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Tales From the Treehouse: Life With Lily – Book 2 and 3

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Remember when we reviewed this book Life With Lily? We were thrilled with a great character and the cultural insights into Amish life for young girls. We hoped, at that time, that there would be a sequel. Well, earlier this year a sequel Book 2 and Book 3 were both released. We couldn’t wait to get our hands on these and about three weeks ago when my daughter returned from camp, the sequels arrived in the mail. Payton devoured both in about one week. Now they are making the rounds with her sister first and then she will share with every last one of her tween friends.

Life With Lily: Book Two and Three is by Suzanne Woods Fisher and Mary Ann Kinsinger, published by Revell Books, 2012, ages 8-12,  $12.99 $$$$$ out of $$$$$. 

We love this great series. It is wholesome and sweet and well written. The character of Lily is very appealing to my daughter’s age group and I love that she learns something from the cultural aspect of the books. As a comical aside: I just wanted to note that we were driving somewhere the other day when Payton told me she wants to “become Amish.” LOL.

Top Five Brainfood Reads 2012

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We had some fabulous books here this past year and before the month of January vanishes, I wanted to share some of our favourites with you. I am developing a passion for young adult fiction and luckily my daughter seems to share the love of reading. Payton spent more than a few hours spinning some of the reviews here this year. Many thanks to her for reading along with me and for helping out on occasion.

This is our Top Five Great Reads List from 2012.

1. The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

2. Life With Lily – Book One – Great Books For Tween Girls

3. The Beggar’s Opera 

4. Lone Wolf 

5. The Virgin Cure


As I type this I need to confess that I finally broke down and bough Fifty Shades of Grey, while in the airport in Las Vegas. So, next year maybe it will make the list and maybe not. I have started the book and it’s a page-turner for sure. So tell us, what was your favorite book last year?

Life With Lily – Book One – Great Books For Tween Girls

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Great_books_for_tween_girls_amish_fiction
This is a guest Post by Payton Schuck

My daughter Payton,11, who loves to read plans to guest post occasionally here now.
By Payton Schuck

Life With Lily was an amazing read. It was very complex and I liked how descriptive so many passages were. My favourite character was Lily, a six-year-old Amish girl, who has two brothers Dannie and Joseph. She is a happy young girl who has a positive outlook on things. Her Mom and Dad are traditional Amish people and she is raised surrounded by animals and she loves being outside and helping her mother in the garden. Lily is in grade one and she lives in upstate New York. She finds something fun and curious about every new experience and each new day. 

When her youngest brother is born, Lily thinks he is ugly. Her cousin Hannah’s mom has a baby at the same time and Lily finds that baby adorable. She wishes her cousin’s baby brother was her baby brother at first. Lily is a good helper to her Mom and Dad and she looks after her brothers too. Lily does arithmetic and attends a very small one-room school house heated by a coal stove. (the kind my grandma always talks about). Lily faces lots of changes – from a baby brother to a new school teacher. Her brother Joseph gets into mischief. He jumps off the chicken coop, tries to fly and breaks his arm. Her brother Dannie dumps a bucket of flour on his head when his Mom is baking bread one day. Lily dreams he is a snowman after that. Her brothers are very active and always finding something to destroy. 

Lily enjoys school and church, but she has one friend Mandy who is often telling her to do things that Lily often knows with her heart she shouldn’t do, but she ends up doing them anyways. One day Mandy tells Lily and some other little girls to come and play in a secret spot. They end up playing on train tracks and a train comes whipping through. Lily almost gets run over, but her Dad swoops in fast to save her. Lily and her family have to move to Pennsylvania at the end of this first book. She is not happy about moving at first, but once she sees the area and meets a new friend while visiting, then she is convinced it won’t be so bad after all. 

Life With Lily: Book One is by Suzanne Woods Fisher and Mary Ann Kinsinger, published by Revell Books, 2012, ages 8-12, 280 pages, $12.99 $$$$$ out of $$$$$. Our highest rating. 

