Clementine and the Family Meeting - Review and Giveaway

Thought for the day:

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” ~Kurt Vonnegut~

A gift for my writer friends:

 Here are a couple of links I think you will find valuable.

Interview with teens on what they want in YA lit: http://authoretc.blogspot.com/2012/11/be-not-afraid.html

Good article on what children should read: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/what-should-children-read/?ref=opinion

How some famous writers work at their craft: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/11/20/daily-routines-writers/

For my fabulous giveaway, the winner is Barbara Watson! (Cue the fife and drums!) Barbara, I will be sending you a copy of Lone Bean. Barbara is also a writer and offers editing services, and she’s very good at it. I speak from experience. You can read her blog and check out her editing services by clicking HERE.  I have another giveaway for today, so stay tuned.

Recently, I won a book in a drawing on Jennifer Rumberger’s blog. She is a children’s author and reviews middle-grade and picture books every week on her blog. Click HERE  to visit her blog. It’s worth your time. I won a copy of Clementine and the Family Meeting, a very cute early middle-grade book by Sara Pennypacker, and sat right down to read it when it arrived.

Clementine is nearly ten years old, but life isn’t easy right now. The “Family Meeting” sign is up at her house, and she is pretty sure the meeting is going to be about something she has done wrong. What she doesn’t know is that her life and her family is about to change big time. At the meeting, Clementine discovers that the big news is that she is not in trouble. The other big news is that their family is going to grow – her mother is pregnant, and Clementine and her little brother will have a new sibling. Clementine is not happy!

“No thanks to more people! Our family is four. There are four sides to a puzzle so we can all work on it at once. Hot dogs come in packages of eight, so we can each have two. At the playground, four is an even number for the seesaws. Four can all be together in the car. Four can be two and two sometimes, and nobody is lonely. Two kids and two grown-ups. Two boys and two girls. There are four sides to the kitchen table, so we each get one. Four is a perfect number of a family.”

The family problem isn’t the only one Clementine is facing. She is working on a science project and her rat has escaped. She has also lost her favorite hat, the one her grandmother had knitted for her that felt like her grandmother’s hands on her head. And to top it all off, her friend Heather, who has already turned ten, is suddenly into make-up and nail polish. Yuck!

Clementine’s family is just ordinary people who live in an apartment, and her dad is the super. This is unusual, I think, these days, to find a book with an intact family that isn’t ridiculously rich or abjectly poor. This book has also great characters, but especially Clementine and her father. She charms and dad is a kick. Clementine isn’t perfect – she makes poor decisions sometimes and great decisions other times. There’s something very old-fashioned about the make-up of the story, yet it is very contemporary. I think kids and those who love reading good kids books will love this story. It is also charmingly illustrated by Marla Frazee. This is one of several books in the Clementine series by Pennypacker, and I’m looking forward to reading more.

Check out other Marvelous Middle-Grade Monday blogs on Shannon Whitney Messenger's wonderful blog by clicking HERE.

You might win my gently-read copy of Clementine and the Family Meeting. I will put your name in my proverbial hat. Link this post on your blog or Facebook or Tweet about it, let me know, and your name will be entered twice.

On the book giveaway, this is for U.S. only. Sorry, but it would be too expensive for me to send books out of the country. But please leave a comment. I’d love to hear from you. Remember, if you have trouble leaving a comment, click on the title of the post and it will give you just this post with a comments section on the bottom. Also, if you haven’t signed up by email, please do. Just look in the upper right-hand corner of this page, pop your email address in, and you will receive an email each time I put up a new post. Your information will not be shared with anyone.