What I Read: May 2024

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Jun 07, 2024

Summer hit HARD this year. We’ve been having on-and-off gorgeous weather for weeks (months?) now and it’s been hard to buckle down and be serious about anything (schoolwork! work work! self-imposed newsletter deadlines!) when it is 72, sunny, breezy, and just plain perfect. I’ve been reading very little, gardening a lot, and and slathering children with sunscreen against their will.

How about you? How are you walking into summer?

Here’s What I Read in May:

The Vanderbeekers #7: Ever After {audiobook}

by Karina Yan Glaser / narrated by Robin Miles

That’s the end. One of the first series the kids and I ever listened to on audio has come to a close. We loved all the Vanderbeeker books, but I can’t help but feel that this one had a little less of the special sauce that we loved so much in Books 1-6. It’s a much sadder book than the others — even though previous novels didn’t shy away from hard topics — because one of the children has gotten a diagnosis that changes the entire family dynamic. There are less antics, more heartfelt words. It’s not a bad book — but it was a slightly less-than-stellar conclusion to an otherwise completely stellar series. There is a happy, hopeful thread that runs throughout the book, so it’s not a total downer. Just a bit more subdued.

Content Warning: There’s childhood illness, medical settings, and the family attends the funeral of a fellow childhood cancer patient. All handle with Glaser’s typical grace, but could be harder for some people than others to read about.

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Ferris

by Kate DiCamillo

I loved this book. I closed it and immediately wanted to read it again. After reading all of DiCamillo’s work last year (literally, every book), I can see some repetition in this novel for sure — character quirks that feel similar to other characters in her oeuvre, a plot that has a similar pace, the not-quite-an-end that so many of her books have. But these threads all wind together so elegantly and in classic DiCamillo style that I can’t wait to read this one again. Safe for all ages, but probably best for the 8+ crowd. Adults will enjoy it, too.

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Remaining You While Raising Them: The Secret Art of Confident Motherhood

by Alli Worthington

This would be a fantastic book to hand to a new mom. As someone 7 years in, I found a lot of it to be similar to other books or podcasts that I’d already read or listened to. Worthington reminds moms that it’s okay to be YOU even now that you are a mom, and among all the reminders of “put on your own oxygen mask first” and a few other cliches, there’s some good reminders in here that mothering is hard and the only way to do it is your own: there’s no recipe to follow, no magic words, no tried-and-true roadmap that works for all mothers or all kids. The book does have a religious component, but I didn’t feel like it was over-the-top. A short, easy read that I hope finds the audience that needs it most.

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I’ve also been sorting through curriculum for next year for second grade for Arthur and 4K for Tennyson, which has taken a big chunk out of my reading time this month!

What I’m Reading with the Kids:

We read the final book in the Heartwood Hotel series, Home Again by Kallie George. It was as beautiful as the previous three, and I could go on reading this series forever. Maybe George will write about another year in the life of Mona the Mouse and her animal friends someday? I do hope so.

I also really enjoyed reading Dear Deer to the kids — it’s a book of homophones as they are featured in letters written back and forth between Dear Deer and Aunt Ant. A playful way to see how words can sound similar but have completely different meanings.

Arthur sat down and read some jokes aloud to me from this book while I folded laundry the other day. Felt like a new level of parenting was unlocked in that moment.

We’ve found another Early Reader series we are enjoying about a boy named Mo Jackson. It’s starts with Don’t Throw It to Mo!, and when Arthur finished it he asked for more immediately. Win!

What I’m Reading Next:

I have no idea! We’ve been spending so much time outside, that I don’t even know what I’m in the mood for. Maybe a breezy novel to kick off summer? There’s a couple of Katherine Center novels I haven’t gotten to yet, and I usually enjoy them. Tell me what you’d recommend!