Nevermoor = SoMuchMore!

Forgive me internet for I have sinned.  It has been 5 years - 5 years! - since my last post.

And what has hauled me back into this strange blog place?

This

 

 





Morrigan Crow is a Cursed Child.  Born on Eventide 11 years before, she and all the other children born on then are destined to die on the next Eventide, an event that happens roughly every 12 years.  Not only are they cursed to die but the children are also blamed for anything unfortunate that happens in their communities during their lifetimes.  As a result, Morrigan has grown up shunned and lonely but with a fierce sense of self.  When Eventide and her foretold death arrives, she is rescued from the Hunt of Smoke and Shadow (the ghosts who take the cursed children) by the strange and mysterious Jupiter North and whisked away from Jackalfax to a city she has never heard of -- Nevermoor.

Jupiter reveals that he plans to sponsor her for membership in Wunderous Society.  Only nine children are accepted each year out of hundreds.  They must go through three trials, each trial weeding out unlucky candidates, then demonstrate their "knack" before judges and the entire city.

For the first time in her life, Morrigan has friends. And she gets to live her Jupiter's hotel, Hotel Deucaloin where her room magically changes according to her interests, head of housekeeping is a giant cat, and every room has something new and interesting.  It would be just about perfect except ... Morrigan doesn't have a knack.  Or at least one that she knows about.  If she doesn't make it through the final trial and gain entrance into the Wunderous Society, she will be sent back to Jackalfax where the Hunt of Smoke and Shadow wait.


This book is awesome.  On a scale of 1(50 Shades) to  10 (Harry Potter) it is a solid 9, easy.  I read it in on a Sunday and on Monday started listening to the audiobook of it at work. Then I recommended it to anyone who showed any indications they could read.  And now I'm recommending it to the interwebs.

All the stories ever told are based on a handful of plots.  We know more or less where each story is going to go when it starts, what really matters is the journey the author takes to get us there. Have they created a world I want to spend time in and characters I want to spend time with?  Are there enough twists to keep me interested even though I have a good idea of the basic plot?  Jessica Townsend manages all these thing in this book

I want to stay at Hotel Deucalion, I want to experience the Battle of Christmas, and I especially want to kick Morrigan's father in the knee.  I want to know who the Grey Man is and how he manages to move between Nevermoor and Jackalfax, something which is supposed to be impossible (Jupiter North's excursions aside).  And I want to meet Jupiter North, who strikes me as very similar to the Eleventh Doctor.

Jessica Townsend's writing reminds me of J. K. Rowling, mixing darker themes with lighter moments and highlighting the relationships among the characters.

The book has already been optioned for a movie (please no!) and a sequel to it comes out in November 1, 2018, a mere 125 days away.

My Manifesto for my Family

Manifesto is a cool word -- sounds like I'm taking over the world, but it just means a stated plan or intention.  Here is the manifesto I created a year ago for my family while I was in the midst of dealing with angst around the behaviour of one of my boys (you know who you are!).



My Manifesto for My Family
* open to interpretation and different methods of implementation

Love

• You are my child/partner and I will always love you.  I will not always love the things you do or the attitudes you have but I will always love you, just as you are. I won't love you more if you behave better; I won't love you less if you behave badly.

 

Loyalty

 

• I will always have your back.  I will always do what will benefit you most.  You may not always like it or agree with it.  No matter what happens, I will stand beside you.

Safety

• Home is a safe place where you can be yourself.  You will not be hurt or ridiculed.  You will be accepted just as you are.  You will not be allowed to hurt or ridicule anyone in this house.  If "who you are" hurts people, I will find you the resources to work through this.  Home is safe for everyone.

Encouragement

• I will always encourage you to go for your goals, try new things and take chances (within reason).  I will do whatever I can to help you.

 

Teaching and Learning

• I will teach you what I know, sometimes even things you don't want to know, like chores, consequences and responsibility.  I am willing to learn what you have to teach me, even if I don't want to. Things like patience, humility and that I'm not always right.

Being Together, Being Apart

• I want to spend time with you -- alone, with the family and with others.  I enjoy your company and we can't achieve the other items if we don't spend time together.  I also need time away from you -- and you need time away from me -- so we can be our own people with our own friends and interests.

Electric Lettuce - Couldn't Stand The Weather

This excellent guitar playing is done by my incredibly talented honey, Aaron Eldridge.  The band is Electric Lettuce.

On the bedside table January 13 to 20

It's been a while.

I've been reading (if I'm breathing, I'm reading) but just haven't been posting.  Got so far behind that it's easier just to start fresh.

Now I am reading but not as much as I'd like so I only have one book this week.



Here is where there should be a picture of the cover but for some reason it won't upload. 

I'm reading Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire.

This book is basically a biography of Oz's Wicked Witch of the West from birth to death.  It covers a lot of class and apartheid issues, as well as covering religion, government, and abuse of both.  It was a bit of a long read.  Definitely some slogging and I didn't find the ending very satisfying.  It felt like Elphie (the witch) worked very hard all her life to make a positive difference in . . . anything and died not only mis-interpreted but a failure.  There are three more books in the series.  I might try one more and see if it's worth continuing.  I found this one kind of depressing.

