As I write this, Pippa is sleeping on the ottoman by the woodstove, so totally and completely asleep that her mouth is hanging open a bit and her whiskers are twitching.  Ah, to be a cat who lives in a house with a woodstove…

Which, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with the book The Capture by Kathryn Lasky.  As I mentioned in a past post, we discussed The Capture at last Tuesday’s Teen Book Group meeting, and I wasn’t too thrilled about having to read the book (I may have even used the word “procrastinating”).  But I did read the whole book before the book group meeting, and I really don’t have any problems with it.  It’s not my favorite genre – as Jennifer says, talking animal books get old pretty fast – but for its chosen genre of animal fantasy, it is fairly well done.  Lasky is a very competent writer, and I was pleased that there weren’t glaring grammatical errors as I’ve seen in some other recently read children’s books.  I appreciate that the pace of her prose is smooth and clean, though I would agree with one of the teens in the group that character development is minimal, which is a serious flaw of the book.

(Pippa just woke up, suddenly, with glazed and confused eyes and a tiny bit of relaxed drool on her bottom lip.  Ah, woodstoves.)

As for the book group’s discussion on Tuesday – there wasn’t much to be said.  I had fears of this when the group voted nearly unanimously to read this book for the January meeting, but I thought that perhaps my fears were misplaced.  They weren’t.  The teen book group is made up of seventh, eighth, and ninth graders, and The Capture has an intended (and actual) readership of third and fourth graders.  Meaning that the older kids really couldn’t find much to discuss in this book.  I had suspected that we’d have a hard time filling the one hour book group meeting, so I had the DVD player set up and played the first twenty minutes of the recently released movie Legends of the Guardians at the start of our meeting, hoping that the compare/contrast between movie and book would help to fill our allotted time.  It did, somewhat, but conversation was definitely waning long before the group meeting was over.  As we were cleaning up at the end, three of the girls and I talked together about how difficult it was to find anything to discuss in this book.  And we did all agree that it was just plain too young for them, in this book group context.

Next month’s book should be much more conducive to discussion, though: we’ll be reading Demons of the Ocean, first in the Vampirates series, by Justin Somper.  Vampire pirates?  How totally cool.  And I have absolute faith in this book choice for the group, since it was suggested by a group member who has consistently made excellent choices for us.  She’s got great taste, and we all trust her!!

And Pippa is wide awake now, basking contentedly in the bright morning sun that is now coming through the window – double bliss, sunshine and woodstove.