Life, Loss, and Puffins - Book Review

Review of a novel by Catherine Ryan Hyde

For two teenagers, their bucket list isn’t about dying. It’s about finally living.

Highlights of the Story

Life, Loss, and Puffins: A Novel

The two main characters in Life, Loss, and Puffins are teenagers Ru Evans and Gabriel.

Ru lives in California with her mother. She is freakishly smart. She taught herself euclidean geometry at age seven and has a photographic memory and total recall. As the story begins, Ru is about to enter college, and she is only thirteen years old. 

The college is 150 miles from Ru’s home, so her mother arranges for her to board with a family near the college campus. This family consists of a mother and her seventeen year old son, Gabriel.

Gabriel is very much an outsider like Ru. They both have trouble making friends; Ru due to her intelligence, Gabriel because he has his own way of ‘being’, which includes wearing makeup on his eyelashes and nail polish on his fingers.

Ru and Gabriel, perhaps because they recognize the ‘uniqueness’ in each other, form a deep sibling-like bond. Being able to relate to someone else in their world that they can talk to is a first for each of them. 

Originally, Ru’s mother planned to come pick up Ru each weekend, but the first few weeks she comes up with excuse after excuse why she cannot come. Finally Ru gets Gabriel (who drives her to the college campus every day and picks her up in the afternoons after his own college classes) to drive her home to see her mom. She discovers her mom’s sister is there and that her mother is terminally ill. She had tried to keep this from Ru. Quite soon, Ru’s mother dies and Ru is expected to go live in Kentucky with her miserable aunt, her only remaining relative and one she has never gotten along with. 

The Trip of a Lifetime

Not able to bear the thought of life with her aunt without ever really having a normal life (wanting to go from being a smart person to just being a ‘person’), Ru tells Gabriel what she would like to do. Gabriel agrees to help her fulfil her ultimate dream. They set off from California and head for Canada. Ru’s bucket list includes seeing the aurora borealis and the Atlantic puffins in the wild. 

Summary

Atlantic Puffin (Source: Pixabay)

Ru & Gabriel know that they will be in trouble when caught, but their special friendship, combined with help in unexpected places, combine to help them both see what it feels like to really ‘live’ as a normal person as they take life one beautiful and spontaneous day at a time. 

This is a delightful feel-good, coming of age story about two young people you will really enjoy getting to know. 

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*Book Review of Life, Loss, and Puffins written by Wednesday Elf

 

Note: The author may receive a commission from purchases made using links found in this article. “As an Amazon Associate, Ebay (EPN), Esty (Awin), and/or Zazzle Affiliate, I (we) earn from qualifying purchases.”

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Just A Regular Boy Book Review

 

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

I recently selected a book from a display of New Fiction by an author I was not familiar with. I chose the book because the story summary on the flap described one of the characters as being a small boy, which appealed to me. It turned out to be a wonderful, and quite unique, story. 

Afterwards, reading about the author, I discovered why I liked her style so much. She is also the author of Pay It Forward, a book that has become a movie and enjoyed world-wide fame. I remember reading Pay it Forward several years ago. If you also read it and liked it, I think you would like her newest publication Just a Regular Boy.  Let me tell you about it here.

Just a Regular Boy Characters

There are two main characters in the story

REMY – A little boy who's mother dies and his father becomes convinced that the collapse of society is eminent. To that end, the father sells their house, buys several acres of very isolated land in northern Idaho, lays in a year's supply of food and other necessities, and takes his five-year-old son from all he has ever known in Pocatello, Idaho to live 'off the grid' in the woods. In effect, the father becomes a survivalist and tells Remy that this is their new life. 

Remy can't believe that everything he has known – TV, electricity, indoor plumbing, his best friend Lester – is now gone. Over time, Remy learns to fish to supplement their meager food supply while his dad does the hunting for food. If the fishing and hunting were not successful, you went hungry. A hard lesson for a small boy. The isolation is also very hard, even though his father tries to teach him that 'freedom' is most important when you can no longer trust civilization. 

