Nicola the traitor?

I just finished re-reading Peter's Room while on dinner here at work, and since I can't drag my co-workers aside to recap the plot, I thought I'd post quickly (yes, I'm still on dinner!). I'd forgotten the horrible "oh-no-she-didn't" bit when everyone is playacting, and Patrick is terrible and betrays everyone - wants to kill Lawrie's character, for starters. Lawrie says, "I cannot believe it. Of [Nicola, her twin sister] I might, but not of you."
And that's when I have to rush to the computer and vent about how horrible a thing that is for Lawrie to say. Nicola has, after all, spent her Christmas vacation playacting when she was clearly bored and creeped out by it. She kept quiet when her pet died, because she's stoic that way. She didn't even rat out Patrick for almost riding his horse over her because he was so busy playacting.
So for Nicola to be called a traitor? Ugh. Shut up, Lawrie.

Farmer Boy

I've been re-reading Farmer Boy yesterday and today. I can only read it when I'm eating, though, which will slow down this re-read a bit. If you're curious about why I can only read it while I'm eating, then clearly you've never read it before. My SO says it's food porn, and he's not far wrong (though my mental Venn diagram puts porn of any kind far, far away from the Little House books). At one dinner, the first meal scene I found, Almanzo eats beans with salt pork in them, baked potato with gravy, ham, "velvety bread spread with sleek butter" (yeah, okay, the SO has a point), mashed turnips, stewed pumpkin, plum preserves and strawberry jam, grape jelly, pickles, and a large piece of pie.
Yeah, there's character development, and Almanzo has adventures - but really, the book could be called Farmer Boy: What Almanzo Ate, and How He Grew It, and that would be far more accurate.

among the tear-soaked

I've been reading some of Margaret Peterson Haddix's books lately. Despite the name of this blog post, I didn't read the Shadow Children series. Instead, I read Leaving Fishers, Double Identity, and Takeoffs and Landings. I liked Leaving Fishers, of course - it's about a girl who joins a cult, and cults are on that quirky list of topics (which also includes school stories, books about nuns, and books about mills) that I will nearly always enjoy. Double Identity was pretty good. I suspect that objectively speaking, Takeoffs and Landings wasn't great, but oh my goodness, it made me cry. It was told my a brother and sister in alternating chapters, and after the first 50 pages, I cried through all the brother's chapters. Thank heavens it was late at night, and no one was there to see me sob my way through this book.
After the Haddix-fest, I went for a re-read of Peter's Room. I've gotten a bit bogged down with it, though, so I picked up The Honour of the House (talking of school stories!) to read over lunch yesterday. Last night a friend was telling me that he wants to read the Little House books (if you're reading this, Mark: seriously, don't do it unless you read The Long Winter, and probably not even then), and that made me want to pull out Farmer Boy for a re-read. So that might be next.