Kathryn's Inbox

The Baby-Sitters Little Sister series gets spooky once again in a tale of Halloween, haunted mansions and families who just flat out don't believe a highly imaginative kid when she discovers that she is living with a ghost. The latest graphic novel adaption is Karen's Ghost, the twelfth novel in the original series and eleventh graphic novel in the series, opens with Halloween fast approaching and Karen becoming intrigued by the story of Ben Brewer, her reclusive great-grandfather whose biggest claim to fame was that he ate fried dandelions. Or, at least, that was his biggest claim to fame until one night when Karen hears some creaks and groans from the attic of the Brewer family mansion and becomes convinced that it is the ghost of Ben Brewer, who is haunting the attic and third floor. A trip to the attic with her stepsister Kristy leads Karen to discover a diary written by Ben Brewer's son Jeremy, who also believed that Ben Brewer haunts the house--and that every ten yea...

Can a dog be twins? That is the question which has catapulted the author's unnamed narrator to fame online. The novel begins as a satire of a life lived online, with the protagonists days spent scrolling through social media and the like, with much commentary on the ridiculousness of what appears online. Midway through, it takes a surprise turn. The narrator is pulled increasingly back into the real world as she learns that her sister is pregnant with a child that has a rare and severe disability. As she rushes to be by her sisters side, suddenly her life becomes more and more divided into two, with the absurdity of what she sees online, and the harsh and heartbreaking realities that are unfolding in front of her, things that are important in her life, but that no one in the outside world is talking about. This was an interesting read. After a while, the depictions of scrolling and online content became tiresome, while the truly interesting parts of the story was what was happening...

Art is so much more than a picture inside a frame. And nothing sums up that feeling more than My Friends the latest novel by Fredrick Backman. The novel opens with Louisa, a girl who was abandoned by her mother and who ran away from her foster home after the untimely death of her very best friend Fish. Seemingly a guerrilla artist, we meet Louisa as she attends an art auction with spray paint in her backpack, but slowly the author reveals something different--a sensitive young woman who just wants to look at a famous artwork titled The One of the Sea which she knows is a painting of so much more than the sea. After all, she can see the pier and the four young people depicted in the painting. Her fascination with the painting and lack of interest in certain rules does not bode well for the other people at the auction, which soon turns into a series of unexpected events, where she encounters the artist, and the story of the four teenagers on the pier--and the birth of the career of an a...