Two or so years go by in this manner, and then the unthinkable happens: Remy's dad dies of a heart attack. Remy, not even eight-years-old yet, fends for himself until he realizes he is going to have to find some help. Loading some supplies into his dad's old truck, he tries to drive out, maybe hoping to find his friend again in Pocatello. But he is too little to both see out the windshield and reach the pedals. Thus he crashes the truck and breaks his leg. He manages to last until the leg heals, but now his supplies have run out. 

Desperate, Remy sets out on foot to find help, but is uncertain what he will find because he has been taught that civilization may now be a terrible thing. He is very fearful, but knows he will die if he doesn't do something. 

ANNE – A nurturing mother who has fostered several unwanted children and adopted two of them, now teenagers, learns that a near feral, silent, and terrified child has been found. 

She immediately takes him in, even though he has severe medical issues suffered while trying to walk to civilization and will need constant care for several months.  And even though he won't speak and they have no idea who he is or where he came from.  But, Anne knows in her heart he is not a lost cause as everyone else seems to think; just a challenging one. 

Summary

As the story continues, Remy slowly adapts to his new foster home, but doesn't trust the world. Anne is still dealing with her own childhood rejections, as are the two adopted teenagers.

Remy's journey into the real world begins as the whole family learns how to navigate the path. Because, all Remy really wanted was to be 'just a regular boy'. 

A special story of compassion and understanding I truly enjoyed. 

Just a Regular Boy by Catherine Ryan Hyde

Available Right Here

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*Just a Regular Boy Book Review written by Wednesday Elf

Note: The author may receive a commission from purchases made using links found in this article. “As an Amazon Associate, Ebay (EPN), Esty (Awin), and/or Zazzle Affiliate, I (we) earn from qualifying purchases.”

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My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry - Book Review

by Fredrik Backman

A Delightful and Most Charming Story

Elsa is seven-going-on-eight, and different.  Granny is seventy-seven years old, and nutty. They are best friends and love each other dearly.  Elsa admits only to herself that her granny is her ONLY friend, as her school chums think her strange and are mean to her. Elsa's strangeness is only in the fact that she is extremely smart and very grown-up for her age (constantly looking words up on Wikipedia!). Her world revolves around her grandmother, her parents, adventures in the fairy tales granny tells, and her admiration for superheros and Harry Potter.

Elsa's parents are divorced and she sees her dad every-other-weekend.  The rest of the time she lives with her mom, who is expecting a baby, and George on the top floor of a 4-story flat across the hall from her grandmother.  The rest of the apartment building is filled with a strange mixture of people we learn about as time goes on. 

The Land-of-Almost-Awake

 

For quite some years, Granny has been telling fairy tales to Elsa to help her go to sleep and get her to practice Granny's secret language.  The fairy tales take place in the "Land-of-Almost-Awake" and the "Kingdom of Miamas" where everybody is different and nobody needs to be normal. 

Later, Elsa's grandmother dies and leaves behind a series of letters apologizing to people she has wronged.  The letters are entrusted to Elsa to deliver, bringing about her greatest adventure ever.  The stories of the people who live in the apartment building, including a brave dog who is very much like the 'wurse' in the Kingdom of Miamas, are revealed to us one by one.  As each letter is delivered we learn the truth about fairy tales and kingdoms and a grandmother like no other.

My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry was written by Fredrik Backman, a native of Sweden who lives in Stockholm. This is only his second novel, but you get the feeling from this well-written story that he has been writing for a very long time. 


His first novel is A Man Called Ove, which became a #1 bestseller in Sweden. 

*Note: When Backman's second book was first published in England in 2014, it had the title: My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises. 

My Grandmother Asked Me To Tell You She's Sorry

 

My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She's Sorry is an absolutely charming story filled with humor and wisdom, and with a glimpse into a fairy tale world we all wish we could visit.  I took Elsa and her grandmother so much to heart that when I finished the book I wanted to immediately go back to page one and read it all over again. You'll laugh, you'll cry, and you will fall in love with these delightful characters. I highly recommend this book.

*Wednesday Elf

Note: The author may receive a commission from purchases made using links found in this article. “As an Amazon Associate, Ebay (EPN), Esty (Awin), and/or Zazzle Affiliate, I (we) earn from qualifying purchases.”

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