(A note from me: Paula Schuck – publisher of thriftymommastips.com. Life With Lily was a total delight for me. I had to wrestle this novel away from Payton at bedtime she loved it so much and found it truly compelling. She took it to school and gave mini reviews to her friends, then her friends each wanted to read it next. I loved that this book was so charming and really rekindled my daughter’s love of reading. She naturally enjoys cultural stories and this tale of a young Amish girl and her daily life was pitch perfect in every way. I have reviewed Suzanne Woods Fisher’s novels for adults and find her writing to be technically and artistically stunning. So pleased this is the first in a series for young readers.)
PS: Can’t wait for the sequel

The Variations – Review

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The Variations is a compelling first novel that tackles the complex topic of faith. It is a most worthy read, with a rather contemporary plot, a complicated main character, a priest who also writes a blog and begins to lose hios way after his mentor dies. I loved the savvy take on faith as something he has spun into a community of sorts on line as well. The main character is Father Dominic, an aging, conflicted soul. Quite an amazing anti-hero really. Likable despite his many faults, but not too likable. He is a gripping character study in some ways. Father Dom is surrounded by a colorful cast of secondary characters that help to fuel his disillusionment, like Dolores, a young spiritually challenged and emotionally volatile young girl who seeks comfort and presents as pregnant. Dom’s crisis of faith is in, a lot of ways escalated by her sudden pregnancy and the many questions regarding the paternity of the child. 
John Donatich is director of the Yale University Press and he lives in New Haven and New York City. So far, his first novel is creating quite a buzz and with reason. This is an author to watch, with a remarkable style all his own and a clear love for wordplay. A writer’s writer. Take for example this, as Dom cleans up the church grounds: “How he hated the clink of glass against glass in the garbage bag, hollow and carnal like a laugh track.” 
As the plot progresses, Dom’s blog attracts the interest of a young single editor, Andrea. Their relationship progresses until his apathy becomes to annoying for her. Their relationship compelling to watch as a reader and somewhat repulsive also, like being spectator to a train wreck. At the same time as Dom is struggling, James, a young African American pianist is working on his great piano masterwork and unable to finish. Will Dom leave the church for good, rediscover his faith or write a bestseller? You have to read it to find out.
The Variations is a lovely book and Donatich has a gorgeous style all his own. This one is a serious read, but should be on your list. It gets $$$$ out of $$$$$
The Variations is by John Donatich, a John Macrae book, Henry Holt and Company, New York, published March 2012, 288 pages $25.00

Untold Story – An Unusual Look at How Princess Diana’s Life Might Have Gone

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Untold Story is quite unlike anything I have ever reviewed here. It takes a real character, Princess Di, who tragically died in a Paris tunnel car crash many years ago and manufactures a fictional future for her, had she lived. The main character in Untold Story is Lydia, a single woman living in a small town somewhat called Kensington anonymously and working at a shelter for animals. She is in a relationship with a man and seems reluctant to get too close to him. She has several girlfriends. As the story begins, her friends are all waiting for her to show up to a party and she is late for an unknown reason. The foreshadowing wasn’t something I really picked up on with the first read of this book, but on a second pass through the manuscript it is evident. Chapter Two jumps back to a month before the party when life was normal for Lydia. She enjoys a quiet life with her dog and her friends. Occasionally she tortures herself with a peek at the gossip magazines seeking glimpses of her children, or her former life. In a side plot there is a photographer writing a book on occasion of the tenth anniversary of Princess Diana’s death. He is travelling and pulling the book together much too slow for his publisher’s desire and here the two plots will collide. Lydia is very skilled at lying to friends and giving them tiny snippets of truth to keep them from questioning her background or to keep them at a distance. Eventually she begins to have the feeling she might be being followed. It is a not unfamiliar feeling for her. When, after many years succeeding in having faked her death, she is found by a photographer, she must make a difficult choice: confront the man or run. Monica Ali is a truly creative author and this is a fantastic and compelling read. Ali takes as the premise the idea that Princess Di was “a gorgeous bundle of trouble” and she supports this with a character who exists in the book as the accomplice who helped Diana to stage her death. Through him we see how trapped she felt towards the last years of her marriage to Prince Charles. He is painted as cruel and controlling. We see also that this fictional Diana’s children were being pulled from her already as she headed towards the inevitability of a divorce. So, Ali, seems to hint it might not have been such a leap for a woman like Diana to have faked her death. It would have been the only way to gain freedom. Ali is the author of two other novels, In the Kitchen and Brick Lane. She lives in the other London with her husband and two children. She was named one of Granta’s twenty best young British novelists.

Untold Story by Monica Ali, is to be released in hardcover June 28, 2011, by Scribner Hardcover (Simon and Schuster Canada) Fiction, 272 pages, $25.00

This one is a $$$$ out of $$$$$. Fun and unconventional twist on a topic many of us thought we already knew.

