a hundred visions and revisions

Well, officially I'm not done until 7:00 a.m. tomorrow morning, but I'm tired and I've got a headache from hell, so I seriously doubt I'll be getting any more reading in before then. I've finished two more books since my last post, but I'm too tired and yucky feeling right now to do full reviews, so I'll just say a few words about each:

The Goose Girl, by Shannon Hale -

I really liked this one. I've always loved fairy tale retellings, ever since I read Robin McKinley's Beauty years ago, and this was a good one. Hale really creates a detailed and believable world, the characters are fun, and there's a nice little romance as well. It looks like there are two sequels following some of the minor characters from this book, so I'll have to check those out as well.






Hattie Big Sky, by Kirby Larson -

I don't know if it was just that this was the last book of the marathon I read and I was starting to wind down, or what, but I had some trouble getting into this one initially. Maybe because it's the only historical fiction of the bunch and so I had to switch gears a bit. One thing that I appreciated was that in the end, our plucky heroine trying to hold down a Montana claim all by herself does NOT succeed - pretty unusual in children's fiction, maybe, but very realistic, considering the odds against her. So, yeah. My impressions of the book as a whole are kind of foggy right now, I think, but I did end up liking it pretty well, although sometimes it felt a bit too messagey.




So that's that, then! Time to wrap things up. Here are the totals for my weekend reading experience:

Books read: 6
Pages read: 1856
Time spent reading: About 20 hours or so

I didn't get as much reading done as I would have liked, since other events came up, but overall it was a fun experience and I'm glad I did it. Right now, though, I just want to get rid of this headache and go to bed and sleep for twelve hours.