Yahoo! We got some rain last night. It poured buckets out on the East End yesterday while I was at Montessori but it didn't look like we had gotten much on the South side. So I hurried up and got my shower in last night before someone else used up the rain water in the cistern! And then it rained some more last night so I even washed a sink full of dishes today while I talked to Mary on the phone. I loved hearing the sound of the thunder last night. It reminded me of when I was a kid in Upper Michigan and we would get huge thunder and lightening storms. My Gramma said it was Thor making new shoes for his horses using his hammer and anvil. I still can close my eyes and see Thor in all his bare-chested glory, striking the anvil! :-) Oh wait a minute - that might have been a cover from one of those bodice ripper romances I read back in my 20s. :-) Either way, the image makes me smile.

While packing book to ship to North Carolina I came across the paperback reprint of Avi's City of Light, City of Dark - a graphic novel that was initially published back in 1993 and made PW 1993 Best Book of the Year list. Not sure I would go so far as to call this a best book, perhaps not even a better book, but a good book for upper elementary, early MS, yes. It took me awhile to even pick it up to read it as I find the cover very unattractive - it looks like the end of a bullet on the cover rather than the subway token it is supposed to be. This is not Avi at his best, but I give him credit for experimenting with this format back in the early 90s. The b/w illustrations, heavy on the black, by Brian Floca are not appealing to me, but then again I am a big fan of the Pini Elfquest series, which have beautiful elaborate illustrations. The story line of a young woman having to find a magical subway token every 6 months to keep the Kurbs, who supposedly are only allowing the humans to use their island, from deep freezing NYC is a stretch, but I do think boys who are not big readers will enjoy this book. This is certainly the testament of a mother in the reader's reviews on Amazon. I am more in agreement with the Kirkus review, but will certainly share this book with graphic novel readers. Also share this with the bilingual kids as one of the characters is Hispanic and the dialog boxes are in both Spanish and English.

That is it for today. I am going to take the laptop and go sit outside and work for a bit so I can catch some of the ocean breezes that cooled off our muggy weather a bit.