What We Found At The Library! {Christmas edition}

For the kiddos:
My parents gifted my boys with a pile of popular children's books (Harold and the Purple Crayon, Where The Wild Things are, Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, to name just a few), so I thought I'd highlight a surprising pick in the bunch that was a hit with them: Can You Tell Me How To Get To Sesame Street?, by Eleanor Hudson and illustrated by Joe Mathieu. I probably wouldn't have grabbed this book simply because of its preset, Sesame Street-theme. And while it held true to form in that department (Elmo refers to himself in the third person, and you'll recognize the setting of Sesame Street), the storyline following Elmo's journey through some of his own favorite books is diverse and clever, packed full of good sound effect opportunities (WHOOSH!) that made my little guys giggle as well as a rhyming structure that goes easy on their developing vocabularies.
The bottom line: A-. Nothing spectacular, but a short, entertaining read.

For the mama:
My mom has been raving to me about Jodi Picoult for about a year now, so I wasn't surprised to find two of Picoult's books -Handle With Care and Nineteen Minutes- among my Christmas presents. I dived into Handle With Care first. It didn't take long to realize why Picoult is so popular (she's also the author of My Sister's Keeper, which was made into a movie starring Cameron Diaz last year): Handle With Care shuffles between five different narrators with unique perspectives on the subject of the book, a young girl named Willow with a rare bone disorder called osteogenesis imperfecta. Willow's family life is completely ordered around her condition and the story revolves around what happens when this fact and the consequential emotions of everyone involved come to a crashing climax in a legal battle (Am I being too vague? I don't want to give too much of the story away...) From early on I was sucked into Handle With Care and blew through it in a few days (thank you, vacation!) I especially appreciated how Picoult's novel made me think deeply about how I might handle having a child with a health issue.
The Bottom Line: B. I was into this book like nobody's business. The characters are well-defined and easy to identify with and root for, but you may find yourself turned upside down by the ending (I wanted to throw it after I read the last page, but fellow readers who reviewed the book seemed mixed on how they felt about it). Also, **this book has some profanity and mild intimate scenes (no sordid details).

---

And those are my literary Christmas treasures! ;)
Head over to This Heavenly Life to see more of what people
are reading and participate yourself!