nomadreader

This year, Mr. Nomadreader and I are starting a new tradition for our family: we hope to visit one new country each year with Hawthorne. Our family is complete, and I'm excited to be starting a new family tradition. Hawthorne will be two and a half next month (!), and we're ready to start showing him the world. Our first destination: Amsterdam, this spring. While we've been studying the guidebooks and planning our days, I've also been busy making lists of fiction I want to read that is set in Amsterdam, both past and present. I've been intrigued by Chris Ewan's The Good Thief series, as each one is set in a different city, but our trip made me pick up his first in the series, The Good Thief's Guide to Amsterdam.  The titular good thief is Charlie Howard, a novelist who writes books about a globetrotting thief named Faulks. He also secretly works as a thief himself. There is a lot going on in this novel. In its opening pages, Charlie gets an intriguing of...

narrated by Kate Rudd The basics: The Fault in Our Stars  is the story of the romance of Hazel and Augustus, teenagers who meet at a cancer support group. My thoughts: I don't read a lot of young adult fiction, but it's been impossible to ignore the acclaim of this novel, particularly it's impressive performance in the 2013 Tournament of Books . I opted to listen to it on audio, and Kate Rudd's narration captured a delightful tone for the novel. There are moments of levity, seriousness and relative normalcy, and Rudd moves between them deftly. The subject matter of this novel is dark: teenagers with cancer, but the novel is rarely dark. While this tone makes it more entertaining read, it also functioned to keep me from becoming as emotionally invested in the characters as I would have liked to be. The Fault in Our Stars  is the first young adult novel I've read since I became pregnant, and it was a somewhat jarring experience for me to feel more connection...