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

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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

Speak!

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It is quite unusual for me to choose a young adult book to read or review for that matter. But something about this one tweaked my interest when shopping at Chapters/Indigo recently and as a result it has changed my whole reading perspective. Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson came recommended by a staffer named Emily as you can see here. It also has garnered more awards than most authors accumulate in a lifetime of writing volumes of novels. This young adult book is one of the most compelling character studies I have seen since reading The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold. (a new movie currently in theatres based on the bestseller. In Speak, the narrator is a young girl starting high school. Melinda Sordino, selectively mute, has stopped communicating in any meaningful way since she broke up a summer party by calling the cops. All of her friends hate her since she ruined the summer’s biggest social event. While most readers will probably be able to guess at the reasons behind the phone call, the author doesn’t reveal the details until a crucial point in the book. Melinda is traumatized, depressed and anxious. She slowly reveals details of why and how she came to be non responsive and disenfranchised from her parents and her former friends. Halse Anderson has done a remarkable job recreating the truly awful awkwardness of early grade nine and the strange but real high school environment. A mother of teenagers at the time she wrote this novel, she captures details with a wonderful mix of humour and pain, always realistically conveying atmosphere, setting and dialogue. Melinda is failing or flailing in most of her subjects. She is depressive to everyone except her parents, who do not stop working or admonishing her poor academic performance long enough to figure out what truly might be happening with their daughter. This is a sad, brave, book because it deals with mental illness and violence. But Speak is also ultimately a hopeful story that chooses to pull back the curtain that shields people from seeing mental illness as something that affects young people. Melinda’s high school is a place of refuge and terror, an escape and a prison. “The art room is one of the places I feel safe. I hum and don’t worry about looking stupid.” This is a book I will keep for my daughters to read when they are old enough to read it (I would estimate 12 and up). Speak conveys a powerful message about voice and truth, safety and the complex world of contemporary teenagers. It is precise and unflinching and it has opened my eyes to another genre of novel and the fact that there are some truly amazing authors writing young adult fiction.

thriftymommastips review $$$$$ our of $$$$$.
Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson is published by Penguin USA, 1999.
198 pages. $14 Canadian and $10 USA.