Book Review: In a Heartbeat by Loretta Ellsworth

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In a Hearbeat by Loretta Ellsworth

Eagan is a figure skater. She’s athletic and talented and headstrong. Amelia’s world is limited by her failing heart. No longer even able to walk up and down the stairs of her home, she is homeschooled and spends a lot of time in her room drawing horses. In a Heartbeat by Loretta Ellsworth opens with Eagan’s story. We know immediately she dies after hitting her head on a board while making a jump in competition. Amelia is the girl who receives her heart.

The storyline goes back and forth between Eagan, who is caught between life and death, and Amelia who is learning to live and experience new sensations every day because of the strong heart beating in her chest. We learn about Eagan’s life through her memories of the times before her death. Amelia starts to suspect that some of her post-operation dreams and her new interests may be those of the donor.

In addition to the stories of the two girls, In a Hearbeat is also about Eagan’s and Amelia’s relationships with their mothers. Eagan feels her mother is too controlling and too invested in how she performs on the ice. She wants time to skate, but she also wants to pursue interests off the rink. Amelia is totally dependent on her mother, who has gone to great lengths to care for her while she waited for a new heart. Now she wonders how she can start to assert her own independence.

Even if you have not known someone who has donated or received an organ, you will be moved by this story of life for one that is not possible without loss for the other. The book never falls into a preachy tone advocating for organ donation, but instead takes a look at what it means from the human and emotional point of view. And it does a good job of showing the different perspectives that teens and parents may have about life and death.

While the focus is mostly on the girls, since it’s told from their perspective, Ellsworth does a great job of showing the ripples of impact on both families and friends. There are many things for mother-daughter book clubs with girls 13 and up to talk about after reading In a Heartbeat. It should certainly open a dialogue between moms and daughters about organ donation and all it entails for both sides—feelings of hope, grief, guilt, and the possibility of a connection between donor and recipient.  I highly recommend it.

Book Review: The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

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A diamond is stolen from the English country estate of Lady Verinder and the renowned Sergeant Cuff is brought in from London to help solve the case. The diamond, said to bring bad luck to its owner because it was stolen from a temple in India, was given to Lady Verinder’s daughter, Rachel, on her 18th birthday. It was bequeathed to Rachel from her uncle (who stole it when he was a young soldier) on his death. The story unfolds through several narrators, all of whom know a piece of what happened. As each of them writes his or her side of the story, the reader gets just a little more information that helps to solve the mystery.

Considered to be the first detective mystery, The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins offers a glimpse into the times it was written—the 1860s.  It was published serially, with new pieces of the story unfolding one section at a time for around six months. It reveals the understandings held about English ladies and gentleman, especially the thought that no well brought up young man or woman could ever commit a crime. It touches on a common occurrence at the time, the looting of jewels by English soldiers from temples in India. And, it’s fun to read once you get into the rhythm of Collins’s writing style (writers at the time were paid by the word, so you won’t find sparse descriptions and conversations here).

Each narrator brought a different perspective and style that was refreshing, and each break kept the story moving in unexpected ways. My daughter and I both found it fun to guess what had happened the night of the theft and in the days following it. My guesses were invariably wrong, but that didn’t stop me from developing new theories as the story progressed. My daughter’s guess about the culprit was right, although neither of us anticipated some of the twists and turns The Moonstone took before the mystery was actually resolved.

The Moonstone makes for longer reading in mother-daughter book clubs, but it is easily divided into two separate sections that can be discussed at two different meetings. Groups could read The Loss of the Diamond, then gather to discuss their theories about what happened. They could also write predictions down and compare them to what actually happened during the rest of the book when they meet again. I recommend The Moonstone for reading groups with girls aged 14 and up.

Mother-Daughter Book Club Meeting—Lesser Read Classics

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Last night my daughter Catherine and I went to our first mother-daughter book club of the year. We had read The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, who was a contemporary of Charles Dickens. The book was challenging—it was nearly 500 pages and written in the style popular in the 1860s when writers were paid by the word and published their books by installments in magazines. Because of the length, two of the mother-daughter pairs had not finished it. But whether we finished or not, we all liked what we read, and we had a great discussion of how the book was first published and how excited people were to buy the magazine each time a new installment came out.

