Farmer's Boy Food

Over at The Hairpin, Jia Tolentino documented every meal that Almanzo eats in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Farmer Boy, one of my favorites from the series. It's just as I remember, with lots of hearty food, and yet again, I was left wanting pie. All the pie.

Chaos Walking Series: The Knife of Never Letting Go, The Ask and the Answer, Monsters of Men

Patrick Ness's dystopian series Chaos Walking is great and original. I devoured them quickly, in large chunks. That being said, only a couple weeks after reading this series, I am already forgetting most of the details, including the protagonists' names. Toby and. . . completely forgot the girl's name. Upon checking, it's Todd and Viola. Oh right, I was annoyed by the single reference to Twelfth Night, but nothing after that.
The basic plot is fascinating. In The Knife of Never Letting Go, we're introduced to Todd, who is a couple months away from the birthday on which he becomes a man. He lives in a village on a distant planet the consists entirely of men. When settlers reached this planet, they were attacked by the alien inhabitants, who we defeat, but not before infecting the human with the Noise germ, which causes the thoughts of all men and animals to be audible, and killed all the women. When Todd is forced to flee his village and encounters a girl settler in the swamps, he discovers that the entire narrative of his life has been a lie.
In The Ask and the Answer, the story concerns how Todd and Viola, the girl settler, survive the burgeoning war between Todd home village and other villages, including plotting by the women healers and new discrimination against women. The series completes with Monsters from Men, in which the warring humans incite a new war with the indigenous Spackle. These two books have a shifting point-of-view between Todd, Viola, and even a Spackle, showing how the actions of beings are misinterpreted by others.
This series has many good qualities, the least of which is that Ness appears to have thought out all three books in advance, instead of tacking the last one and a half on to drag out the series (I can't yet speak for the free prequel, The New World). Unfortunately, the characters are completely forgettable, with little personality. In addition, the way they never learn from their mistakes annoyed me to know end. I totally recommend this series, but advise you not the expect your world to be changed.

Every Day

I have been trying to get a different book of David Levithan's for a couple months at my library, but they only had Every Day, so I grabbed that one. I am thrilled that I did, because this book is phenomenal and so original!
Every Day is told from the perspective of A, a soul (mind/human spirit?) who does not own a body. Instead this person involuntarily switches bodies at midnight, waking up in a new body each morning. The body always belongs to someone the same general age and within about two hundred miles, and never is visited again, but otherwise there is no pattern or continuity. A attempts to live the day as the person would have done so, but without mining his or her brain for too much information. A basically lives by the campsite rule, leaving each person as A found it. Of course, since this is a book, A's situation can't remain the as is. A falls in love with the girlfriend of a boy whose body he or she's inhabiting, and begins to change his or her ways. A begins to influence the bodies, making these people do things they might not ordinarily do, just to see this girl.
While the romance is interesting, the concept just blew me away. It raised up so many questions for me that would be great to explore with students. What is identity, when you've got to live a new life every day? What is the moral choice, to live the life of another every day, live your own life, or to try to improve the life of the person you're inhabiting? Does A have the right to try to have a relationship with this girl?
In addition, A's descriptions of their earlier life were fascinating. As a mother, I ached for a small child, learning that they're the only one living as a transient being with no body. I'm keeping an eye out for Levithan's accompanying book, Six Earlier Days, which appears to only be available in digital form. I've read a few of Levithan's other books by now, and so far this is the best.