January Brighter Winter Favorites

I filled in most of the challenges for January! Let me tell you about a few of them...

Over Christmas, our family booked an Airbnb near Ripley, Ohio to spend the weekend just being together and relaxing. One of the days we were there, we did a little sightseeing down along the Ohio river. We specifically stopped to see this landmark:

But then enjoyed reading more history about the houses along the river. I've always loved stories about the underground railroad -- inspired largely, I believe, by A Lantern In The Window being read for story time at school when I was in maybe third grade. (Incidentally, there's a great audio version of that book that I got through the library recently...)

Anyway. 

After seeing/reading lots of information about John Parker, and seeing there was a book about his life called His Promised Land, I promptly put it on hold at the library for my January reading!

I thoroughly enjoyed it. His Promised Land tells amazing stories of John Parker's own life as a slave, and then his incredible accounts of helping other slaves find freedom. It made the book doubly interesting to have just seen the house and area where many of the stories took place!

I would say the most intriguing book I read in January was a recommendation I had seen for a book written in 2021:

Blythe's stories about tutoring children in upper class New York are mind boggling. I think, perhaps, I found her stories extra fascinating because I had recently listened to my brother telling his experiences of teaching in the opposite public school spectrum. Both extremes are equally foreign to my small world! I got lost amongst some of her detailed percentages and statistics, but overall the book was highly interesting. 

The book that kept me enthralled and on the edge of my seat was this one:

I listened to the audio version and the reader was amazing. Told through alternating voices in present day and Nazi-occupied Poland, the author weaves a spellbinding, heartbreaking story that will leave you unsure of the ending until... well... the end. While the book is technically fiction, the story is inspired by the author's own family history, and the events of wartime Poland are highly plausible. The things those people went through are both horrifying and inspiring, all at the same time.

I'd say out of the ten books I read in January, those were my top three favorites. But maybe that's just because, apart from Mr Revere And I (a new to me middle grade book I picked off of a library shelf because it also had a yellow cover), they were the only first time reads out of my stack. 

The rest - plus the Gospel of Matthew and the audio version of The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn - I had all read before. 

And now, on this dreary evening while we wait for the rain to turn to ice/ snow, I can mark off the February challenge to "tell someone about a book you read for Brighter Winter".......

Cheerio!