite the planner and thinker when it came to all that.

What She Left Behind by Ellen Marie Wiseman

Available on Amazon

Rating (1-5) 📘📘📘📘📘
Genre - Coming of Age Fiction, Psychological Fiction, Contemporary Literature & Fiction
Format - Paperback
Length - 336 pages

*Amazon Blurb*

Ten years ago, Izzy Stone's mother fatally shot her father while he slept. Devastated by her mother's apparent insanity, Izzy, now seventeen, refuses to visit her in prison. But her new foster parents, employees at the local museum, have enlisted Izzy's help in cataloging items at a long-shuttered state asylum. There, amid piles of abandoned belongings, Izzy discovers a stack of unopened letters, a decades-old journal, and a window into her own past.

Clara Cartwright, eighteen years old in 1929, is caught between her overbearing parents and her love for an Italian immigrant. Furious when she rejects an arranged marriage, Clara's father sends her to a genteel home for nervous invalids. But when his fortune is lost in the stock market crash, he can no longer afford her care--and Clara is committed to the public asylum.

Even as Izzy deals with the challenges of yet another new beginning, Clara's story keeps drawing her into the past. If Clara was never really mentally ill, could something else explain her own mother's violent act? Piecing together Clara's fate compels Izzy to re-examine her own choices--with shocking and unexpected results.

*My Review* 

This book!!! If I rated books with more than 5 stars, this would definitely get them. My love of reading started late in life (really just a few years ago) and it started with this book. I think I read it within 24 - 48 hours. I have just read it again for my book club at the library.

This book will make you wonder about how many people (mainly women) were institutionalized that were completely sane and no matter how hard they tried, they were unable to get out. Everything they did or said was twisted to make it sound like they were crazy.

Grist Mill Road by Christopher J. Yates

Available on Amazon

Rating (1-5) 📘📘📘
Genre - Suspense, Thrillers
Format - Hardcover
Length - 352 pages

*Amazon Blurb*

Christopher J. Yates’s cult hit Black Chalk introduced that rare writerly talent: a literary writer who could write a plot with the intricacy of a brilliant mental puzzle, and with characters so absorbing that readers are immediately gripped. Yates’s new book does not disappoint. Grist Mill Road is a dark, twisted, and expertly plotted Rashomon-style tale. The year is 1982; the setting, an Edenic hamlet some ninety miles north of New York City. There, among the craggy rock cliffs and glacial ponds of timeworn mountains, three friends—Patrick, Matthew, and Hannah—are bound together by a terrible and seemingly senseless crime. Twenty-six years later, in New York City, living lives their younger selves never could have predicted, the three meet again—with even more devastating results.

*My Review* 

This book grabbed my attention immediately. I figured I would have it read within just a couple days. It turned out not to be the case. At one point the book changes point of view and you start reading as Hannah. I am not sure what happened here, but I struggled more than anything to read her chapters. I felt like there was just a lot of information given about her growing up that did nothing except fill space in the book. Even after finishing the book, I still don't think I needed to know anything about her families history.
I also lost the connection I felt with Patrick in the beginning. At first I felt for him and understood where he was coming from, but he seemed to deteriorate as a character for me the more I read.