Halfway through this book I took a break to plant some things. This book is about planting things.

An Episode of Sparrows was good, but it also was confusing, hard to read, and didn't really have a plot.

There are some references to Lovejoy's mother dating men for money, though it is unclear whether this is a rumor or fact. At the very least, she uses her romantic life as an excuse to neglect Lovejoy.  It is implied that Lovejoy's mom might have died later on, but it is never discussed.  A dog is killed, though not on purpose. Some characters are very sickly and are often told outright that they won't live long. Whether this is actually the case is sometimes unclear.

Like I said, there is no clear/followable path here. I'll try my best, though. Actually, nope, I have no idea what I just read. Basically, you have a girl and a boy who build an English garden behind a church in the bombed-out ruins of a graveyard. Let's hope for no shallow graves... The adults around them are overly annoyed by this, so they keep it a secret.

I read Anne Frank's diary. It took me a year. I got about halfway through Great Expectations. I have listened to/read To Kill a Mockingbird more times than I can remember. I really enjoyed The Hound of the Baskervilles. This was the hardest book I have finished, though. It jumped. Not the book itself, but the writing. One paragraph (or sentence, honestly) could jump between times, places, and perspectives without expressing that it was doing so. I brought in my mom who was an English major. She found it hard to read as well. This book was beautifully written, though. If you are interested in the period or the setting, this would be a good book for you. Also, in all fairness, I had other things going on when I started reading this book. Still, it would have probably taken me a month to read this under ideal circumstances.

I don't regret reading this, but I wouldn't have read it if i knew what I was getting myself into.

A neighbor enjoyed this book so much that she left it on my doorstep, so I read it! Set in the 1950s in London, it’s the tale of children who find a purpose in creating a hidden garden. It’s the adults we judge though, as they react with different degrees of understanding or prejudice. First published in 1955, the story absorbed me but it’s not written in a style we use much anymore, so one interesting thing is to see how what counts as “good” or, more accurately, “publishable” can change.

I just finished rereading this one. It's not easy in the sense that the child at the center of the book, and a man she looks up to, are both failing. Lovejoy, whose mother is more often than not away on singing engagements, has fallen to the lot of the landlady and her husband. Mrs. Combie tries to look after Lovejoy, even though no one has asked her to. Her husband Vincent is trying to run a quality restaurant in a poor London neighborhood and it's not going well. Lovejoy, 11, is on her own. She attends school sometimes but isn't interested. She has no close friends. She suffers from knowing, subliminally, that her mother doesn't care for her. But she discovers gardening when someone drops a packet of seed on the sidewalk. She plants her first garden in the bombed out ruins of London, and later one of a gang of boys helps her find a safer place to garden. But the garden is demanding: they steal earth from a posh neighborhood's communal garden and have to haul water over the wall a jug at a time. I love this book because it is about the triumph of spirit and of dreams. It ends hopefully, which is something I need in this parlous times.