Walking the Dog, by Linda Benson captured my attention this morning and kept me reading until I finished the last page. I finished it in one sitting, which is no easy feat when you have a three year old wanting crazy things, like breakfast.

Walking the Dog is intended for a middle grade audience, though I think the story could be enjoyed by a much older audience. Jared Westen is an average sixth grade boy who struggles in math and is really annoyed by his little brother (I was with him there). Everything is going great for him until he notices Sophie Best.

She’s beautiful, even with the scar on her face, but his parents don’t want him to hang around her because she has a troubled past. Jared finds a way around this by volunteering to walk dogs with her at the animal shelter.

I enjoyed the book, and I was really surprised at how riled up I got reading it. I hated his parents. Hated them. His mom expects Jared to watch his little brother all the time, and at one point in the book says something about how it’s his responsibility not to let anything happen to him. You know whose responsibility it is to make sure nothing happens to a child? The parents. Period. When his little brother goes missing later in the book, I was kind of hoping Jared would say something to his mother like “you lost track of him? But he’s your son. He’s your responsibility, how could you have let this happen.” Which if you’re wondering is verbatim what his mother said to him at a point in the book. Their stance regarding Sophie was ridiculously selfish and unfair. And had their actions been presented in a favorable light, I wouldn’t have enjoyed this book. But they weren’t, so they put me strongly in Jared’s camp.

I think this was a great read, and Linda Benson is definitely an author to keep an eye out for. I think her name is going to get pretty well known if she keeps releasing books like Walking the Dog, The Girl Who Remembered Horses, and Six Degrees of Lost.

“Becka’s acting strange, stranger than usual”

Normalish, by Margaret Lesh was a pretty good book. I really enjoyed it. It’s so strange how I JUST finished reading Perks of a Wall Flower and picked up this book. They are very much alike, and both outside of my usual reading realm. I have to say, between the two, I preferred this one.

Normalish follows a freshmen named Stacy as she copes with her fathers death, her sisters mental illness, and all the angst that comes with high school. The boy she sees as a friend wants to be more, and the boy she wants to go out with starts dating her best friend, leaving Stacy with no one to talk to about what she’s going through.

She falls back on her family. Her strange, wonderful family that eat Tofu turkeys, sushi, and tamales for Christmas dinner. Together they try to put their lives back together, and if they can’t ever get back to normal, then at least they know they’re normalish.

My favorite bit of the book was the boy at the mental institute, Bobby. I really enjoyed that entire subplot, heart wrenching as it was. I also love Stacy’s voice. I love how matter of fact she is, I don’t know why, but I like self-deprecating humor. Every time she called herself ridiculous, I smiled. The only complaint I had in the entire book was the way the Anthony situation was handled. I wanted more of a conversation, or at least that conversation to be public, but it was still awesome.

You can find out more about this book Margaret Lesh’s blog: http://www.margaretlesh.com/ and you can buy it in ebook stores everywhere.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a young adult novel told through letters by Stephen Chbosky. I bought this book for book club and ended up tearing through it in one day. It’s an intense read. The author takes the events in the book and spins them on their head a few times and it’s… intense.
The Good: This book was very well written, very very very engaging, and all kinds of literary fun. The twists were unbelievable. This is definitely a book to reread because you’ll get a whole different story the second time through
The bad: The character felt too young to be in high school. In retrospect that makes sense, but in the context of the book, other characters react to him or situations like he’s in seventh grade. There’s lots of “Do you understand what just happened?” and OMG, a senior is going out with a freshmen, the perv. When I was in high school, and now, teaching high school, there wasn’t much in the way of an acknowledged age difference between seniors and freshmen. There is from an adults perspective, but not from the kids themselves. It just kept throwing me, but by the end of the book that attitude was mostly gone.
The spoilers: WARNING…. SPOILERS

I couldn’t get over the suicide note/poem. It was so sad that his friend showed him this poem, and Charlie latched onto it without understanding it was a cry for help. It really added another layer to everything about Michael. I kind of liked that Charlie still never seemed to get that the poem was Michael’s suicide note. It made all his thoughts that much more tragic.

The thing with the Aunt just put this whole new spin on the entire book. I’m really curious how all of this is going to translate to film.