Our group also talked about how this book is among the forgotten classics—books from long ago that have stayed in print but for some reason have not made it onto the list of must-read classics. We decided to create our own list of favorites that may fall under this category, and here’s what we came up with:

Lesser-Read Classics

  • A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain (14+)
  • The Adventures of Pinnochio by Carlo Collodi (9-12)
  • The Call of the Wild by Jack London (14+)
  • Five Children and It by E. Nesbit (9-12)
  • I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (14+)
  • The Indian in the Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks (9-12)
  • Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling (9-12)
  • Little Lord Fauntleroy by Frances Hodgson Burnett (12+)
  • The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas (14+)
  • The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum (7-11)
  • Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (14+)

While many of these titles are well known because of the movies made from them, they’re not commonly recommended for reading. I have read many of these to my daughters outside of book club, and I’m looking forward to reading others now that we’ve talked about them. Do you have a book to add to this list? Post a comment below to tell us about it.

Working Moms and Mother-Daughter Book Clubs

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I’m often asked how working moms can fit being in a mother-daughter book club into their already busy schedules. It is a challenge, but it can be done and I believe the rewards are well worth the effort. Most of the moms in my two book clubs work full or part-time. And most of the moms I interviewed for Book by Book: The Complete Guide to Mother-Daughter Book Clubs work as professionals too. Here are a few tips to make sure book club doesn’t become just one more thing to stress about.

  • Get the book soon after it’s assigned. If the library doesn’t have a copy in, you can put it on hold and have it sent to your local branch. If you prefer to purchase your books, buy it as soon after you know what you’ll be reading as possible.
  • Make reading your book club selection part of the time you spend with your daughter. If you read out loud to her, it lets you schedule time in your busy day to connect one-on-one with your daughter.
  • If you host book club at your house, enlist help to get ready. Even if your daughter is young, it’s likely she can help you tidy the house or put food out.
  • Don’t be afraid to ask for help if you need it. Do you have other children who will need looking after while you’re at your book club? See if you can arrange a regular sitter to help out on meeting nights. Do you need to drive straight from work to be at the meeting? Ask if someone else in the group can bring your daughter.
  • Set a regular meeting date, like the first Monday of the month or the third Thursday. This will help you plan around other events you need to schedule.

If being in a book club with your daughter is a priority, finding ways to make it work will be easier for you.

Book Review: A Different Day, A Different Destiny by Annette Laing

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Yesterday, I featured an interview with author Annette Laing along with a giveaway of her two books on time travel for middle grade readers, Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When and A Different Day, A Different Destiny. Here’s my review of A Different Day, A Different Destiny:

Hannah, Alex and George are back in a second time-traveling novel for kids, A Different Day, A Different Destiny by Annette Laing. Readers first met the three in Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When while they traveled from modern-day Snipesville, Georgia, to World War I and World War II England. This time they are headed even further back, to 1851, and all three land in different places.

Alex stays in Georgia, with its slaves, cotton plantations and Savannah businesses. Brandon ends up in a coal mine in northern England, and Hannah finds herself working in a cotton factory in a small Scottish town. This story is grittier and more frightening for the characters than the first. Since they travelled to different places, they can’t share their experience and their fears of returning to their normal time with each other.

They are also finding out about the privations suffered by the lower working class people of the time and the hardships of slaves. Food and extra clothing is scarce, as is time off from backbreaking work. As they each find ways to earn their keep, readers get a glimpse of the social conditions of the time when Western society was shifting from mostly agricultural to mainly industrial work. For the workers, it was a time of exploitation in many ways until they were able to earn more rights through labor laws many years later.

While Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When felt more lighthearted, A Different Day, A Different Destiny has more depth. I felt as though I learned quite a bit about the mid-1800s and what it was like to live then. And I felt the characters, in their second time around with time travel, were more aware of the culture they were temporarily part of. As Hannah, Alex and Brandon travel around and search to find each other as well as figure out what they need to do before they can return home, they learn a lot from being around people with all levels of social standing and they observe expectations people have of members of a certain social class.

Readers will delight in the surprising plot twists that connect this story to the one that came before. And they’ll look forward to seeing how the story unfolds in the next book in the series. I recommend this book and the series to mother-daughter book clubs with girls aged 9 to 12.

