Grace J > Recent Status Updates

I would like to be a traditional woman like Ma and look my husband in the eye and say, "You needn't have worried about us, I have a gun and can protect our children and livestock from a pack of wolves."

Okay, something just happened: the singular friend our MC has just told the MC her huge plan she has been working on to go help a famous scientist, and the MC immediately asked her to hand over her money and everything so she could do it all instead because "you don't need this like I do."

105 pages in and I'm still waiting for something to happen besides "sad orphan child is mistreated by everyone".

Now that I am an elementary teacher, it cracks me up when authors are like "She had been taught all the letter sounds in the alphabet as a child so now she figured out how to read!!" But like. Blends are a thing. Silent letters are a thing. This child does not know how to read, at least nowhere near the level you're pretending she can 😭

Mr. Edwards!!

"...sometimes saying things that might be silly to your own mother is actually a perfectly reasonable thing to do."

"And they folded sheets together for a while, slapping the air out of them so the folds would stay crisp, so that this one small corner of the universe would be, at least in this one small way, orderly and rational."

"She sat up on her bed, feeling like someone doomed to having to be brave, which is not the same thing as actually feeling brave."

"It felt good to be finding the proper notes, to be shaping the air of the world into music, which is really what you do when you play the horn."

The 3rd graders are astounded by the fact that I choose to read anything that is not this book to them. They keep asking me to read this instead of Little House on the Prairie 😆

Jenny: Will has such nice manners!

Will, 5 seconds later: comments on Jenny's weight and how his friend will be even happier to see her now that she has lost weight

AHHHHHHHH

Some of the cover art for these books is so janky

This is...strange...

They said esthet chayil.

THEY SAID ESHET CHAYIL.

THEY SAID ESHET CHAYIL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now I want to start handing little girls books with brave main female characters and tell them that it contains a woman of valor / eshet chayil.

So today I got to hear about all of my students who have lost a dog and how it died 😢

"Sometimes, holding a family together is not a quiet kind of work. Sometimes, it's exactly the opposite."

13 pages in and I had to clarify that Jack is not pulling the wagon, the horses are.

I love 3rd graders.

Why is it that slow-paced middle grade novels set in the summer on the beach seem to speak to my soul?