Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen

Okay, here's an adult book!  If you haven't read it yet, you need to before they make it into a movie and ruin it by having that vampire kid play the lead role.  It's set during the Depression and Prohibition and follows an orphaned and destitute young man as he joins a traveling circus.  What a great story!  Michel couldn't put it down when he read it, either.  I love how it goes back and forth in time, showing the main character as an old man in a nursing home.

The Wish List by Eoin Colfer

I recently read Everlost by Neal Shusterman, but I didn't like it nearly as much as Unwind.  A much better stuck-in-limbo-between-life-and-death book is The Wish List.  A troubled teenage girl (sorry--I read a lot of teen lit) gets sent back to earth after death to basically make up for some bad decisions.  She ends up helping an old man achieve his life's wish list.  This book is by the guy who wrote the Artemis Fowl series, which is a smart fantasy/science fiction series for kids ages 10 to 100.

A Room With A View, by E. M. Forster

Love and nineteenth-century English propriety never seem to mix very well. They’re in constant battle, each trying to repress the other, and we all know which one wins out in the end (at least in literature). We’ve read it before—the instant attraction between two people who aren’t supposed to be together, the problem of societal expectations, the confusion of priorities, the excruciating separation in which the characters realize they’d give up society just to be together, and the ultimate “love conquers all” ending. Same old story. But the thing is, it doesn’t get old! (Am I right, girls?) Seems like even if I know where the story is headed, I still always appreciate the journey.

Forster’s A Room With a View is a variation on this theme. The first half is set in Italy, and from there we move with our English characters back to England. Lucy Honeychurch, the heroine of the novel, is in a real muddle when George Emerson kisses her on a gloriously perfect Italian day. (This is a really big deal. Super improper and chastity-endangering in the nineteenth century.) So she’s got a dilemma when she gets back to England and has to decide basically between love and living a life that society expects of her.

We can guess how it turns out, but really it’s a beautiful journey. I didn’t much care for E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End, but I did enjoy this one. It’s a bit slow at the beginning, but picks up towards the second half. It isn’t the most fantastic read out there, but I did enjoy it and it had some loveable characters. It also really dug into the soul of the heroine, which I loved. I’d recommend this read if a) you enjoy Romantic love stories, 2) you enjoy descriptions of Italian and/or English countrysides, or d) you like books with exasperating, gossiping, old English biddies and unorthodox, understanding, fatherly figures.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver

When Barbara Kingsolver and her family set out from their home in Arizona to their small farm in western Virginia, book deal in hand, the term "locavore" had little meaning to most of us. However, during and after their year-long experiment, the local food movement has exploded into the consciousness of most Americans.

In this work of non-fiction (from a largely fiction writer), one family resolves to spend a year growing as much of their own food as possible and finding the rest, with a few small exceptions, within 120 miles of home. The narrative is written conversationally, with contributions from the author's husband and daughter, resulting in a non-fiction book that reads like fiction (I'm looking at you, Gina).

While I'm not going to be moving to a farm in Appalachia any time soon to recreate this experiment, I have taken a lot from it with respect to the value of knowing from whence our food has come, eating locally and supporting smaller scale organic food production. Also how damn lucky some of us are to live in California.

Barbara Kingsolver is my current favorite author. Though admittedly, I have not read the book for which she is probably the most famous: The Poisonwood Bible. Most of her works are fiction, many set in the Southwest United States. Animal Vegetable Miracle is the exception. Others that I've read and loved by Kingsolver are: The Bean Trees and its sequel Pigs in Heaven and Animal Dreams. I think I have copies of those first two if any one is interested in borrowing. The others were from the library.

xo Jennie

Unwind by Neal Shusterman

Great idea for those pesky teenagers in your life!  (Anne, Pat, and Anna, take note!)  This dystopian young adult (YA) novel takes place after the Reproductive Wars, when a treaty granted parents the right to have their teenagers taken apart bit by bit to live on as donated organs in other people's bodies.  Obviously, some teens aren't crazy about the idea and run away before they can be unwound.  This is a can't-put-down book full of action.  (Even Aba loved it!)  It also has an interesting take on pro-life/pro-choice debate.  
P.S. Christine gets credit for finding this one.