Taking a break

I may have mentioned before that sometimes my brain gets a little overwhelmed with the histories I read and I need to give it a break.  I don't mean a break from reading, of course - it's not like I'm going to start watching television, after all! - but a break from heavy and serious stuff.  That's when I usually binge on some YA and kids books.  Here's a few of them:

Boys of Blur by N. D. Wilson was a pleasant surprise.  It's about 12 year-old Charlie Reynolds who left Taper, Florida and an abusive father behind many years before.  Now, he and his mom are back when his step-dad, Mack, is offered the job of head football coach at the high school. Taper is sugar cane country, and when they burn the sugar cane in the fall (to remove the dry leaves), kids chase the rabbits and try to outrun the flames. Charlie has seen some scary things in his life, but nothing prepares him for the frights he faces here - and we're not talking gators and snakes. I don't want to give too much away but this was a fun little book for middle-school aged kids, and I think boys, in particular, might enjoy this fast-paced and sometimes scary story with interesting characters.  Supposedly there are elements of Beowulf in the story.

The Secret Hum of a Daisy by Tracy Holczer is a pretty amazing story about loss and dealing with grief.  Twelve year-old Grace's life has been one of constantly moving. But when her mom dies in an accident, she ends up at her grandma's house - a grandma she's never met, and a grandma who put Grace's mom on a bus when she was 17 and pregnant. She struggles with the adjustment and schemes to get herself sent back to live with Mrs. Greene and her best friend Lacey. But then Grace starts finding little clues that she believes are being sent by her mother, leading her to something. The writing is beautiful and the story twists and turns as though answers aren't always easy, and Grace has to keep struggling to find them. Robert Frost's poetry is threaded through the story, and although it deals with a sober topic, I never felt that it lost sight of Grace's grief - or her grandmothers - and dealt with it in an appropriate way. 

Finally, Torn from Troy: Odyssey of a Slave: Book 1 by Patrick Bowman was another that surprised me - mostly because it's basically the story of The Odyssey by Homer, which was one of those books I read the Cliffs Notes for instead when it was assigned back in high school.  But this is retold as the story of Alexi, a fifteen year-old Trojan boy who is enslaved by Odysseus, who is called Lopex in this story.  Alexi ends up helping the Greeks through the storms they face at sea and getting out of some of the troubles they get into, like the Cicones they try to steal from, the bewitching lotus-eaters... and even bigger problems.  And as he learns a grudging respect for his captors, he also earns respect from them.  I liked this one so well that I'm going to track down the rest in the series, and I might even go back and read The Odyssey and The Iliad.  (Miss Haltiner would be proud!)

(I received Boys of Blur and The Secret Hum of a Daisy from Amazon Vine.  Torn from Troy was a 2014 audiobook download from SYNC.)