Book Review: The Christmas Magic by Lauren Thompson

I was very excited to win The Christmas Magic by Lauren Thompson through this giveaway at Buried with Children. It's very fitting that I post this review on the eve of Christmas Eve, as this book is about the magic that comes to Santa on Christmas Eve. It's a beautiful story with soft illustrations and a charming, unique vision of Santa Claus.

In this book, Santa lives in a small house in a snowy, wooded place. The reindeer roam in the land around his home. There are no elves to help Santa prepare for Christmas. Instead, he has a room in his home where all the toys are kept. And in this room is also a book with the names of all the children. As Christmas approaches, Santa starts to feel the magic coming and begins to get ready, shining his boots and packing his bag.

I just love this story and so do my kids, especially M, who is 2 1/2. She says her favorite part is when the magic comes. To me, Christmas is a very magical time, and this book really brings that feeling to the surface. I highly recommend The Christmas Magic as a story to read to your children year after year. I know I will.

This review was written based on a copy of The Christmas Magic that I won in a giveaway.

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Banned Books Week: Junie B. Jones by Barbara Park

This is the end of Banned Books Week and unfortunately, I haven't had a lot of time to write about banned books this year. But I did want to include at least one post about it, so today I wanted to share one of the book series that it seems most people are surprised to find on the list: Junie B. Jones by Barbara Park.

According to Wikipedia:
The Junie B. Jones series came in at #71 on the American Library Association's list of the Top 100 Banned or Challenged Books from 2000-2009. Reasons cited are poor social values taught by the books and Junie B. Jones not being considered a good role model due to her mouthiness and bad spelling/grammar. This is an interesting example of a banned book. Many times there are serious, controversial topics featured in books that are challenged. Things like homosexuality, drugs, vulgar language, etc. You can actually understand why people may not want their children to read those books, and why they may challenge their inclusion in school libra…

April Reading Review

Where exactly did April go? I swear it was just the middle of March and now it's May. Once again, I'm going to provide a quick review of each of the books I read last month. For the last two weeks of the month, I participated in the Spring Into Horror Readathon hosted by Michelle at Seasons of Reading. The only rule was that you had to read at least one book that was horror, thriller, etc. I read one book that qualified. With the exception of the first book in my list, the books I mention below were read during the readathon

My book club's May selection was Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. I had started reading this nonfiction book about the author's work representing men, women and children who were on death row in March but finished the book in April. This is an eye-opening story that everyone at my book club discussion agreed should be required reading for law schools and police officers and even legislators who are making the laws related to judgements. I learned to…

Getting back to blogging

It seems that blogging has dropped to the bottom of my list for the past year, and was pretty low for the year or two prior to that. I love to read, and am continuing to do so, but as my regular readers know I haven't been around much. My last blog post was almost a year ago!!

There are many things that have taken me away from blogging. Work has been much more challenging and interesting these past few years, but that means I really don't want to get back on the computer when I get home at night - or on the weekends.

Family life has been more busy with kids having multiple activities in the evenings, leaving little time to just hang out and write about the books that I read.

I will admit to a bit of a Facebook addiction, which means way too much time spent scrolling through my newsfeed instead of doing something more productive. This is one of the things I'm working on and hoping that this will free up some time for getting back to the blog.

Overall, life is good. Work is …

My Book Retreat

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