I received a copy of this book to review for free and a chat will be occurring on line about the book through Wanda @YMCBookalicious and YummyMummyClub

My Foolish Heart by Susan May Warren

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I expected Susan May Warren’s My Foolish Heart to read like a romance novel. And it does. But to dismiss this book as simple pulp would be doing it a grave injustice. There is real substance here with a main character who suffers paralyzing anxiety attacks and, we learn, was sole survivor in a terrible car crash. Isadora, Issie, is a radio host of a talk show about love called The Foolish Heart. She dispenses advice and listens to romantic issues and yet she is so deeply scarred by her post-traumatic stress disorder she is barely able to venture from her home and therefore also unable to fall in love. She lives in Deep Haven and is the daughter of the town’s well loved former football coach. Football is almost as much a character here as are the grown high school students who never left town or left briefly and came back. Caleb is an ex-vet who was injured on duty in Iraq and has returned to town to audition for football coach. His nemesis Seb Brewster is also auditioning for coach. Caleb has been physically scarred over part of his face and yet, when he moves in next door to Issie she can’t help but noticing how attractive he is. Lucy is the town’s donut shop owner. She is Issie’s friend and as the plot reveals also has a history with Seb. My Foolish Heart is about a town healing after the death of their beloved coach. It is the first book I have read by Susan May Warren. She has three others in the Deep Haven series. Warren has clearly done her research on anxiety and PTSD. She delves really graphically into the psychological and emotional issues that are coupled with these disorders. For this reason her characters are unique and deep and multi-faceted. Caleb calls into the radio show one night and falls for a voice without knowing the woman behind the voice is also his neighbour. He is both physically and psychologically scarred by the past. Can they both get over their many obstacles in order to find each other? The author Warren has written more than 30 novels and was once a missionary in Russia. She is married with four children and now lives in Minnesota.

This one is a $$$$ out of $$$$$. I received a free copy of this book for review. That in no way impacts my opinion.

My Foolish Heart by Susan May Warren, published by Tyndale Fiction, US, $13.99, 358 pages paperback.

Smart Female Characters and Adoption History Lessons: A Review of the Novel, Angel Sister

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Angel Sister is a sweet, moving, tale that has all the elements of a good story. It is a story of family and forgiveness and survival, but Angel Sister is also an unlikely adoption story of sorts set against a backdrop of depression era America. Kate Meritt is the middle daughter in a big family struggling to find their way and stay strong during a terrible economic time that has tested many and left others destitute. Kate is a spirited girl who speaks her mind. With a tangle of dark hair that is often unkempt, a penchant for saying what she thinks, and a stronger interest in playing outside than in, she is not like her quiet girly sisters. “Brothers are alright, but a sister, she can understand things about you without ever saying a word. It’s like your heart divided and made another person.” Kate’s mother reminds her she is fortunate to have sisters, but Kate sometimes seems so much more mature than the rest of her siblings, that she is not so sure any of her existing biological brothers or sisters are a blessing. Kate’s father Victor is an alcoholic with what would be known today as post-traumatic stress disorder from fighting in the war. The mother Nadine is the daughter of the town’s preacher, a man who has always inspired more fear than respect and who clearly objected to his daughter’s choice of husband. He is a slightly foreboding presence and an influence on their entire community, a rural spot ironically named Rosey Corners. Kate is out running a jar of jam to her grandfather, Father Reece, the preacher, one day when she finds a small girl Lorena Birdsong, abandoned on the church steps by a family that apparently had little choice but to flee town with no money, no jobs and a very sick young son. What is interesting about this book is the historical insights into a time when this is really what life would have looked like for so many in America. As well, the author gives us a unique look at the early phenomenon of adoption before it was really even regarded as such. Adoption here is a very sad and unfortunate result of the economy. It is not legally binding in any way, but more so a kinship arrangement in which a town got together and decided what would be best for the child and the community in general. It is common sense in a lot of ways. But Kate is the one who has found the little girl Lorena, dirty and waiting on the church steps for someone to be her “angel.” She takes one look at Kate and quickly decides Kate must be her angel. The elder girl and her family really are in no position to add another child to their stressed full, but loving home, and yet her heart and conscience tell her the girl belongs with them. Kate cleans little Lorena up and takes her home with her. Conflict arises when Kate and the family fall for the child, but the church and community agree she must go live with a childless and somewhat unfriendly couple. At the point it is announced by Grandfather Reece in the church that Lorena shall go live with the Baxters, a couple of people stand up to protest, but it is Kate’s voice that rings out loud and clear. Unfortunately at that precise moment she chooses to speak out, the preacher has a stroke in front of the congregation. Poor Lorena Birdsong goes to dwell with the Baxters and Kate keeps an eye from afar as the plot gets more complicated. I won’t spoil the end of the story for my readers, but there are multiple levels of plot complications towards the end of the book that make this novel a really interesting book despite a rather slow start. Gabhart is a lovely writer and her characters in Angel Sister are really dynamic, especially the females. Kate is a charming and really three dimensional youth you will enjoy spending time with. I picked this book to review because of the title and the hint of an adoption plot. I enjoyed it because of the great female characters and the historical insights into a period of time that seems to echo, in more ways than one, the current socio-economic climate of southern Ontario.
Ann Gabhardt is the best-selling author of several novels. She has written The Outsider, The Believer and The Seeker.
Angel Sister, by Ann Gabhart, 2011, Revell Publishing, 407 pages, $14.99
This one gets $$$$ out of $$$$$
I received this novel for free to review, and this in no way impacts my original review.

