happy new year!

Happy New Year!

Or happy arbitrary day to start a new year?  (Guess I'm starting the year a bit of a cynic?)

I haven't gotten much sewing done in the last week, but that's because someone had to take care of boarding animals where I work and guess who got that job?  The new girl!  It's okay, though, I got paid for it.  It just meant less time to do fun stuff at home.  Not that I have many projects brewing right now.

I did get the remainder of the cat toy parts sewn together and turned!

I've started stuffing and closing them, but this is going to be a LONG process.  There are a lot in there - it looks like not so much, but it is.  I'm trying to get through a batch every day that I don't work, but I've had less than helpful help...

I have two of these boxes and they each hold 28 toys upright, half-stuffed.  Lily decided they would instead hold one cat.

And when finally ousted from the box, she claimed the giant bag of stuffing as a cat cave.  She looks worried in both photos, probably because I was trying to get her attention so you could see her face instead of her behind while she was squirreling around inside of things.

I did manage to finish one last book before the new year - I read 300 pages on the 31st just to get it done!

I enjoyed this book, but maybe not as much as some of her previous novels.  Maybe it was because I had high expectations (she is one of my favorite authors), or maybe because the suspense of what would happen to the main character through the whole middle section?

Demon Copperhead is the nickname of the main character, a red-headed spitfire of a child born to an addict and he ends up in foster care.  In true Kingsolver fashion, she has chosen a topic to expose in her writing, and this time it is the foster care system and how it fails so many children.  You don't really realize what she is doing, as it is woven into the story so nicely, which is nice.  She also tackles the pervasive idea that country folks are dumb and how that came to be.  I had no idea, but as with her other books, it makes you think about how you just accept things.

Demon has a number of ups and downs in his life experiences, but I found myself tense when things were good, waiting for the bad, and tense when things were bad, waiting for it to get worse or him to hit bottom and come back up.  That made the middle part of the book seem to take forever to read.

And the first finish for 2025!

I knew nothing of the Dunkirk story - vaguely aware that it was part of a war, but nothing more.  (Yes, there is a whole movie about it, but I'm no fan of that kind of entertainment!)  So I thought this book, though fiction, since it is based on actual events, would be a good one to learn about that history.

There are two stories running through the whole book - there are family ties that connect the stories, but they never do cross into each other, as I expected.  Sorry if that's a spoiler!

The first story is about a yacht, the Maggie Bright.  A young woman inherits it from a man she didn't know and she wants to learn to sail it and go around the world.  In short order, a man shows up on the boat,  looking for documents hidden on the boat that will change the course of the war, but ends up in prison, the documents unfound.  Soon after, another man shows up, also involved in the document saga.  Scotland Yard gets involved as well and the search continues.

The second story is of a soldier in the war, trying to make his way to Dunkirk, as that is where he was told to take a wounded captain.  He finds other soldiers along the way - cut off from their unit - and a group of seven make their way to the town.  They provide a first-person perspective of the events of the evacuation.

As you probably suspect, if you know anything about the Dunkirk story, the Maggie Bright joins the fleet of civilian boats that aid the evacuation, though not with the crew you'd expect.

I won't spoil any more, but I enjoyed the book.

Oh yes, and one of my apps has it categorized as romance.  There is a TEENSY bit of budding romance, but nowhere near enough to categorize it as that.  I hate when they do that - it makes it look like I read a lot of romance novels, but I do not!  Sometimes there is a romantic interest in the story, but I don't gravitate towards books where that IS the story.

The year-end wrap-ups are available, so it's easy to show this graphically!

(The Storygraph is awesome for these stats - year-round or year-end wrap-ups!)

A bigger picture - the whole year!

(click on it to make it bigger if you're really curious!)

I read 67 books and I love this graphical representation of how it is spread out by month.

There is also a whole-year wrap-up graphic that is intended to share on places like Instagram - I shared it there, but I'll share it here also!

As the year went on, I found another Instagram user that, if you set either your Goodreads or Storygraph app to public, can create a similar graphic and it's a little different, but still fun.

You can get yours here!

Okay, enough being a nerd.

Time to go get some sewing done.  Or something.

Happy quilting!

Katie