One good thing about not being able to walk is that you get a lot of reading and writing out of the way. (You also have a lot of time to watch your ankle slowly change colors. Right now mine is a lovely shade of blue with green highlights which extend up my leg. I'm not making this up.) I finished two books for Booklist and turned those reviews in and I finished my February column (Charles and Emma by Deborah Heiligmann is in that one and a fantastic biography. It's written for teens but anyone looking for some insight on Darwin that includes an extensive look at his family life will love this.) (Three of his children died - it's a heartbreaker.) I was also dishing about for some light reading and started two mysteries which means April will now be a mystery column as they are both shaping up to be great.

A Mystery for Thoreau by Kin Platt is exactly the sort of book that I think middle schools should use to introduce the great American poets/philosophers. It is a murder mystery starring Emerson and Thoreau with guest appearances by Bronson and Louisa May Alcott and references to Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Everyone acts as they should for the period and the story is solid but the best part is how human everyone is, especially Thoreau whose whole family wanders in and out of the plot. I finally understand just a bit of what he was trying to prove, something that completely eluded me in the 9th grade.

The other mystery is The Uninvited by Tim Wynne-Jones which is a first rate thriller for teens. You have college freshman Mimi who has made a most inappropriate romantic choice at school and now is fleeing to spend a year sorting things out at her mostly absent father's (he's been pretty much out of her life since she was a toddler) country house in Canada. A key plot point is that dear old Dad offered the place to her. Upon arrival Mimi discovers Jackson, also twenty-something, who is using the place for a year to work on his music...after obtaining permission from his forever absent father. (You can see where this is going, right?) Mimi and Jackson meet, sort things out, and over a few weeks realize they are being stalked by someone mostly harmless but who is escalating in stalkerish behavior. A parallel plot line introduces Cramer, a local kid with the mother from hell who is being manipulated in many sad ways. Tension goes up a notch with each chapter, Mimi and Jackson get more determined, Cramer's nutso mom gets more nutso and the whole time you want to save everyone, catch the baddies and well....sort it all out. I love Tim Wynne-Jones and he is at his best here; if the ending stays true to the rest it should be one of those all elusive teen titles: an actual thriller/mystery for high school students in which no superpowers/undead/eating disorders or depression is involved.

It's like a Christmas miracle.

For adult light reading I can highly recommend Don Hall's memoir Unpacking the Boxes. I was very interested to see how he came to be a poet and sustained his childhood love for the form all of his life. He explains all of this brilliantly from how he first started writing poems, how he attained no small amount of attention from girls for doing it well and how his parents supported him through all of his literary triumphs. The best bits are where he writes about the discussions with fellow students in college (Harvard and Oxford) where all manner of literature and literary greats were subject for big arguments and debate. It's all so cool and so not like my own experience and just so bloody smart. The smartness of his life pretty much blew me away. Poetry wonderfulness for all to enjoy. A must light read.

And then, there is The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff. This is one fabulous novel; loved it from start to finish. If you've ever been to Cooperstown, NY you are really going to find it appealing as it perfectly captures the oddness of one of our country's great writers being saluted in the same location as baseball. (Groff was from Cooperstown.) There is an excellent historic family mystery about who was who and who did what to whom and Groff does a nice job of integrating all sorts of different voices into the text via letters, diary entries and first person reminiscences and makes everyone come alive in a delicious way. The contemporary family mystery is compelling but the historical bits become more and more significant as the book progresses.

Oh, and there's the monster in the lake that is really cool too.

I LOVED this book. Even if your ankle is changing color by the minute and refusing to bend in the right way without a wrong sort of tightness/pain you will lose yourself in the story. Once I got going I couldn't put it down. Groff has a book of short stories out and I've added that to my future reads list; I'm totally looking forward to it.

Okay, look at this cover. Would you guess from seeing it that this book is written entirely from the POV of a teenage boy and is all about first love, sex, making the wrong choice about how to handle a big problem and making the right choice about how to fix it and more than anything else about how to be a man?

After the Moment by Garret Freymann-Weyr is a coming-of-age story for high school boys. And it has a yellow cover with a picture of a teenage girl. If this kind of book is being marketed to girls rather than boys then I think I can safely say that publishers have decided all teenage boys are clueless and not worthy of a single intelligent book. This is not a case of boys not reading, this is a case of an author writing a great book for boys and a publisher (hello Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) deciding not to sell it to them.

They might as well have pasted the words "GIRLY BOOK" across the cover.

I know there are boys out there who will read a book with a girl's picture on the cover (all 15 of them) but I just don't think there are enough of them to justify this. And the shame of it is that After the Moment is a really great book. Leigh is a smart protagonist, his concerns are valid, his family problems/issues are easily identifiable and his love for Maia, who is pretty spectacularly screwed up, is honest. The best part is what Leigh does when something rather bad happens to Maia (but happens in a most uncliched way). Leigh responds as maturely as you would expect and then as immaturely as you would expect. In other words, he's awesome and even when he's wrong he's still also, to a certain degree, right. And through it all he is always trying to figure out the best way to be a brother, son and boyfriend. It's a great book and a lot of teenage boys would identify with him and his worries. It's too bad they won't ever read it because the publisher didn't trust them enough to believe they would want to buy it.

If you know a teen boy of the Jess Mariano or Dean or Xander variety then buy the book (when it comes out in May), recover it in brown paper and put it into their hands. They'll appreciate the effort, trust me.

So Wednesday night, around 9PM, I was carrying some boxes of our Christmas village downstairs back to storage and missed a step (or two) and ended up flying down part of the stairs. I honestly don't know entirely what I did, only that I did it. In the five minutes it took for my husband to help me back upstairs my right ankle swelled up as if there was a baseball stored in under the skin. (It was the quickest and creepiest thing I've ever seen which is saying something after you've been through childbirth.) So off to the emergency room for x-rays and no it's not broken but viciously sprained and now I'm hopping around, eating advil and keeping it elevated every single second.

It's so bloody annoying and stupid that I still can't hardly believe it.

Here's hoping this is not 2009 saying hello, but rather 2008 giving me a swift kick as it leaves!