Baby Books

I'd love to do a review of some kids/baby books, but I've discovered that a two week old can't even look at my face, let alone a board book. So it'll have to wait. But, amusingly, a poster at the doctor's office tells me that chewing on books is a developmentally appropriate way of appreciating them, on the path to becoming a reader.

So, needless to say, busy. But I wanted to point out that The Other Side of the Island, by Allegra Goodman (of Intuition fame) is a really great YA book. It's about a rigorously controlled, totalitarian society in the future, after environmental devastation has limited the habitable world to a large handful of islands. A girl, Honor, moves with her parents to a new home. She tries to be good, to be everything she's supposed to be, but her parents are strange and rebellious, and she finds herself caught between them and what society teaches her is right.

A lot of what drives the book is world-building, but it's great world-building, with plenty of payoff in the plot. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it, and I'm afraid I may have to go out and read more of Allegra Goodman's work, though some of her earlier novels appear to be family dramas, of which I'm not generally a fan. Worth a try, I'm thinking.