As one of the best books I have read recently, the book Walk Two Moons scores a huge 10/10 from me. It's lovely, with the two threads woven into a fine, smooth story. 14-year-old Sal has an urgent deadline to reach her mother's gravestone on her birthday. On the way, she recalls the story of her best friend Phoebe's mother's mysterious disappearance.

Salamanca Tree Hiddle is the sole daughter of Chanhassen "Sugar" Hiddle and John Hiddle. One day, traveling from Euclid, Ohio, to Lewiston, Idaho, where Sal's mother died in a bus accident, with her paternal grandparents "Gram" and "Gramps", Gramps suggests that Sal "spin us a yarn", referring to a story, Sal decides to tell the curious story of Phoebe Winterbottom and the lunatic.

Phoebe's mother Norma isn't supposed to do anything too shocking, just cook and bake and be nice and polite, but one day she disappears completely, to the surprise of Phoebe. In addition, a mysterious note-leaver is leaving odd sayings on Phoebe's front porch, such as:
"Everyone has their own agenda," and "Never judge a man until you've walked two moons in his moccasins."

On top of it all, there is a suspicious boy in his twenties who is snooping around Phoebe's house, looking for her mother, and a particular boy named Ben in Sal's life, which, as Michael D. Beil, the author of the wonderful, but sadly not very well-known, series The Red Blazer Girls, once said, "complicates everything, as Boys usually do."

I recommend this book to girls ages ten and up, or nine years old if you want a challenging book. I think that people who enjoy the following books should read this book, and if you have read this book, you might want to try reading the following:

Out of the Dust, by Karen Hesse
Love, Audrey, by Suzanne LaFleur
Princess Academy, by Shannon Hale
Rules, by Cynthia Lord
The Red Blazer Girls Series, by Michael D. Beil

--Dana

The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet

The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron is good, to say the  least. I had a little bit of a problem when the author used improper words such as "waked" instead of "woke", but my overall impression was quite good, and the author wrote this book in 1954, so perhaps back then the common term was "waked" and was different from what we use nowadays. Maybe this book earns a 7 or 8 out of ten.

David Topman and Chuck Masterson, the main characters of the book, are very fascinated with space ships and space travel, especially David, who dreams about flying one every night to different planets, and Chuck talks about space travel with his "grand-pop", Cap'n Tom, who used to be a captain on a ship, because his parents are traveling.

David's father, Dr. Topman, discovers an ad for 'a space ship, built by a boy, or two boys, between the ages of 8 and 11, who must be ready for an adventure,' and that is where the story takes us: watching David and Chuck build the space ship, bringing it to Mr. Tyco M. Bass, the issuer of the ad, and following his unique and peculiar instructions to launch and ride their homemade rocket into outer space, to follow a quest and mission to save the Mushroom People of the satellite that orbits Earth christened by Mr. Bass to be Bastidium-X, which is invisible to the naked eye, and is only viewable through Mr. Bass's unique telescope through which one may see the position and blueish-green mass that is Bastidium-X.

Chuck once remarks, "[Mr. Bass] must be a wizard", for he had said, 'you must bring a mascot'. They brought David's hen, Mrs. Pennyfeather, and little did they know that she would save the lives of the scanty population on the almost-extinct satellite--or is it planet?-- of Bastidium-X.

How does Mrs. Pennyfeather do it? Well, I'm afraid I can't help you there; this is a reading blog, to help promote reading, so why don't you read the almost-magnificent book entitled The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet for yourself?

Seeing Sugar

Seeing Sugar by Cynthia L. Brinson was a sweet  (pardon the pun-- wait, is that a pun?) grade 2-4 book. I think the book would've been better if the plot had been expanded and details added to form an older-grade novel, but it was good as is, although, I must say, not as good as I expected.

The book is about a fourth grader named Kate whose whole perspective on school changes when a new girl, Sugar Rose from Georgia, joins Miss Burke's class and Miss Burke decides to let Sugar Rose take Kate's seat, which she says is "up front and center". Since she moved to a seat further away from the teacher, Kate realizes that she needs glasses, and when she leaves for a trip to the eye doctor's, scares Sugar Rose with a mean outburst. Through her new lavender-colored glasses, Kate sees the world with a photographer's eye-- the leaves on the maple trees aren't fuzzy green blurs, but individual shapes with veins and markings, making each one different; even the people are different: her brother Andy is a boy with a deep passion for baseball, and the much-hated Sugar Rose is actually just a scared new girl, not the popular show-off in Kate's imagination.

This is highly recommended, and makes for a good read-aloud or bedtime story (maybe?). If you've read it, or are interested, post a comment-- I'd love to hear what you think!

--Dana