Category: Books

Jack’s Book Recommendation: Princess Pulverizer

Source: Amazon.com

Jack has been enjoying a new reading series, so I wanted to share it with you all in case you have a young reader in your life! The interest for this latest series came out of an online class with the school librarian where she told the kids about different books they can check out though the school’s online borrowing system.

I was in a meeting, but as soon as I hung up my phone Jack burst into my office with a list of book titles written on his whiteboard.

One of those titles was Princess Pulverizer.

Knowing literally nothing about the book other than the description literally made my kid excited to read, I immediately clicked over to my Amazon account and ordered the first three paperbacks.

Parenting Rule #108: If my kid is interesting in reading a book, any book… I’m buying it!

Princess Pulverizer: Grilled Cheese and Dragons by Nancy Krulik (find it here on Amazon)

Source: Amazon.com

Synopsis: Princess Serena (or as she prefers, Princess Pulverizer) doesn’t want to be a princess–she wants to be knight! But her father, King Alexander of Empiria, thinks she still has a lot to learn when it comes to exhibiting valiant behavior. So, he presents a challenge: the princess must first go on a Quest of Kindness and perform good deeds to prove that she truly deserves to go to knight school. With help from a friendly dragon named Dribble and a perpetually terrified knight-in-training named Lucas, can she complete her quest and discover what it really takes to be a hero?

You guys, if I could hug the author, I totally would. This is a real, actual CHAPTER book with a Lexile score higher than my kid is currently testing. However, he loves this series so much that we have been reading a chapter each night. I read a page, he reads a page, and we go back and forth until the end of the chapter. He doesn’t complain that I’m making him learn… he LOVES IT.

We just finished the second book of the series together, Princess Pulverizer: Worse, Worser, Wurst and he liked it as much as the first one. Even though he thought the wizard was kind of mean.

There are 8 books in the series and I am happy to buy all of them if it helps my kid to be excited about reading!

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Nope: Books I Didn’t Like

Source: Photo by Gemma Evans on Unsplash

Well, they can’t all be winners. I thought I’d share 3 books that I’ve read so far this year that belong on the stinkers list.

Yuck #1: Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan

I’ve heard so much about the movie, which was based on this book and I thought this was going to be an absolutely delightful romance read. Instead, it had a million different characters that were hard to keep straight and it was a name-dropping slog. Money, money, rich people, money. Just super repetitive. And yes, I know it is about Crazy RICH Asians. But it was… boring. And I feel like everyone was really bitchy, and not in a fun way. Now, I have heard that the movie is actually delightful, but after reading the book it is not on my ‘must watch’ list.

Yuck #2: I Hate Your Face (and other things I wish I could tell my coworkers) by Connie O’Reyes

Okay, this is going to sound really mean. And I’m sorry. But this book read like someone had an unsuccessful unfunny blog about office life and they made a book out of it. There was nothing fresh to the stories at all and I feel like I’ve heard a version of them dozens of times already. It was like the writer was trying to emulate someone awesome like Jenny Lawson, The Bloggess. And it just fell flat.

Yuck #3: Nobody Eats Parsley by David Oakley

Here is another short story book that did not hit the mark at all. I literally only made it a third of the way and not one of his stories made me chuckle, even a little bit. Not even a small smile or a ‘HA!’ was had. Nothing. Life is too short for unfunny humor books, so I immediately hit ‘return’ on this one and freed the space back up on my Kindle.

If you’d like to find my full 2021 Book List, you can find it here: 2021 Books

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2020 Books: Wrap Up

After what felt like 32 months, 2020 finally came to a close. Before we fully move on to 2021, I wanted to take one last look back at the books I read in 2020.

I’ve never bothered to keep track of my reading before, but for some reason I decided to do a quick little running tally on my Instagram account. After I received a few suggestions to add the list to my blog, I made the 2020 Book List page and kept it updated through the entire year.

I borrowed a bunch of the books from the library – both in-person and the online through the Maryland’s Digital eLibrary Consortium (Overdrive). I also used my Kindle Unlimited subscription a ton and downloaded many books from Amazon. I only ended up buying a few books, because I was too impatient for them to come available for free.

All-in-all, I ended up reading 113 books this year.

And here is an easy-peasy list of all my book-related blogs from 2020 recommending some of my favorite reads of the year:

I enjoyed keeping track of my books so much this year, that I decided to keep it going for 2021. However, I’m planning to improve on my list by also including my mini book reviews on the page to keep all the information in one place.

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