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A Place For Delta

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A Place For Delta is an amazing, educational adventure story for youth aged 9 to 12 set against an Alaskan backdrop. This young adult fiction tale is one of the best stories we’ve read here in a very long time. For a couple of weeks I’ve been reading this book out loud to my daughters, aged 8 and 6, and they have been captivated from start to finish. And you know that thing where your brain wanders sometimes to adult stuff while reading kids books out loud, well none of that happened to my brain with this story. In fact I might even be a bit smarter from reading it. Delta is a baby polar bear and this is the story of the people who find her and help nurture her, in the process, also helping to solve the crime of who shot the bear cub’s mother. It is insightful and educational. It is relevant, at times dealing with topics such as global warming, Alaskan oil drilling and environmental threats to animals such as polar bears. A Place For Delta is well written, and contains just the right amount of suspense to drive the plot forward. The story begins in Georgia many years prior, when a young brother,  Ben, his sister Kate and their mother, Lisi, move to an old farmhouse with many acres of land. We are told Lisi has taken a job at a college nearby and her children are explorers venturing out onto their new property tracking footprints and scat, in search of wildlife. They are pioneering in spirit, both animal and nature-lovers. As young children, Ben and Kate are daring. They have several close calls with bears and snakes. But these are smart savvy kids, without need of rescuers. Fast forward, many years later and the children are grown. Ben has a son named Joseph. Kate is employed at a research station in Alaska when news of an orphaned polar bear comes to light. She is busy with research, but also needing to help hand-feed and socialize a polar bear and she quickly asks her nephew Joseph, 11, to come to Alaska to help raise the bear. What follows is an amazing cultural adventure and a mystery as well. Joseph becomes friends with Ada, a young Eskimo girl, and together the two spy on locals and tourists to uncover the truth. At times, while reading this, I felt it to be the same kind of timeless classic like Charlotte’s Web that can be read over and over, treasured and passed down through families. A good book, read together with children, can cement bonds, raises important issues, help encourage character development and nurture creativity. A Place For Delta was a joy to share and I suspect that’s how my children felt to when it ended and they asked to read it all over again. I will treasure A Place For Delta, a savvy intelligent book that encourages children to be smart and resourceful while taking ownership of the world around them. This story is wholesome and contains many biology and geography lessons. Walker was a professor of English at the University of New Orleans, and is an advocate for civil rights and wilderness. She makes Alaska fascinating. She is the author of Reading The Environment and Living on Wilderness Time: 200 Days Alone in America’s Wild Places. She lives with her husband Jerome in Atlanta and spends summers in Alaska. Richard Walker is a nurse and artist. His illustrations are quite lovely and timeless. The jacket blurb for Delta indicates it is the first of a series of books for children. We will wait anxiously for the second installment in the series.
Melissa Walker, A Place For Delta, illustrated by Richard Walker, $16.95 US, Whale Tale Press
released today June 1, 2010. Thriftymommastips rating $$$$$ out of $$$$$. Loved it. I don’t think I’ve ever given perfect $$$$$’s before. My eldest has told every child at her school about this amazing new book called A Place For Delta and my youngest has asked all of her teachers if they’ve ever read it. One night she stated: “I would like 100 copies of that book.”

Thriftymommastips is not paid to review books, but receives a free copy to read from the publisher.

Sean Aiken, the One-Week Job Guru

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He found true love, tried out 52 different jobs and, along the way took the temperature of an entire generation, kickstarting a one-week job empire. Sean Aiken, author of The One-Week Job Project spoke with thriftymomma last week about the U.S. release of his book this coming week and a summer job project like no other. From firefighter to yoga instructor. From cowboy to fundraiser, Sean Aiken has tried it all. Aiken is author of The One-Week Job Project and a media sensation. In one year Aiken, a recent college graduate from Port Moody, B.C. tried on as many hats as possible in search of a career that sparked his passion. His idea attracted attention from around North America. “When I first started this project I thought I was alone in this search,” Aiken told thriftymomma. But Aiken quickly learned the topic hit a nerve and legions of fans understood the universal search for a career they were passionate about. This week Random House publishes his book in the United States. This month I had the pleasure of reading the story, a fun, light and, at times, philosophical look at life and the relationship we have with our career and our colleagues. The year he spent examining himself and his own passions led him to employers who were self obsessed and those who were selfless, those who tirelessly worked for non profits raising funds to help cure cancer and those who promoted films pompously self inflated and egomaniacal. There are numerous excellent glimpses into really interesting career paths. Aiken recalls some of his favourites: “My answer changes. I really enjoyed being a park ranger in Hawaii and a real estate agent.” In the book, his fondness for Steam Whistle Brewing, a microbrewery, in Toronto makes this one of the highlights. Clearly this employer has a knack for treating employees right and a reputation for knocking off work at 5:30 and rounding up the crew for a trip through downtown Toronto on the Steam Whistle party bus. Throughout the book the media attention Aiken attracted first shocked him and then became a little too familiar. He chronicles the trials of keeping up with the media requests and the dangers of falling into a trap where you begin to believe all of the hype created by the image machine. Early in his travels Aiken attracted a sponsor and was fortunate to be able to have this unique quest funded in part by NiceJob. Along the way he met a girl named Danna, from Toronto, who endures the lengthy separations and ups and downs of the bizarre year. Thriftymomma wanted to know if Danna and Sean were still together and readers will be glad to know they are happily living in B. C. Later on in the book Sean’s mother is diagnosed with cancer causing him to question whether he can finish the journey or not. But Aiken clarifies his mother is well now. “I could definitely see myself teaching at some point,” says Aiken. “For now I am really enjoying giving the talks. It has been so rewarding to have so many students come up to me afterwards and say how much the book resonated with them.”

