All posts by Pamela

About Pamela

Pamela is an Information Assistant at Vaughan Public Libraries. She loves reading all kinds of books including fantasy, historical fiction, mysteries and non-fiction.  |  Meet the team

Pamela’s Picks: Cheaper By The Dozen by Frank Bunker Gilbreth Jr And Ernestine Gilbreth Carey

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One of my all time favorite books is Cheaper By The Dozen. It’s a fictionalized version of the real life of the Gilbreth family of twelve children in the 1920s, whose father was an engineer and a pioneer in the field of motion study and whose mother was also an engineer and a psychologist. Father Gilbreth used to apply his motion study principles to his large family and this book includes funny stories about how the children skipped grades through school, learned Morse code and French and got their tonsils removed en masse. After doing some research I found out that the second oldest child, Mary, died at age six, which meant that the dozen children were never contemporaries. But the family included her in spirit so that made up the dozen in the title. The version on hoopla that is in our catalogue includes photos of the family and many other photos are on the Internet for those who are interested in what the real family looked like.

Pamela’s Picks: The Spring Girls by Anna Todd

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Have you ever wondered what the four March sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, from the book Little Women by Louisa May Alcott would be like if they were transported to another time and place. The Spring Girls by Anna Todd is one author’s answer to that. The four Spring sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy live on an army base in the United States in the twenty-first century. Like the first part of Little Women, this book chronicles a year in the life of the sisters, relating their changes in growing up, their relationships with each other and their parents, as well as friends and crushes. The characters are true to the original characters, Jo aspires to be an author, Meg wants popularity and to get married, Beth is a homebody and Amy is a self centered bratty little girl. I must admit that some swearing and few sexual situations felt a little out of character to me but they would be appropriate with the sisters lives in this modern time and place. Even so I enjoyed the book and so I’m recommended it here. If you read it do let me know what you think.

Pamela’s Picks: One Of Us Is Lying by Karen M McManus

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Even though One Of Us Is Lying is marketed to young adults, I’m an adult and I loved it. The author describes it as ‘the breakfast club with murder.’ Five high school teens get detention –  Bronwyn the brain, Addy the beauty, Nate the criminal, Cooper the athlete and Simon the outcast. Before detention ends Simon is dead. He had made lots of enemies by publishing students’ personal secrets on his app and was about to publish secrets about the four others in detention. This means that when foul play is suspected they are all suspects in his murder. So, who killed Simon and why?

This is one of the few books I read recently that I can call a page turner and I stayed up until around 4:00am one night to finish it. The characters are well drawn and individualistic and I was hoping that none of them was the killer. The ending was a big surprise and something that I hadn’t been expecting at all. If you’re looking for an enthralling read try this book.