Review: The Book of Tomorrow by Cecelia Ahern

Tamara Goodwin is a spoiled rotten, selfish, boy and clothing obsessed brat of a teenager. She's also just had her world rocked off its axis. Her father committed suicide and left a mountain of debts that mean she and her mother have to go live in the back of beyond with her Uncle Arthur and Aunt Rosaleen, whom Tamara has dubbed the Deliverance Duo. Cut off from her friends, shopping, her enormous house, and elaborate expectations, Tamara is determined not to make the best of things. Even worse, her mother is retreating into grief and sleep, leaving Tamara at the overbearing and obsessive mercy of Aunt Rosaleen.

In an effort to escape the claustrophobic feel of the house and her ever-watchful aunt, Tamara starts to explore the local castle's ruins (of much more recent vintage than she thinks), befriends a nun who lives nearby, meets some local teenagers, and flirts with the mobile library driver, on whose bus she discovers a blank book that starts to reveal to her, in her own handwriting no less, her own near future. The book is a diary and each entry is dated the day she is reading it but it is written as if it has already happened. What she does with this knowledge and the ways in which she is able (or not) to change the outcome drives the plot for the most part.

I found it incredibly hard to care about Tamara. She was such a snotty, whiny, mopey character and was fairly stagnant throughout the book, only gaining a little clarity about others at the extreme end of the book. Unfortunately, for me, that was too little too late. My good opinion once lost... The rising tension and slight gothic air made the book more interesting but many of the secrets Tamara discovered were so heavily foreshadowed (sign-posted?) that they were not a surprise when they were revealed taking away the impact they should have had. The actual book of tomorrow as a plot device sort of petered out only to reappear later and that felt more sloppy than intentional. Ultimately I was disappointed in the book, having expected something much different from the jacket copy but I suspect that Ahern's many fans will overlook the weaknesses here and thoroughly enjoy this slightly fantastical bit of chick lit.

Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of this book for review.

Review: The Proper Care and Maintenance of Friendship by Lisa Verge Higgins

When you look at your own life, do you see the things that might be out of balance? Do you recognize when you lose a part of yourself that you should never have allowed to slip away? Can you see the past as it really was without romanticizing it? For friends Jo, Kate, and Sarah, the answers to these questions are a resounding "No" but they are going to be offered the chance to see their lives as their friend Rachel saw them and scariest of all, to change.

The novel opens with Kate, a married mother of three who is afraid of flying, standing in the doorway of an airplane ready to skydive for the very first time. She is terrified but this is Rachel's dying wish for her: to jump out of an airplane. Each of the three women have letters delivered to them after their bright, vibrant friend Rachel dies of cancer unexpectedly (unexpected in that she didn't tell her three friends she was dying). The letters challenge the women. They ruffle their worlds, sending shockwaves into lives all around them.

Kate used to be a risk-taker, spontaneous and fun. Now she's subsumed her personality in her marriage and her children. She's content enough but when she fulfills Rachel's directive to jump out of the plane, she finds that content is not enough and that she needs to experience the wild joy and blazing happiness she used to feel.

Jo is all career woman with no roots. She doesn't rely on anyone and doesn't want anyone to rely on her outside of her job. And yet Rachel chooses to make Jo her young daughter's guardian, trusting that Jo has a great store of love and understanding inside herself. She offers Jo not only her daughter but also a sense of connection.

Sarah has spent years working as a nurse in some of the most challenging spots in the world but she is unable to let go of one man in her past. Rachel's final request of Sarah? Find Dr. Colin O'Rourke and either make it work or let it go and move on, able to live a full life.

The novel is quite clearly chronicles the growth and "coming of age" (despite their ages) of each of the three women through the insight of their late friend. It is also a novel of connection and friendship between women. Jo, Kate, and Sarah are very different people who have maintained a close friendship despite their differences and their different paths in life and it is fitting that together they must weather the trials set out for them by Rachel since it was Rachel who originally brought them together. Each of the characters is well drawn and unique. I did have one quibble about them though: Jo's caricature as a career woman who immediately makes a muddle of her life once she has Grace is a bit stereotypical and over the top. And while I suspect that many people would at least try to honor a dear, dear friend's final request of them, Rachel's uncanny knowledge of exactly how each of her friends needs to grow as a person and what action will make that happen is the tiniest bit deus ex machina. Overall though, this is a nice friendship and growth story. Fans of women's fiction will appreciate the connections between the women and enjoy the reminder to live life to the fullest each and every moment.

Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of this book for review.

Review: Breakfast With Buddha by Roland Merullo

One of my book clubs chooses the upcoming reads based on the recommendations of a varied collection of people (not all of whom are in the group). This being the case, someone either in the group or close to a group member obviously raved about this book to get it onto our schedule. I certainly wasn't fussed by the choice as the book has been resident on my to be read shelves for quite some time now. But over all, it was rather a disappointment, especially knowing it had the force of recommendation behind it and a delightfully different premise too. I was quite disappointed to miss the meeting where it was discussed if only to hear other perspectives on it.

Otto Ringling is a middle-aged, food-book editor, originally from North Dakota, who lives a happy and fairly fulfilled life with his long-time wife and their two cookie-cutter teenaged children. The book opens with Otto (aka Everyman) taking time off work to drive out to North Dakota with his sister Cecelia to make arrangements for the disposition of their parents' farm, said parents having died in a car accident some months previous. But when Otto gets to his eccentric and New Age-ish sister's home, she informs him that she is not going with him. Instead, she wants him to take her spiritual advisor, to whom she wants to give her portion of the farm, with him. Otto doesn't want to have this perfect stranger in maroon robes foisted on him and he certainly doesn't want to show this foreigner a piece of America, but with grave misgivings, he agrees. So starts not only Otto's road trip but also his spiritual awakening.

With thoughts of mortality and the meaning of life flitting into and out of his consciousness, Otto is, of course, ripe to open to Volya Rinpoche's teachings. Unfortunately, Rinpoche sounds like Robert Fulghum and all he learned in kindergarten, offering up easy platitudes about living life mindfully, in moderation, and without causing harm to others. Certainly there's nothing wrong with living life this way, and a lot to be said for following this path, but as a revelation designed to open Otto's formerly skeptical eyes, it just trickles and dribbles, a little trite and very self-evident.

While some of the scenes of the childlike Rinpoche delighting in the everyday are entertaining enough, I am still uncertain as to how Otto ended up agreeing to take the man with him. Not only that but I apparently missed the transition Otto made from wanting to get to North Dakota quickly in order to rejoin his own family after wrapping up his business to willingly extending the road trip and meandering through the midwest with a not Buddhist monk in tow (Rinpoche refutes Otto's charge of Buddhism, claiming that all religions are at root similar enough to be not worth differentiating). The character of Rinpoche was a bit annoying and the way that his ability to use English seemed to fade in and out was almost as if Merullo veered between not wanting his spoken language to be a caricature and forgetting that he had written a character who indeed spoke English as an inexact second (or eleventh) language.

The latter portion of this first person narrative (Otto narrates) is very much a spiritual awakening journey and less and less of the road trip journey, a fact that made me lose interest in the book almost entirely. The ending grabbed me back, though not in a good way. The ending to this book was one of the most dreadful I have read in a long time, an airy-fairy, feel-good ending that grated unbelievably. Perhaps I am not spiritually open enough, just plain unelightened, or languishing too far back on the path, but I didn't love this book despite having been so attracted initially to the quirky premise and having enjoyed Merullo's A Little Love Story previously. Others thoroughly enjoyed the philosophical nature of the book though so it could just be my own stubbornness that kept me from being receptive to this novel.

Review: Ragtime by E. L. Doctorow

Ragtime is called one of the best books of its time. It was apparently a trailblazer in terms of the way the novel has evolved. It is included on the lists of 1001 books that will make you a well read person. Obviously I missed something substantial here because it didn't impress me, draw me in, or engage me in any real sort of way. In actuality, I found it to be rather a mess. Then again, my critical facilities may be going haywire or, conversely, it could be an emperor has no clothes kind of situation here. I know which scenario I think it is. Draw your own conclusions.

