Three books in two days

Again, catching up, but a few weekends ago I had a bonus couple of days where I powered through some books, and that's pretty much what I did in between card games and walks in the woods. We LOVE weekends like that! Here are the three books I read


The Great Call of China - Cynthea Liu; Elephant Run, Roland Smith; True Love, the Sphinx and Other Unsolvable Riddles, Tyne O'Connell.


The Great Call of China is a Students Across the Seven Seas book, a series of books about students who travel overseas as part of a school exchange program. In this book the main character travels to China. Cece, the main character in this story was adopted from China when she was just two. In her program she has to write a paper about a cultural phenomenon, and she decides to write about China's one child policy and how bad it is, as she is sure that's why she was left as an orphan. But as is the case quite often in the effort to do good research, she finds out that things are not always as they seem on the surface. A quick easy read with a little romance thrown in.

Elephant Run is an OBOB book that's set in Burma during World War II. I didn't even know WHERE Burma was, let alone know anything about the country or their involvement in WWII, so I thought this was a really interesting story. I also really liked learning about elephants and how they were used in Burma. This was a very suspenseful story, and although it's not one of my top favorite Roland smith stories, it's a really good novel.


True Love, the Sphinx and Other Unsolvable Riddles This story is also based on a school trip, although I don't know which schools are going on trips that take cruises down the Nile River in Egypt...certainly not mine. This is a boy/girl romance story - or actually a kind of lack of romance story when said boys can't get the girls they want - an experience that's completely, shall we say, foreign to them. It has some funny moments in it, and students will probably like it more than I did. Fans of Gossip Girls and the like are sure to enjoy it. Better suited for high school than middle school.