Olivetti

 Olivetti

By Allie Millington

I picked this up yesterday while in the Woodstock Library, where Kes had curled up with a Big Nate book
and didn't show signs of stopping. I didn't want to interrupt a good reading session on a summer's day, saw the type writer on the cover of this one, along with a supportive quote from Tom Hanks, and decided to give it a try.

The story is told from two perspectives. Ernest is a 7th-grader going through some very challenging times. He barely speaks to anyone, including his boisterous family of five, and spends much of his time pouring over the Oxford English Dictionary on the roof of his San Francisco apartment. Olivetti is, well, a typewriter. The idea here is that typewriters are sentient beings, sworn to hide their intelligence from human users, who take on and hold the memories of everything that was written with them.

This becomes quite handy when, one day, the matriarch of the family, Beatrice, disappears. It is the family's worst nightmare, but hits Ernest particularly hard. It turns out his psychological challenges stem largely from a bout of cancer that Beatrice survived over the course of several years prior. He just doesn't trust that anyone else he connects with won't suffer a similar fate. Doing some detective work, Ernest discovers that his mother has pawned Olivetti for $126 at a pawn shop across the street from his apartment. He returns there one evening, finds the door unlocked, and goes to the typewriter. He writes a short sentence, thinking it is to his mother: I think it's my fault you ran away. But it isn't Beatrice who responds -- it is Olivetti.

Ernest is, of course, shocked. But Olivetti says he will help him find his mother, so he absconds with the typewriter and his search continues in, well, earnest. With the help of Olivetti, and the pawn shop owner's daughter, Quinn, he is successful in finding Beatrice, whose disappearance is an irrational, but perhaps understandable, reaction to news that her cancer is back. She ran rather than have to face the fact that she would be putting her family through another round of sickness.

I finished this book in a day. I can't remember the last time I did that! It was a nice read.

Murder at Gulls Nest

 Murder at Gulls Nest

By Jess Kidd

This was my first read of the summer; I finished it just before our departure for Costa Rica on July 3, which

is why I am just getting to it now. 

This was a lovely little murder mystery that felt perfect for the days just after school got out. It was set in the scenic, but becoming-run-down seaside town of Gull's Nest in England. The main character, whose name I forget, is a nun who has just given up her vows after three or four decades in cloister. The spark that set this move in motion, though it had been long simmering, was the disappearance of another newly-freed nun who had rented a room in Gull's Nest, faithfully corresponded with our accidental detective -- and then suddenly stopped. Such is the main character's loyalty to this friend, that she is convinced something must have happened. 

It did, of course, which becomes all-too-obvious when another murder happens at the same inn that the main character and her former friend take rooms. And then another. The former nun helps guide the investigation, which leads, improbably, to a wife whose groom, it turns out, was gay. The other murders were simply cover-ups for that one. 

Can't say this book was earth shattering, but it kept me turning the pages.