This historical fiction novel is a pastiche. Ostensibly following several very different characters, Doctorow has woven real historical figures and actual events from the turn of the 20th century (right up until the eve of WWI) into his narrative. A plethora of characters is introduced and then seemingly dismissed in the early stages of the novel, only to reappear on the page later, making coincidental connections with each other. The almost vignette like narratives highlight the major ideas and enthusiasms of the time: Coalhouse Walker's quest for justice highlights rampant racism, Houdini's acts underline the public's fascination with death defying escapes and their interest in the occult, Father's trip to the North Pole emphasizes the way in which exploration still captured the imagination, the trial of Harry Thaw chronicles the birth of the celebrity culture through his actress wife Evelyn Nesbit's role in Stanford White's murder, the pow-wow between Henry Ford and J. P. Morgan showcases the rising industrialization and mechanisation of the time, and so on. Perhaps there's just entirely too much going on in the novel, too many characters, too many themes, and a superficiality to both.

The combination of fictional and real characters resulted in a short-shift approach to both and I found myself lacking sympathy for anyone. Late in the book when one character finally reappears, I just didn't care. And the coincidental intersections of the characters, real or imagined felt too contrived and intentional. This was, of course, a fascinating time period with so much nascent but I felt as if Doctorow had just missed the mark in depicting it. Having read it, I am that much closer to being "well-read" but I'm not any closer to understanding why.

Review: The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa

It is no secret that math has never been "my thing." My children regularly struggle through their math homework without asking me for help. They make disparaging comments about my lack of mathematical ability. What I don't think they understand is that for a very long time, I did quite well in math (geometry beat the confidence right out of me but that's a story for another time). It wasn't so much that I didn't "get" it, I just didn't love it. Numbers have always been quite far down on my list of enjoyable things to ponder. And yet this slight novel about a former math professor who, after suffering a traumatic brain injury, can only hold things in his memory for 80 minutes and the unschooled housekeeper who assumes the care of the man and the cleaning of his small cottage is incredibly fascinating both on the human (character) level and in terms of the math concepts the professor explains to the housekeeper and her small son.

The professor is a mathematical genius and a gifted teacher who lives alone in a small cottage on the grounds of his sister-in-law's house. After a car accident in 1975, he has been unable to retain anything in his memory for more than eighty minutes. The suits he wears flutter with pinned notes reminding him of important things in his life. The most important note, which he wakes to every morning, is that his memory only lasts eighty minutes. Many housekeepers have come and gone in his life until the unnamed housekeeper of the title. She must reintroduce herself to the professor every morning offering him numerical tidbits from her life (her birthdate, her phone number, etc.) to help ground him in the immutable, eternal solidity of numbers even while everything else in his life seems new and confusing on a daily basis.

As the housekeeper settles into her own routine, she introduces her ten year old son, nicknamed Root by the professor because of his head's resemblence to the square root sign, into the small cottage. Root's presence pleases and energizes the professor, who takes to teaching both the housekeeper and Root about the beauty he sees in numbers. He explains prime numbers, amicable numbers, and difficult equations. His explanations are elegant and interesting and strike a cord with the housekeeper, who pushes further on her own. The three of them listen to baseball games, the game a statistician's dream. The housekeeper, the professor, and Root form friendships based on mutual interests and genuine caring despite the professor's inability to remember the other two from day to day.

The story itself is quiet, gentle, and lovely. The writing is carefully meticulous and yet elegant in the way that a complicated mathematical proof would be distilled to its simplest rendering. The theme of time and the fleetingness of memory contrast nicely with the eternal strength of numbers and friendship. There are no pyrotechnics here, just the simple beauty of a well-written, enchanting story. Like the concept the professor explains to the housekeper one day, this novel is easily summed up as amicable.

Review: Cheerfulness Breaks In by Angela Thirkell

I do love Angela Thirkell's work, her imagined county of Barsetshire and the residents thereof. This is one of the first books in the extensive series to be set during World War II and as such it captures the feel of the early days of the war, at least as it was seen from rural village England. In this installment of the story, Rose Birkett finally gets married to the relief of her family who figured they'd have the care of her selfishly flighty self forever. Other village girls take up wartime efforts, working in local hospitals and caring for evacuee children while settling into engagements with the men so soon to be leaving. There's no muss, no fuss about the courtships or indeed the characters themselves.

Thirkell is an ace at portraying the British stiff upper lip so evident in times of stress and she pokes fun at many of her characters, having them lament the lack of good patients at the hospital and thrill at the thought of catastrophic injuries. She presents the London children in all their dirt and coarseness but makes it evident that the ladies of the village have no intention of facing reality in their dealings with the urchins. As the series reader has come to expect, Thirkell's biting wit is just as evident in this war time novel as it is in previous novels. Her characters are a delight with whom to spend time and the reader is easily engrossed in their daily lives. Thirkell is, as always, a writer of domestic fiction par excellence. A reading experience to savour, I look forward to the rest of the series, especially since this book in particular ends with a terrible cloud hanging over it (and enough information to know the outcome despite its perceived ambiguity). If you're not yet reading Thirkell's delightful books, why ever not?