My take-away: Don't let someone else decide your fate.

On the bedside table July 7 to 20

I know, it's a two week list this time, but as you'll see, I had a lot of reading to do!  I didn't even finish one book (You're Not So Smart) before it had to go back to the library.

Here's what I've read in the last two weeks

Success Secrets of Sherlock Holmes (Acord) - An interesting book taking characteristics and habits of the fictional Sherlock Holmes and showing how we mortals can use them to be more successful in our lives.  I found the snippets of information about Conan Doyle more interesting than the self-help tips, most of which were pretty standard fare -- do what you love, pay attention to the details, etc. My take-away: I need to re-read the Sherlock Holmes books as I feel some of the traits Acord was lauding were ones that I had found grating when reading the books. 

A Wolf at the Table (Burroughs) -- I love Augesten Burroughs. LOVE him.  I've loved every book I've read by him.  That said, I often mix him up with David Sedaris, who I often confuse with Dave Eggers.  Anyway, this is a haunting memoir about the author's experience of growing up with a father who was clearly quite mentally ill, and how his mother tried to protect him in the best way she could at a time when a married woman didn't have a lot of options.  Burroughs tried vainly to elicit love from his father and the stories are sad, scary and sometimes funny.  Eventually Burrough's mother loses her grip on sanity as well, leaving him effectively orphaned and under the care of a tremendously unstable doctor (see his book Running with Scissors.  Don't see the movie, it's not good.).  Despite the abuse and disinterest Burroughs received from his father, he still tried to get the love and attention he so desperately craved right to the end of his father's life. Kudos to Augusten for turning out as well as he did and writing such great books. My take-away: Living with a crazy person can make you crazy.

The Last Apprentice series (Delaney) -- THIS is why it took two weeks to post.  I randomly picked up book 3 of this series and enjoyed it so I ordered the rest from the library, assuming they would come in at a leisurely pace. They all came in on the same day.  So I had seven books to read and luckily they were interesting enough that I read them all in one go.  Phew.  The basic premises is that the renowned Spook in the area (a Spook is a person who deals with the dark, driving away ghosts, battling witches and trying to make the area safe) has trained 30 apprentices, many of whom didn't survive, and hasn't found one that can replace him.  He takes on Tom Ward as his last apprentice and throughout the series they battle various forms of evil with the help of a young witch, Alice.  My favourite character doesn't appear until about book 4 or 5 -- Grimalkin, the witch assassin who swears she will kill Tom but ends up being his ally.  My take-away: only order one book at a time . . . .

On the bedside table, June 30 to July 6

My job recently lent me an Ipad to trial an application for work.  It's been interesting to have one.  Maybe I'm not using it right or something but I seriously don't understand the appeal of them.  I've downloaded some apps but the Ipad is too bulky to take with me everywhere, making the apps that seem most useful (Evernote etc.) much less useful.  One app I am liking is Overdrive because it lets me download books from the library.  So this week's books were downloaded and read on my Ipad.
Oh yeah, we downloaded Angry Birds as well. Stupid birds. I may never sleep again.

NurtureShock (Bronson/Merryman) -- ah, this is one of those books that I've read before and forgot until I was well into it and it all seemed familiar.  It's an interesting book about how a lot of the common wisdom we use in raising children (praise heavily to increase self-esteem, not talking about race will make children "colour blind") are wrong and actually cause the opposite effect.  I enjoyed the information in the book (yay information!) but then felt anxious and unsettled because I obviously caused my children great harm (because I belive in full catastrophe thinking) by following what seemed like the best parenting ideas at the time.  So, it's a good read for the information but not if you're looking for parenting support and tend to be insecure anyway.  My take-away: interesting bit about how babies actually learn new words which I'll revisit now that Carson is starting to talk.

Nerd Do Well (Pegg) -- I love Simon Pegg's movies. I think Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead are hysterical.  And I wanted to like this book, I really did.  Unfortunately, I couldn't even finish it.  He intersperces his biographical bits with some fictious bits where he is a superhero? with a robot butler.  I ended up just skipping those bits but even with doing that it just  . . . drug.  In the introduction he mentions that writing a biography seems a little self-important and would try to downplay that aspect of it.  Which he did to the point where it wasn't intersting.  Normally I would perservere but a HUGE stack of library books, all with non-renewable return dates and the promise of something interesting inside them finally made me give up on this one.  A third through the book and he was still around 10.  My take-away: Just because someone can write a funny movie doesn't mean they can write an interesting book.

On the bedside table June 23 to 30

ugh! Not much reading done this week as the family (except for Aaron) has been down with gasteroentinitis, which is Latin for "Sucks to be you".  I only finished one book.

Peter and the Shadow Thieves (Barry/Pearson) -- The next book in the prequels to Peter Pan, I didn't enjoy this one as much as the first, but that might be because I was reading it between vomiting spells.  In this book Peter returns to London to warn Molly (from the first book) that she's in danger.  He briefly meets J M Barrie, author of the original Peter Pan, and we are introduced to George Darling. My take-away: Don't read while you're sick, just rest. Or your dreams get weird.