This book, blog and web site, http://www.oneweekjob.com/ are all very entertaining.The book is excellent for anyone contemplating a job change or searching for a career. It would be a lovely graduation gift for a high school or university student. On the One-Week Job site a new project, which is a mini version of the book, has been spun off into a contest starting this summer. The winners net $3,000 to try out 8 different jobs, hopefully finding their passion in the process. Entrants must be 18 years of age. Each individual will sculpt their own path and line up their own series of jobs to try out. Interest has been very good so far, he notes.

Sean Aiken
The One-Week Job Project, Penguin Canada, 2010, 288 pages, $19.
To be released in the U.S. next week Random House.
Thriftymommastips rating $$$$$ out of $$$$$. Highly entertaining and informative. Enjoyable and insightful. Thriftymomma doesn’t receive compensation for her reviews, instead publishers send one free copy for review.

Lemon

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I have been a great fan of Cordelia Strube from the time she first drew attention for her novel Alex and Zee. Strube’s first novel was nominated for the W.H. Smith Books In Canada first novel award and it garnered a fair bit of praise roughly 15 years ago, back when young Canadian authors were being discovered and celebrated regularly, in both this country, and on the world stage. Strube’s various other novels Milton’s Elements and Teaching Pigs To Sing are firmly tucked away in my own personal home library of great Canadian authors. Teaching Pigs To Sing was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award. When I heard of Strube’s latest novel Lemon, I quickly contacted Coach House books and asked for a review copy for thriftymommasbrainfood. And from the moment I received this one in the mail I couldn’t put it down. I read it on the treadmill at the Y and while waiting for my daughter’s at their various activities which they do all over town. I literally could not put it down. And that doesn’t happen that often any more as my reading time vies with many other obligations, commitments and passions. Strube is a witty author, with a strong narrative voice, perhaps an aquired taste for some, but her characters are often strong females with a very jaded view of life, or a cynical eye. Lemon is no exception. Lemon is the story of a disenfranchised young girl, 16, named Limone, nicknamed Lemon, who spends her days rebelling at school and her off hours volunteering in a children’s cancer ward at a local hospital. At the start of the story when we meet Lemon, she has three mothers. The biological mother seeking her, her adoptive father’s depressed ex who tried to kill them both, and her most recent stepmother. Lemon lives with the most recent stepmother, a school principal who has become agoraphobic since being stabbed. The young teen escapes her life by reading voraciously. In her sad world teens beat each other up to feel something, sexting each other constantly, then betraying their friends by posting their pervy messages on sites like Youtube. Cyberbullying is the norm at Lemon’s high school and teachers seem to look the other way as most of the students have some secret underground perversion. Despite the claim that Lemon feels she has three mothers, she sees herself as an orphan in a world that is not worth living in and she spends her spare time hiding in trees observing the drug dealers, thugs and lowlifes in her neighbourhood. While she was at one point adopted, those parents have long since broken up. When we meet her, her adoptive mother is dead, her birthmother is searching for her and Lemon is conflicted. Her adoptive father, who eventually it is revealed, turns out to be her biological father, is a horrid skirtchaser she dubbed The Slug. Lemon’s closest friend is a child named Kadylak dying of cancer, her one teenage friend is the school slut and her only other friend is a dark intense poet practising to be a psychiatrist. When Lemon’s only true friend dies of cancer she receives a package from the family containing the girls’ drawings and it plummets her into a downward spiral. “Brightly coloured birds with stick legs under an always smiling sun. Drawings I watched her pen intently with felt marker, wondering why the sun was always smiling. She who could not go outside for fear of burning her chemo-blasted skin always drew smiling suns. I believed she would survive because of those suns.” While this book is extremely graphic, Lemon is a beautiful character with an unflinching view of the really desparate world she feels she has inherited. In the mirror she sees her biology tying her to people she either doesn’t know or cannot stand. In the end this is a story about the nature of family. When a young drifter who is also an environmentalist comes to live with the odd pair, the novel clearly becomes an essay on the nature of family and what it is that binds us to this earth. Lemon is one of the most humourous, sad and touching books I have read in a very long time. It is very respectful of adoption language and truthful in rendering the emotions involved in this bittersweet process. It is life in an adoptive family, but darker, way funnier and taken to the extreme. This is a story I will treasure.

Lemon by Cordelia Strube
Coach House Books
Toronto, 2009, 260 pages, $19.95 Canadian $21.95 U.S.
ISBN1552452204
thriftymommas rating $$$$ and 1/2 out of $$$$$.