Review: Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson

Billed as a tale of love between two older people, the very properly English Major Pettigrew and the widowed Pakistani-English Mrs. Ali, who owns the local village shop, this marvelous debut novel is indeed a charming love story but it is very multi-dimensional, a delightful story of two people who find they have as many similarities as differences, a complicated look at the invidiousnesss of racism, even that unintentionally practiced, the cost of progress, and the conflicts of family. It is a modern tale of manners told with wit and brilliance.

Opening with Major Pettigrew hearing about his brother's death, we are introduced to the quiet, reserved, eminently traditional Major. As he and Mrs. Ali come to know each other better, the Major understands how little consideration he's given to this nice woman who has made her home in the same village he has for so many years. He must face his own culpability in keeping Mrs. Ali an outsider for so long, especially as he witnesses the deliberate unkindnesses and bigotry displayed by so many around him. He finds in Mrs. Ali a kindred spirit of the sort that his wife Nancy had been for him and he gradually welcomes her into his life and thence into his heart. As their friendship and mutual admiration grows, many other multi-faceted characters parade through the narrative.

The Major's son Roger is a colossal prat, completely self-involved and almost as grasping as the Major's sister-in-law and niece. Roger's fiancee, a loud American turns out to have hidden depths. Abdul Wahid, Mrs. Ali's nephew is dour and studious, a seeming stereotype who learns to bend. The villagers are a mixed batch, with some welcoming the increasing involvement between the Major and Mrs. Ali and others being horrified.

The Major desperately wants to reunite the gun his father left his late brother with his own gun, making them the matched set they once were. He feels an entitlement for it to be so but his desire also reflects his insistence on history and tradition. As he strives to rescue the gun from his brother's widow, who is most concerned with the money possible if the gun is sold, he faces, on a smaller, domestic scale, several issues swirling throughout the novel: the potential loss of heritage and misunderstood intentions.

I loved the characters here and appreciated their dry sarcasm. Although not strictly a humorous book, I did chuckle quite often as I read along. And I appreciated the oblique but completely clear manner of addressing obstacles and beliefs, both positive (stewardship and preservation) and negative (racism and self-absorption). The story was completely satisfying and I am pleased to say that I enjoyed the book as much as the buzz would suggest. A wonderful read.


For more information about Helen Simonson and the book, be sure to visit her website, her Facebook page, and her GoodReads page.



Thanks to Trish from TLC Book Tours for arranging the blog tour and getting me to finally read my copy of this wonderful book.

Review: Being Polite to Hitler by Robb Forman Dew

Normally I don't like to read books in a series out of order but I didn't know that Being Polite to Hitler was the final book in a trilogy. Thankfully that turned out not to matter and I am even rather pleased to know that I can revisit these characters when I so choose, even if I do already know their ultimate outcomes (and I suspect that I have the first two books somewhere deep on the tbr mountains already so it will be easy enough for me to do). Putting aside the trilogy order issue though, how could I possibly pass up a book so enticingly titled especially coupled with the cover image of a woman daintily sipping tea? It was just too appealing.

Taking place in the years following World War II, from the early 50's to the early 70's, the novel follows the Scofield clan through their everyday lives in small town Washburn, Ohio. Matriarch Agnes Scofield starts the novel coming to the conclusion that she is tired of teaching. It was only ever something she did out of obligation and now she wishes to be able to leave off. Whether she will have the courage and ability to change her life in the face of the mundane remains to be seen. The novel also follows Agnes' family in their daily struggles, financial, marital, and personal as well.

Althought it might seem as if there's not much going on in this quietly domestic novel, there is nothing going on in the way that there was nothing happening in Virginia Woolf's novels. There is a sense of the ordinary extraordinariness of daily life in a small town during the post war years. And like Woolf's, many of Dew's characters face that elegantly quiet desperation in which only the comfortable upper middle class can indulge. The characters peopling the pages of the novel are langorous and yet tightly wound too, a neat, tricky bit of writing that Dew pulls off admirably.

