Old Whatshername

Polly Horavath is super funny.  I would love to meet this lady.  I loved that she is the reader of the audiobooks for the Bunny's.  Lord and Lady Bunny-- Almost Royalty!  is the second book in the Bunny series and I hope there are more.
I especially love the depiction of Old Whatshername.
Hilarious!  Loved it!  Love Polly Horvath!

Funny. Very funny.

I am a very big fan of Polly Horvath.  I love, love, love her sense of humor.  Mr. and Mrs. Bunny- Detectives Extraordinaire is a book that I have seen on the downloadable audiobooks, but I never checked out because I thought it was a picture book.  I was so excited when I clicked on it and learned that it is a book-book!  And what a book!  I loved this book!  I can't wait to read the next one.
The human parents in this book are hideous!  They are caricatures, of course.  And they are Portland types for sure.  But Mr. and Mrs. Bunny are wonderful, wonderful.  The audio is read by the author and she does a super, super job! Great, great book!

Trolling

Is trolling a thing anymore?  The Trolls by Polly Horvath is a pretty funny book.  It's not laugh-out-loud funny, bizarre, hilarious like The Pepins and Their Problems.  But man, it subtly tells a story that is important, interesting and amusing. 
Siblings Melissa, Amanda and Pee Wee need someone to stay with them when their parents go on vacation.  Their regular babysitter is sick and there is no one to take care of them but their father's sister from Vancouver Island,  Aunt Sally. 
Aunt Sally is very different!  And she brings with her, stories of the family from long ago. 
The ending really made the book for me. 

Love this Lady...

Polly Horvath is fantastic.  The only thing is, I wish she hammered out books faster!  But maybe then they wouldn't be as wonderful.  From Everything on a Waffle, to my first Horvath experience, Northward to the Moon, this lady writes wonder after wonder.  The Pepins and their Problems is so funny, so fantastic.  I laughed on every page.  Great, funny book for kids!

Back up North

Polly Horvath is a beautiful writer.  Her books are the kind that you fall right into and get lost in the world she has created.  I've loved everything I've read from her and I really enjoyed One Year in Coal Harbor.   This is a sequel to Everything on a Waffle and tells the further adventures of Primrose, her family, Burt and Evie, Uncle Jack and a new character, Ked, who is the new foster child of Burt and Evie.  What I like most of Horvath and Coal Harbor is that the book is written for middle-schoolers, but it doesn't talk down to them like so many middle school books do.  It also isn't pretentious at all.  It has that delicate balance of being wicked smart, but not being smart for smart's sake or preachy.  Great story.  Very funny in places.  Very touching.  

Hmmm....waffles....

This book made me hungry! Everything on a Waffle is filled with recipes for all kinds of things, not just waffles. And it is filled with lots of subtle jokes and great characters. It seems to me that Polly Horvath is just one of really talented writers who can take you away to another place and make it so you want to stay there. Even when the characters are having a tough time of it. In this case, our heroine, Primrose, is dealing with the fact that her parents were washed out to sea in a killer of a storm and everyone thinks they are dead.
Primrose doesn't though. While she is living with the uncle she keeps hope alive and believes that one day they will return.
The book has so many funny parts, even though you would think that would be hard to do, with missing parents and all. Primrose's uncle is subtly and not-so-subtly hounded by women because of his very elligible batcheolor status. This makes for some good laughs.
Set in a dying little fishing town in British Columbia, the probably isn't familiar to many, but the book makes you want to live there. I loved this book.
It won a Newbery Honor in 2002. The winner that year was A Single Shard, which I haven't read so I can't do another rant like I did here. But you can bet I'll be investigating!

The First Part Last

My One Hundred Adventures came before Northward to the Moon which I finished last week and loved. I liked Adventures but not as much as Northward, which probably means that if the author writes another, it will be even better than Northward and I'll read it because I was lucky enough to read the second book in the series first! Not that this book wasn't good...it just wasn't as good as the second. I am glad I read it though, because it makes Northward even more funny and enjoyable, now that I know Jane's backstory. A great book for tweens for sure and good for discussion. Some parents might be put off by the fact that Jane and her siblings all have different dads and none of them know who their dad is. But that does happen in real life. This book just has so much to offer and is so different from a lot of the stuff out there. I think it would also be a great mother-daughter discussion book. There's a lot of humor here, too, subtle and sophisticated.

Tween Time

Somtimes it is hard to find good books for tweens. Sometimes it is hard to define a tween even. I think they used to be called kids. But now kids age eight to twelve are tweens. I don't know anything about Lord of the Rings, but I read that Tolkien wrote that hobbits between that age of 20 and 32. Do I really care about this? Not really.
Northward to the Moon is a great book for tweens. Actually, it is a great book for anyone. I loved the cover and so I took it home. It sat around for awhile because the cover grabbed me in a different kind of way. It wasn't one of those covers shouting "READ ME READ ME READ ME!" , but it the faces of the girls looking out the back window of the station wagon on the empty road, with the big ole moon looming above, well they whispered, "Read me...read me...read me..." and so eventually, I did. And I am hip, hoppy happy that I did!
All of this reading sometimes gets me into a tizzy but this book was one of those slow down, enjoy the moments kind of book. I loved it. I am embarrassed to admit that I had never heard of Polly Horvath but I have heard of Everything on a Waffle, but I haven't read it. It won a Newbery. I will read it, even though I won.
The other thing that drew me into the book was the first page or so. We meet a step-dad who has just been fired from his position as a high school French teacher. The probable reason was the fact that he doesn't know to speak French.
As I read on I realized that this book is a sequel to My One Hundred Adventures which I just checked out of the library. My One has a HORRIBLE cover and I never would have picked it up so I am especially glad that I saw Northward first. Hooray for this book!
If it were a movie, I would call it a sleeper hit!