Children of the Dust Bowl: The True Story of the School at Weedpatch Camp by Jerry Stanley

 

An excellent description of what the “Okie” children experienced as their families fled the Dust Bowl for the promise lands of California. Complete with pictures, it gives the reader a good sense of their plight to be accepted and educated in a land where they were discriminated against. They were denied an education until a local educator Leo Hart decided to build a school just for them. What follows is a heart warming story of a displaced community coming together to build the school from donated and scrap materials, including an airplane, and insuring that the children received a quality education. This book should be on the required reading list for all grades.

Shallow Graves (A Location Scout Mystery Series) by Jeffery Deaver

John Pellam and his partner, Marty, are scouting locations for a film in Cleary, a small town in upstate New York. The book turns formulaic from the beginning. Pellam and Marty are outsiders in a close knit community which does not trust them or like the interruption of their small town life. The scouts’ motor home is vandalized, someone is watching them for the woods, there’s a murder to be solved and plenty of cover up by the town authorities. Formulas aside, this was a quick read and a decent thriller. It would be a good book for your next plane trip.

Thursday Next: First Among Sequels: A Thursday Next Novel by Jasper Fforde

 

Thursday Next: First Among Sequels is one of the better installments of the Thursday Next series. While maintaining its British sci-fi/fantasy feel, it brings the story lines from the previous novels together and answers a lot of questions left open throughout the series. Although subtitled “First Among Sequels”, this ties up nicely enough to be the last installment of the series. I have thoroughly enjoyed this series and highly recommend that if you decide to read it that you start with the first book, “The Eyre Affair” or you will be thoroughly lost but beyond that warning, I know you will enjoy the series. 

Anthill by E.O. Wilson

An extremely slow moving book with excruciating detail about coastal Alabama wildlife habitats mixed throughout with a thinly veiled conservation message. Even though we are introduced to the main character Raff at an early age, his character never seems to develop fully. The first part of the book spends more time on Raff’s parent’s background and the history of the Mobile social hierarchy than the main character himself. The middle part of the book is an extremely detailed explanation of the life cycle of an ant colony. Finally the last part of the book begins to build some excitement but sadly it is too little, too late. If I hadn’t been committed to writing this review, I would have put the book down after the first 100 pages.