The hopscotching narrative functions as a window to peek in on various different Scofields and the state of the world as America comes of age after the war. Dew weaves historically significant events throughout the story. Some are intact and lengthy (Kenndy's assassination) while others are merely alluded to or briefly discussed by the characters (the Rosenbergs), their prominence in the storyline mirroring the importance of each event commensurate with their impact on the middle America of the time. This is a book filled with moments, everday moments, extraordinary moments, and even authorial moments. At one point, with a wink to her readers, Dew gives herself a tongue in cheek tip of the hat in the midst of an exposition.

Beautifully crafted, this is a quietly resonant novel. When Agnes' daughter-in-law Lavinia crossly accuses her husband Claytor of being willing to endure anything, willing to sit being polite to Hitler so as not to ruffle any feathers, the perfection of the title as a descriptor for the characters' lives is highlighted. And for those people who often find themselves bemoaning tepid endings, this book has one of the very best ending lines I have read, perfectly in keeping with the entire tone of everything that went on before. Lovers of literary fiction will find much to savor here and Woolf fans will rejoice in the understated homage to To the Lighthouse.

Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of the book for review.

Review: The Crimson Rooms by Katharine McMahon

I generally don't read anything that has a body or blood in it because I am prone to nightmares, coward that I am. So it is probably completely incongruous that I would cheerfully agree to read a book in which one of the first female lawyers in Britain is helping to defend a man accused of murdering his wife. I am nothing if not inconsistent. Then again, I am up writing this review in the wee hours of the night when I am usually asleep because the image of a pink shoe on a lady's foot poking out of the underbrush has crawled into my brain and horrified me beyond sleep. Tame stuff for afficianados of the scary and gory but disturbing and lasting for babies like me.

Six years after her brother's death in WWI, Londoner Evelyn Gifford opens the door to find a small boy the spitting image of her brother standing with his mother on the stoop. There is no doubt that the child is her brother James' son, conceived just before his death. The household has been in a sort of grieving stasis since the telegram announcing James' death six years ago and the presence of small Edmund and his mum Meredith is about about to change everything. And while Evelyn's family life is undergoing this major upheaval, she is struggling in her professional life and opening up to an opportunity in her personal life as well.

One of the first female lawyers in England, Evelyn is still in training and facing the almost inevitable prejudice of being a trailblazer. Her boss has relegated her to mostly unimportant (and non-paying) clients. When he is out of town, by default she is given the case of a poor mother, a bit too fond of drink, who is accused of having kidnapped her own child. Leah Marchant willingly surrendered her children to a charity home while she tried to get back on her feet but in so doing, she didn't fully understand the consequences of her actions or the potentially terrible complications. In fact, neither did most of society fully understand the possible fates for children like Leah Marchant's. A seemingly insignificant case, it blossoms out of control as Evelyn undertakes to reunite the mother with her children.

Meanwhile, she is also called on to assist at a spectacular murder trial where a former soldier is accused of having shot his new wife in the heart while out picnicking and then cold bloodedly heading to a pub for a few drinks. The evidence against Stephen Wheeler is overwhelming if circumstantial and Evelyn may be the only person who believes his innocence. And proving that innocence could be beyond her capabilities.

As I've already mentioned, the murder storyline left me sleepless over the two nights it took to read the book. This is not because it was difficult to figure out who the killer was though. As a matter of fact, it seemed to me to be glaringly obvious from the first. But as the novel is much more than the mystery, this seems less a handicap than it might.

The obstacles faced by women in the time between the two world wars, as they not only entered the workplace but entered in educated professions which had always been the sole province of men, were enormous. And add to that the lack of rights of women in general during this time and it becomes clear the sorts of odds a character like Evelyn faced. She should have been a wonderfully admirable character but I just couldn't warm to her. She was somehow more insipid than I had expected given her drive to become a lawyer despite general public sentiment. Perhaps this was intended to show her complexity and make her multi-dimensional but it left me without a character with whom to identify. As for Meredith, the mother of James' son and the character who stands as a foil to Evelyn, I didn't care for her either. She was flighty and cruel, fickle, inconsistent, and grasping and I suspect she was not meant to seem that way. Evelyn's budding lust for Nicholas, a man who represents everything she abhors, was a distraction given everything else going on in the novel but his very presence was necessary to the meat of the plot, making for an interesting conundrum: how to include him without the busyness of yet another plot thread.