Beside Still Waters: Not Your Average Amish Fiction Story

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Beside Still Waters is an unexpected and gorgeous treat of a book. It’s like buying a trip off the Internet for the first time. You cross your fingers and take a leap of faith. Then you get there and discover you landed a 5 star resort with world class dining and an unexpected room upgrade. It is clear from page two on that Beside Still Waters is the equivalent of landing a five star resort. On this journey there is fine writing with great and moving characters and a stunning, heart-wrenching, plot. From the first page the author grabs you and won’t let you go. Tricia Goyer has a real talent for gripping your heart, evoking emotion, and inspiring imagination. Beside Still Waters: A Big Sky Novel is the first book in a new series by Goyer. The book begins with a terrible tragedy, and an early birth that follows hot on the heels of the tragedy – life asserting itself even as grief reigns down on the Sommer family. The plot that unfolds reveals themes of growth, grief, romance, faith, differences and tolerance. Marianna is the infant born the same day her parents experience a horrible life-altering tragedy. She is, at once, a blessing and a lifelong reminder of their tragedy. Not surprisingly her character is sobre beyond her years. Marianna is the eldest daughter in her family and therefore often charged with child care. When we first meet her she is 18 planning a life in her community in Indiana, a place she has known all of her life. But her family is unable to move past their losses. They have also lost an older son, Levi, the brother to Marianne, who chose to leave Amish life for the world of the Englisch. In Indiana, Aaron Zook is the near perfect Amish young man who has her in his sights and quickens her heart. He is already building their home together despite having never really even asked her for an official date. Despite the many sadnesses that plague and follow Marianna, she believes she can see a future with Aaron. But her father shocks her with news they will leave their home and try to start fresh in Montana. Marianna agrees to give the new home six months and then she will return to her church, her home and the life that is waiting with Aaron. Or will she? A long train trip with her family is Marianna’s first real experience with the Englisch. And while there is a lovely older woman who speaks to her of faith and trusting God on the train trip, there is also a belligerent drunk young man who hits on Marianna prompting her father to step in and threaten physical retaliation. Goyer has an interesting way of illustrating the good with the bad and through her character’s psychological journeys, showing that black and white sometimes make grey.

Tricia Goyer is a remarkable talent. Goyer is the author of 24 books including Songbird Under a German Moon. She has also written a Mommy memoir called Blue Like Play Dough. She has been published in magazines and has written for Today’s Christian Woman and Focus on The Family. She doesn’t rely on the old standby stereotypes, or even the predictable Amish fiction romance plots. Her characters challenge the norms for Amish tradition. They have strong psychological lives. For instance, while it is common that Amish people live all their life in one area, this family in Beside Still Waters, moves to Montana. Despite the fact that the Amish are peaceful people, they can also be moved to violence should the opportunity demand it. Marianna’s father threatens to hit a young man hitting on Marianna when she is on the train ride. Marianna questions him after and he tells her he was merely calling the young man’s bluff. Goyer magically balances the allure of that which is different, the English culture, and the appeal of a familiar Amish life. She has created in Marianna a really strong, authentic, and lovely character I hope readers get to see more of in future books. To assume that this is a simple romance is to do great injustice to this novel, a book that could hold its own with any best-selling fiction novel I have read.

Beside Still Waters, by Tricia Goyer, released April 2011, paperback, is published by B&H books, 320 pages and $14.99 US.

I give this one a $$$$ 1/2 out of $$$$$.

I was provided with a free copy of this book to review. This in no way impacts my opinion.

Tricia Goyer has her own blog over at http://www.triciagoyerblogspot.com/

She is running a giveaway there right now offering five readers each a copy of this book. She also has a unique Amish salt and pepper set for one winner.