Serena- Ron Rash

Just finished. It's amazing! It's one of the first adult books i've read in a while, as i usually just stick to chapter and YA, and it makes me want to venture further into the world of adult literature. Who knows, i may even stop neglecting my copy of Crime and Punishment... Unlikely.

It's 1929, the Pembertons are out in the mountains of North Carolina, contentedly hacking away at the forests to further their wealth and ensure that there are enough mahogany dining tables to go around. But some meddling fools have decided that a National Park is a needed to preserve the wilderness for the future. The Pembertons are doing everything they can to stop this, and I mean everything.

Serena is the beautiful, calculated and utterly evil female half of the Pemberton Lumber Company. Pemberton himself is good looking, intelligent enough, but WAY out of his league. This expansive tale of life in the mountains hurtles along like one of the trains carrying logs around the hills, and is given a fantastic sense of depth through the often caustic and always entertainng musings of one particular logging crew on their tea breaks.

workplacement

just found out i got the okay to do work placement at my old primary school. super excited about this, as it is the type of library i would like to work in when im qualified, i get to hang with the chidlets, and i get to peruse the shelves of my youth! also the librarian has been there since i was a little tacker, and is a total champ so it should be great fun.

also, hopefully the now out of print copy of 'camphor laurel' by sarah walker is still there, and hopefully i get to do some weeding...

mucho excitemondo

shiny silver bicycle

i recently came into a shiny silver bicycle, a pink and silver helmet and a black metal basket with the mesh holes small enough that my keys and assorted other things can't fall out while i fly gracefully over potholes.
i haven't had a bicycle for years, my last one got stolen on christmas eve one year i was working at coles. i had chained it to the bike rack outside the library, just behind the coles carpark. when i came out at the end of my shift, my bike was gone. i think the grinch stole it.
anyway, i should have replaced it ages ago. bicycles are fantastic! i have been zooming around most days since i got it, and i think im nearly ready to tackle the ride to work from home, about four suburbs away (not that far, i know, but still, im takin it slow..) and have decided to combat helmet hair with an excellent scarf from an op shop that has strange and colourful skiers on it.

lips touch: three times- laini taylor

I keep referring to this book in my mind (and to other people) as the pretty goblin stories, even though only the first story has goblins in it, and the artwork inside the book before each story is very classy and pretty, if the cover is a little trashy looking.
Three short stories about wanting, really really wanting something more than anything else at all.
Its got kitten eating monsters, otherworldly queens that keep children as pets, and fruit so delicious you would die for it. It is phenomenally beautiful writing, compelling and so evocative.
These stories need to be savoured, one by one, like a some kind of tiny, exquisitely created chocolate.

In the first of these delights, Goblin Fruit, Kizzy wants. She wants to be one of those girls with the swinging hips in the artfully faded denim, one of the pretty, flower scented girls that everyone else wants. But the goblins don't like them popular, and follow the scent of wanting that wafts like a perfume from girls like Kizzy, hungry.
Unlike the other kids at school, Kizzy is well aware of the existence of such creatures, she 'liked the ghosts but not the strangers, because her father made her give up her room for them, and they always left it smelling like feet'. But when the new and very beautiful boy at school shows an interest, all the warnings and tales her grandmother drilled into her fly out the window...

In Spicy Little Curses Such As These a curse is placed on a young girl in India that prevents her from making a sound, for fear of killing those that hear her. This curse was placed on her by a demon in return for the lives of many children countries away.

My favourite story was the last, Hatchling. Truly, truly amazing. I don't think I'm going to try and explain it because I tend to get a bit to excited and muddled trying to choose which bit to talk about first. So I'll just go with intricate, mind blowing, and utterly gorgeous.

New Melina Marchetta!

So i just finished the new Melina Marchetta, 'The Piper's Son', and before i even started it i got that excited happy feeling of anticipation you only get when you know that there is an excellent read hiding quietly in your bag. The feeling that goes away when the book is finished, leaving only the afterglow, and the knowledge that those books don't come round everyday and it may be a while till that delicious anticipation comes back. I wish i had read it more slowly, savoured it more, but it was just a bit too unputdownable.

The companion novel to Saving Francesca, it is five years later and Thomas Mackee has lost the plot. His uncle Joe was blown up on his way to work and his dad has fallen off the wagon, hard. He screwed things up irreversibly with 'that psycho Finke' and so occupies his time by getting wasted and falling off stages at gigs, craving oblivion. That is until his feral flat mates kick him out, his pregnant aunt Georgie finds him on her verandah with ten stitches in his head and lets him move in, and he starts working at the local pub washing dishes with Francesca and Justine, whom he hasn't spoken to properly since Joe's death. Cleverly written and honestly voiced, Marchetta has created yet another classic laugh/cry/grow story for YA. About family, grief, and love, and what happens when grief is threatening to swallow everything else.

I first read Saving Francesca in yr 10 or 11 and have read it a couple times since. The characters from Saving Francesca have embedded themselves firmly in my mind, and alongside Moriarty's Em, Cass and Lyd, Anne Shirley and Georgia Nicholson, are firm book people friends. While I absolutely loved Looking for Alibrandi, i think that as a teenager i really identified with the SF characters, and still do. I don't know why that is, and could probably try and analyse it but cant be bothered right now... byeeee