MADreads

Rocky's family spends one week a year vacationing in a cottage on the Cape. Rocky, her husband, their two college-age or slightly older children, their son's girlfriend, and Rocky's elderly parents make the small, quaint cottage with a sensitive septic system their home away from home. There are not enough beds or chairs, and privacy is limited. There is plenty of swimming, relaxing on the beach, and enough penny candy to make lasting memories.

This is a touching story that starts with a day that is not like the others. Eleven-year-old Sophie Winslow is best friends with her neighbor, eighty-eight-year-old Sophie Gershowitz. Eleven-year-old Sophie is an unusual child - she's an old soul and hypochondriac. She loves using traditional library reference tools such as looking up medical ailments in the Merck Manual and memorizing quotes from Bartlett's Familiar Quotations.

An esteemed author who writes under the pen name "Scheherazade" decides to retire to the Dominican Republic and build a cemetery and sculpture garden to mark stories that she and others started to write or tell and didn't finish. To provide closure, the stories are "buried" and marked with fantastical sculptures. Those with open hearts and minds are allowed entry into the garden. Skeptics with closed minds must stay outside the gates. Once inside, guests to the cemetery are allowed to wander and listen and learn.

This is the first book in "The Norendy Tales" series by Kate DiCamillo. The Puppets of Spelhorst is a wonderful story filled with hope, adventure, wisdom, courage and love. Five puppets: a king, an owl, a boy, a girl, and a wolf are "in a story together" that starts with their purchase from a toy shop by an old, broken-hearted sea captain named Spelhorst.