Given the fact that the novel was certainly out of my comfort zone, I probably zeroed in on things that wouldn't have struck other readers quite as strongly. And as evidenced by my lack of sleep, the detail of the story is quite vivid. The touches of historical information, the reaction and prejudice against the first female lawyers, the shipping of children from English charity homes to Canada where they could be ill-used, the toll the war had on the survivors, both soldier and civilian, all of these were fascinating and woven into the novel well. I just couldn't make a connection with the characters that didn't leave me irritated and so my overall enjoyment was lessened. I do think, however, that mystery readers will enjoy the threads of the story that kept me awake and historical fiction readers will find interesting nuggets scattered throughout this post-WWI set novel.

Thanks to the publisher for sending me a copy of the book to review.

Sunday Salon: Review: Firmin by Sam Savage

Although I was always turned off by animal stories (even those like Animal Farm or Watership Down that were allegories for our own or future society) as a younger reader, I couldn't resist asking for a review copy of a book that features a rat born in a bookstore. Basically, mention books in your jacket or marketing copy and you can reel me in hook, line and sinker. The good news is that this book did not disappoint. Firmin is born into a nest of shredded pages torn from Joyce's Ulysses. This, perhaps, makes it understandable that it is a bit of a struggle to get into the book initially. But persevere and the omnivorous reader is rewarded. Firmin tells of his life in books, both eating them and once he learns, in reading them. I definitely chuckled when our intrepid rat tastes toilet paper for the first time and discovers it to taste similarly to Emily Post's etiquette tomes. But Firmin is the book rat in all of us. His imagination, nutured by his reading, is writ large and oftentimes gets him into trouble. He sees the coming destruction of his neighborhood but prefers to stay oblivious, with his nose in a book. He is, in short, a furry scholar who can only shut out the real world for so long. And don't for one minute think he's limited to the highbrow. Oh no. He is also a connisseur of girlie movies, featuring women he calls his "Lovelies," shown at the local movie theater, which is also a treasure trove of food for a rat. Firmin is a funny and loveable character and the book is a small gem for eclectic readers.

On a non-content related point, I will say that the chunk missing from the cover and pages of the book (shaped to look as if Firmin was a giant rat and had taken a chomp of the book), was highly annoying. It was cute in the store (yes, this was one of those Advanced Reading Copies I never received because of my new address snafu and so bought myself to fulfill the review obligation), but it was hideous in practice. The chunk was exactly where I try to hold a book and made holding this one uncomfortable. So any publishers out there thinking of doing something like this, it's nice to look at novelties of this sort but not a good idea in practice, at least as far as I'm concerned.

National Just Read More Novels Challenge

So I stumbled across this challenge a couple of days ago and thought, I can do this. Even better, I've already done this! I have read more than my usual share of non-fiction already this year but the month devoted to reading novels is helping keep me balanced. So far, The Water Babies, Firmin, and Fingersmith (reviews to come of the latter two) count towards my total. We'll see how many I can read before the deadline of the 31st! I suspect I'll earn a silver medal for reading five but not make it to a gold for 10 since I have a couple more non-fiction on the go too.

Review: The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley

This Victorian children's morality tale is one that I've not heard many other people mention and that is a shame. It is more sophisticated than many elementary school-aged books written now and yet still sweet. Tom, a little chimney-sweep who is smacked about by his master, is cleaning a chimney at a great house when he is mistakenly thought to be a thief. He is terrified and runs off, all the while trailed by the queen of the fairies. After encountering huge obstacles in his path and overcoming them, he faces more mistrust and so wanders off to bathe in the river. He falls in and is transformed into a water-baby. As a water-baby, he has many adventures and learns to be a better boy than he had ever been when on land. This story owes much both to Gulliver's Travels and to The Odyssey. There are many strange creatures who instruct Tom in what is right and good during his quest and he has a loyal girl waiting for him to come home to her during his strangest adventure. The language would probably be a bit tough for elementary school readers today, either because they didn't understand it or simply because it is quite ornate and descriptive, unlike today's books, but the creativity of the land in which the water-babies live and the creatures that populate it might help children overcome these difficulties. There were pockets of the story that were a bit tedious in their insistence on moral lessons being pointed out in case the reader missed the significance of Tom's experience but this is very much a hallmark of the literature of the time and didn't ultimately detract from the overall loveliness of the story.