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Interview with Annette Laing, Author of Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When

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Last week I reviewed Annette’s book of time-traveling kids, Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When. Tomorrow I’ll review the sequel, A Different Day, A Different Destiny. Today, I’m happy to have Annette visiting to share a few words with Mother Daughter Book Club about her background, why she’s writing a series on kids who travel through time and more.

Author Annette Laing in Scotland

Tell us a little bit about your background.

AL: I’m from Scotland originally, but my family moved to Stevenage, a small city north of London, when I was quite small. So I grew up as a Scot in England, which was a pretty odd experience. In the early eighties, I had what was at the time an incredibly amazing opportunity, when I was accepted as an exchange student to Northern California. I had a blast in high school: I felt like I was living in the movie Grease. I quickly returned to California to attend college, which, again, was very unusual for a Brit in those days. Then, having wanted to become a newspaper reporter since I was seven years old, I abruptly changed my mind, and decided to become a history professor instead, because dead people, unlike live interviewees, don’t challenge a reporter’s version of events. After finishing my PhD in early American and British history, I moved to Georgia to take up a university post. I quit my job two years ago, but, as I like to point out, I’m still a professional historian, and I still love to chat with historian friends about background material for my novels.

What do you like most about writing?

AL: It’s pure escapism. It’s a luxurious time spent daydreaming instead of worrying about everyday matters. The best part is when I stop consciously putting words into characters’ mouths, and start transcribing what they say, as they take on a life of their own. It’s a very weird feeling, and at first I worried that I was going a bit demented, so it was a huge relief to discover that this is a normal experience among authors!

How did you decide to write about time travel?

AL: It was kind of a no-brainer for a historian to turn to writing about the past, but of course, I could always have turned my hand to historical fiction. I wasn’t drawn to the sci-fi aspects of time travel at all—I don’t understand the physics, and don’t pretend to. What strikes me as a cultural historian was that so few kids’ novels which are set in the past, whether time travel or historical novels, captured the sense of how differently people thought in the past. So I set out to take three very modern kids, living in a town that’s a bit of an eccentric time warp but is nonetheless part of the twenty-first century, and drop them off in places that I know very well, both personally and as a historian, so that their confusion about how to act becomes fun to read about, while showing that the past is indeed a foreign country. It’s great fun to write, too.

Why did you choose World War II England as a place for your characters to travel to?

AL: Like many Brits of my generation, I have an obsessive interest in The War (we always called it that, with implied capital letters.) We feel like we missed out somehow, although why we would want to suffer through bombing and food rationing is beyond me…. A few years ago, I started creating time travel workshops for kids, where we spent days making believe we were in the past. I decided to treat myself and “send” us first to wartime England. I had no idea if the kids would be remotely interested, so it was kind of selfish, but they were absolutely fascinated. It was pretty surreal for me to watch all these kids from rural Georgia pretending to be British kids in 1940, so I can only imagine what it felt like for the guest speakers who visited us who had actually lived through the Blitz. The kids’ programs are what kickstarted my idea for The Snipesville Chronicles, so it was probably inevitable that I would set the first book in World War II England. The whole series will be set in British and American history, for reasons that I hope will become clear…

Why did you insert a double time travel and send one of your characters back even further to World War I?

AL: I wanted to show how quickly people and places can change. Britain in 1914, the year the First World War began, and Britain in 1945, the year World War II ended, were very different places, and yet only thirty years had passed, less than most people’s lifetimes. People too often assume that the present is the only thing that counts, that the past is quaint and irrelevant, but this isn’t so. The past never entirely disappears. I hope Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When spurs readers to think about how quickly and profoundly the way we think changes over time, and yet how much we have in common with people throughout history.

Why did you decide to make one of your characters a black boy? How did that limit and/or enhance your story line?

AL: Brandon arrived in my head as who he is. Having lived and taught in a small town in the South for many years now, I couldn’t imagine why I would make all my main characters white: Sure, I’m not black, but neither am I an American by birth, or a teenager, or a boy, so all my main characters took a leap of imagination on my part.

