Etiquette and Espionage

For Friday's YA Pick:

Etiquette and Espionage by Gail Carriger

Seriously weird, but seriously awesome. Mary and I both loved it. If you're looking for something fun and unusual, a rip-roaring sort of thing, give this a try! Good for twelve (or maybe even ten) and up.

For Nonfiction for Everybody:

Snowflake Bentley by Jacqueline Briggs Martin

This is an old book, but so very wonderful. We own it and we love it. This gets pulled out and read all the time by everyone. It demonstrates what a real passion for something can do for you and the people around you. For the world. Definitely worth checking out and discussing. You could ask your children what things they feel passionate about. These things can, of course, change as our children get older, but they are NEVER too young, I don't think, to start examining the world around them closely and asking themselves what is important to them.

What a different world this would be if everyone had a passion for something and set about using that passion to make the world a better place!

I've been working on helping Mary in particular and my children in general love writing. I have some new ideas (some coming from a good friend), and one of them is pointing out great sentences (amazing sentences) and loving on them together.

So every Friday, I'm going to post a Great Sentence (or passage). Hopefully these will, in the future, come from sentences my kids have chosen, but for today, here's one I found in Going Solo by Roald Dahl.


Breakfast in Dar es Salaam never varied. It was always a delicious ripe pawpaw picked that morning in the garden by the cook, on to which was squeezed the juice of a whole fresh lime.


Can't you taste that pawpaw? I've never had a pawpaw, but I sure can imagine it (I imagine it tastes like lime mixed with Sprite. Probably not accurate). A simple sentence that tells so much! Find a great sentence today and share it with your kids!