The Sweetness of Salt by Cecilia Galante

Title: The Sweetness of Salt
Author: Cecilia Galante
Pages: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA Childrens

From bn.com:  Julia just graduated as her high school valedictorian, has a full ride to college in the fall and a coveted summer internship clerking for a federal judge. But when her older sister, Sophie, shows up at the graduation determined to reveal some long buried secrets, Julia's carefully constructed plans come to a halt. Instead of the summer she had painstakingly laid out, Julia follows Sophie back to Vermont, where Sophie is opening a bakery—and struggling with some secrets of her own. What follows is a summer of revelations—some heartwarming, some heartbreaking, and all slowly pointing Julia toward a new understanding of both herself and of the sister she never really knew.

What do you do when you realize you've been blindly following a path laid out for you by someone else?  Spurred on by a long buried family secret coming to light, Julia takes her estranged sister up on an offer to go visit her in Vermont, where she's renovating an old house into a bakery.  Once there, the sisters explore the pieces of the past that no one else will speak of and start making new roads for themselves.  I don't want to give anything else away because the anticipation of finding out the family secret was part of what made this book so great. 

Another big part of what I loved about this book was how genuinely likeable all the characters were- Julia, Sophie, Milo, Aiden, the Table of Knowledge...

Speaking of the Table of Knowledge, all I could think of when reading about them was the "Birds of a Feather Flock to Taylor" episode of Home Improvement.

 

This is totally who I imagined in my mind when I thought of the Table of Knowledge.

I couldn't find the exact scene that they made me think of but this at 2:57 is close enough.  I love small town stories with small town characters.  They always have the best personalities and are the most fun to watch the main characters interact with.

The scenes where Sophie was baking, especially when she makes the biscuits (mmm buttery biscuits!) had my mouth watering had me wanting to leave work immediately to start baking.

This story has a little bit of everything: family, friendship, romance, suspense, sorrow, and self-exploration.  It is a whole lot of story packed into 320 pages.  You would think this book would be overstuffed with everything in it, but I thought it was just perfect.

New cover alert! 

The paperback is coming out on May 22nd with a brand new cover!

2012 Challenges

I'm going to attempt 5 contemporaries for 2010, 2011, and 2012.

10 Sophomore YA books in 2012

I am super excited (and a little nervous!) to be attempting these challenges this year.  To learn more/sign up for the Completely Contemp Challenge go here.  For the Sophomore Reading Challenge go here.  Good luck everyone!

Blood Wounds by Susan Beth Pfeffer

Title: Blood Wounds
Author: Susan Beth Pfeffer
Pages: 248

Publisher: Harcourt Children’s Books

From bn.com:  Blood can both wound and heal …

Willa is lucky: She has a loving blended family that gets along. Not all families are so fortunate. But when a bloody crime takes place hundreds of miles away, it has an explosive effect on Willa’s peaceful life. The estranged father she hardly remembers has murdered his new wife and children, and is headed east toward Willa and her mother. Under police protection, Willa discovers that her mother has harbored secrets that are threatening to boil over. Has everything Willa believed about herself been a lie? But as Willa sets out to untangle the mysteries of her past, she also keeps her own secret—one that has the potential to tear apart all she holds dear.

Okay, so the above description pretty much covers the plot summary.  I definitely thought that this book was going to be more of a thriller than it turned out to be.  Pfeffer took great care in setting up the family dynamics in the beginning and really laid out how Willa felt about everyone.  We’re then dropped right into the action.  They find out her father killed his family and was on the run, probably towards them.  The family goes into hiding and the initial conflict is, surprisingly (to me at least), wrapped up pretty quickly.  Willa decides that she needs to go to her former hometown to go to pay her respects and go to her sisters funeral.  After that we really start to dig in to the relationships between everyone.  It was very interesting to see how the family dynamics shifted as the story went on.

I really liked how Willa’s memories came to the surface as she revisited the places of her past.  She spent so much of her life sweeping events and memories under the rug that once she started revisiting them, she couldn’t stop.  It changed her whole perspective on the people she had come to know as family and how they treated each other.

I’ve read one of Pfeffer’s other books (Life As We Knew It) and she has this way of putting normal people in these extraordinary circumstances and really showing you who they are and what they’re made of.  I want to say that I enjoyed this book, but I don’t really think that’s the right way to put it.  I’m glad I read it, but the situations in it don’t exactly make it a pleasurable read.