Early in the story development, Brandon began to run into all kinds of attitudes toward race in early twentieth-century Britain, and I did briefly wonder whether it would be a problem that his blackness would always be an issue in the stories. Then it struck me that this is how it has always been for black people in Britain and the United States, and that I should be no less honest about “race” in my fiction than in my history. What’s most important is how Brandon reacts. He is taken aback at first by his reception in a pre-multicultural England, but he’s no wuss, and he refuses to be defined by the color of his skin. Like many young people I’ve known in Georgia, he is comfortable with who he is, as an individual and as a member of a middle-class black family.  He’s not perfect, and he’s a little eccentric, which makes him an ordinary but interesting and likeable kid. All in all, I am very pleased with Brandon. Recently, there has been much blog discussion about the lack of black characters in kids’ novels, other than slaves and members of the civil rights movement, and I hope that Brandon is a modest contribution toward addressing that absence.

Tell us a little bit about your second book in the Snipesville Chronicles.

AL: A Different Day, A Different Destiny, true to its title, is quite a different book from Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When. I want to surprise my readers with every new entry in the series. This book is much more of an odyssey than the first one, with all three kids taking long separate journeys in the year 1851. This is a time when kids are providing an exploited labor force in both Britain’s industrial revolution and America’s cotton boom, and the kids get caught up in both. At the same time as they are trying to make their way in Victorian times, they have been told to find a modern pocket calculator to get home to the present day, which is even harder than it sounds…

How many books do you plan for this series?

AL: Five, but I am leaving open the possibility of a sixth.

Anything else you’d like to say to readers at Mother Daughter Book Club?

AL: If you read Don’t Know Where together, I would love to hear about your group’s reactions to the character of Hannah, who would always rather go shopping than read a book, and who has found out that you can act out your issues in the past as well as in the present. Readers respond very strongly to her, but girls are afraid to admit out loud that they identify with her, so they claim that they have more in common with Alex or Brandon instead. Like I believe them. Yeah, right.

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Book Recommendations for Boys

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The Art of Manliness recently posted a list of 50 Best Books for Boys and Young Men that you may want to check out if you’re looking for good books for boys. The website in general is intriguing, and you may find yourself spending a few minutes looking around at other things it has to offer once you’ve finished checking out the book recommendations. I found it to be both funny and informative. Here’s the description from the site:

“The Art of Manliness is authored by husband and wife team, Brett and Kate McKay. It features articles on helping men be better husbands, better fathers, and better men. In our search to uncover the lost art of manliness, we’ll look to the past to find examples of manliness in action. We’ll analyze the lives of great men who knew what it meant to “man up” and hopefully learn from them. And we’ll talk about the skills, manners, and principles that every man should know. Since beginning in January 2008, The Art of Manliness has already gained 53,000+ subscribers and continues to grow each week.”

Of course not all the books are limited to boys. I really want to read The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. And books I loved when I was growing up and still do are Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, Holes by Louis Sachar, and Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. I adored Trumpet of the Swan by E. B. White, and To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is one of my all time favorites. My daughter, Catherine, would appreciate The Indispensable Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson. Check out the whole list to find your new or old favorites.

Questions to Answer When You Choose Your Book Club Book

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When you choose your book club books, have you ever thought to start off your discussion by answering a few questions about why you chose it? Starting out with this little step can get the ball rolling and provide insight to the rest of your conversation. Here are a few questions you may want to answer:

  • What made you want to read it?
  • What made you suggest it to the group for reading?
  • Did it live up to your expectations? Why or why not?
  • Are you sorry/glad that you suggested it to the group?

There’s often a lot of self-imposed pressure when you choose a book for your book group to pick something everyone will like. But unless you’ve read the book first, you may not even like it yourself! It actually helps you relax and lead a discussion more easily if you can say, “I expected to like this book because…” “I think this book brings up several issues we can talk about like…” Then you can focus more on the discussion topics and less on whether everyone liked and disliked the book, which is very subjective. I’ve rarely seen a book that 100 percent of our book club members liked and would recommend to others. And that’s a good thing actually. Because the best discussion usually comes about through disagreement, although I’m talking about respectful disagreement where you may benefit and learn from someone else’s opinion even if you don’t share it.

Be the first to open up, and you may just inspire everyone in your group to be more candid.

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