Arts Night 2016

Kate performed in Arts Night this year. When she first mentioned it to me I told her that it was fine by me, but I wanted her to organize everything. So she did! She and her friend Brooke signed up for auditions, picked the song, practiced, got their outfits organized… and performed! Nice job, girls.

To Be Read: What Was Lost

As part of my New Year’s Resolutions, I am working through my To Be Read shelf and tracking the books I read in an effort to be more mindful about my reading and more critical in my thinking.

I had been looking forward to reading What Was Lost by Catherine O’Flynn, but I did not finish it. Good Reads describes it as:

The 1980s: Ten-year-old Kate Meaney – with her ‘Top Secret’ notebook and Mickey her toy monkey – is busy being a junior detective. She observes goings-on and follows ‘suspects’ at the newly opened Green Oaks shopping centre and in her street, where she is friends with the newsagent’s son, Adrian. But when this curious, independent-spirited young girl disappears, Adrian falls under suspicion and is hounded out of his home by the press.

Then, in 2004, Lisa is working as a deputy manager at Your Music, a cut-price record store. Every day, under the watchful eye of the CCTV, she tears her hair out at the behaviour of her customers and colleagues. But when she meets security guard Kurt, she becomes entranced by the little girl he keeps glimpsing on the centre’s CCTV. As their after-hours friendship intensifies, they investigate how these sightings might be connected to the unsettling history of Green Oaks.

I loved the depiction of Kate. She truly was an interesting, quirky character. An attaching, funny girl who has her own set of problems and too much to handle, so tries to control the uncontrollable by observing everything. Halfway through the book the author killed her off, and that broke one of my two book reading laws: no dead children and nothing about WWII. I was done.