Play It Again, SAHM

Play It Again, SAHM by Meredith Efken

Like creative approaches? Tired of the cut and dried themes? Get ready for a truly innovative way of writing. The author manages to tackle serious topics but with just enough light-hearted humor to keep you reading. I discovered it by accident at the library and wasn’t sure I would really like it. However, it deals realistically with issues moms deal with and in an entertaining way. It’s based on a friendship between 7 ladies who have never met before. A friendship forged in emails, no less.

They finally meet and like a blind date, all sorts of unknown things come to the surface. Personalities clash, belief systems collide, and attitudes surface. Yet, amazingly the friendships survive, strengthened by the disasters and trouble encountered together.

If you are a stay at home mom, you will quickly relate to this book and the different struggles they all face, both alone and together. It’s so realistic, that it’s scary. Chances are you will see yourself in one of these dynamic women.

Review by Kathy Stutzman Community Relations Assistant

Book Thief

It is a strange thing for a librarian to admit she doesn’t want to return a book, that she would like it to make a book be part of the “extremely overdue” collection. However strange the feeling, The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak, is such a book for me.

I’ve just finished reading it and am now trying to put into words how this book moved me.

It’s the story of Liesel Meminger who is the book thief. It follows her life as a foster child in Molching, Germany, a small working class town outside of Munich, from 1939 to 1943. She is a girl with a dead brother and mother, and no father. She moves in with Mama and Papa, her foster parents. She can’t read or write yet, but she can steal. She makes friends and enemies and helps her parents keep a secret that will change all their lives. She goes from a little girl to an almost women while the world around her deals with the insanity of war torn Nazi Germany.

The complex nature of this book surprised me. But the first surprise comes early in the book. Should I tell you? I will. The books narrator is Death. And he is an excellent narrator, at that. As he says often in the book, he is always surprised at how much humans can take and still survive and still want to live.

If you’d like to read a book about the power of the human spirit that is real, that doesn’t sugar coat the darkest aspects of human nature and that recognizes that ordinary people can turn the smallest glimpse of hope into “a yellow raining sun,” then you’ll like the book thief.

For now, I may have to buy a copy for myself, or possibly at least donate one to the library to replace the “extremely overdue” copy.

Review by Childrens Librarian Patricia Schroader