happy Friday.

Gee, I already don't know if I'm going to meet my two resolutions for the year.  But I am definitely going to clean up and make consistent capitalization in book titles.  That, at least, is doable.  For everything else, all my plans keep falling through.

The memory weaver by Jane Kirkpatrick. Like A light in the wilderness, there is a good amount of incorporated historical detail.  Also like A light, there are storytelling flaws.  In this one, the pacing was off-- I seem to remember large chunks of time being glossed over.  There were also several events, which took place prior to the main part of the story, which were referred to throughout the book to add the backstory.  However, these were also poorly incorporated into the main story and were given out of order.

I also didn't find the main character particularly sympathetic.  Her back-story wasn't strongly a part of a her character, and her choices and the situation she created for herself didn't exactly draw me to her.   I was interested in the story as a fictionalized version of a regional historical person.

Alex + Ada, volumes 2 and 3, by Jonathan Luna and Sarah Vaughn.  This was so great!... until the last quarter of the last book.  That was so rushed.  There was material in there for a couple more books easily.  Why rush the story line?

The ex by Alafair Burke.  Hmm. Not my usual fare.  There were some things that stretched credibility, but those sections definitely moved the plot along.  This was far more suspenseful and kept me on my toes much better than most in-genre mysteries I've tried.  The writing style is surprisingly clunky for the number of books this author has published; maybe she's so good at keeping the reader in suspense that not many people complain about how poorly the dialogue is woven into the narration.  I'd recommend it.

Bob the alien discovers the Dewey Decimal System by Sandy Donovan; illustrated by Martin Haake.  I discovered this while trying to find 020s in the catalog, and knew it would either be hilarious or hilariously awful  I read this and I formed a pretty firm opinion. Then I gave it to my second-grader to see what he would think. He read it to me, and a book that I had thought stodgy and pedantic read differently in his voice.  Still stilted, still not natural dialogue, but not as bad as it seemed when I read it to myself.  That was very interesting experience to me. His opinion, which I'll share with you because it's more flattering than mine, is that the book has a lot of good information but it is a little bit silly because there's no real reason for an alien and the illustrations are a little too cartoony.

People's pops: 55 recipes for ice pops, shave ice, and boozy pops from Brooklyn's coolest pop shop by Nathalie Jordi, David Carrell, and Joel Horowitz. (641.863)  Gah, another number I already have covered.  Well, I read this to steal recipes, not primarily to fill a spot (although I'm getting pretty worried about the survey and my 2016 goal.  I need to get on that!).  Stuff sounds yummy and I now have a good handle on the theory of frozen cooking.