The Librarian Writer

It's summertime and the living is ... busy. Between work, family obligations, and you know, life ... I'll be taking the summer off from the blog. Expect me back sometime in August with more book reviews, writing tips, and library stuff. Have a great summer!

Title: Rapture Practice Author: Aaron Hartzler Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers Publication Date: April 9, 2013 ISBN-13: 978-0316094658 400 pp. ARC provided by publisher Aaron Hartzler is a good kid. He loves Jesus. He honors his mother and father. He doesn't go to movies or listen to rock music. He believes with all his heart that Jesus will return in the Second Coming and the faithful will fly up to heaven to meet Him in the Rapture. And then Aaron becomes a teenager. Rapture Practice is a memoir by Aaron Hartzler , the son of a preacher man, who learns that belief needs to come from yourself and not from your parents. I get Aaron Hartzler. I grew up in a Catholic family that switched to evangelical Christian when I was 12. My parents weren't as strict as Aaron's. We went to movies. We owned a television. But we prayed in restaurants before eating our meals. There was a big family meeting when my parents wanted to throw out my comic...

"I better start hoarding peanut butter." And so summer begins! Again, I haven't had much time to do much reading, but I have started Rapture Practice by Aaron Hartzler, and that has been so much fun. On the audiobook side, I listened to The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater. It's a fantastic audiobook and a good, creepy story about a girl who's the daughter of a psychic and a group of boys at a private school who are looking for the tomb of an ancient king. And it's one of the Sync audiobooks this summer, so you can listen to it for free! The other audiobook I listened to was The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker. It's an end-of-the-world story where the end isn't a bang, but a whimper. The year Julia turns 12, the Earth starts slowing on its axis. The days and nights become longer. Birds die off. Crops fail. Suicide cults form. But the story centers on Julia's perspective as a girl on the brink of adolescence, living in a suburb...