The Bookworm Mom Struggle is Real: Read to My Kids or Read to Myself?

I'm reading one of my favorite books with my younger kids and as we read the delicious description of the wonderfully horrible Trunchbull last night, I found myself in a bit of a dilemma.  I was genuinely enjoying reading to my kids but I had been looking forward to bedtime all night so I could sneak away and read MY new book .  I realized I had discovered a main bookworm mom problem - keep reading to the kids or read for myself.  What a good problem to have!  In the end I read until the kids' really had to get to bed then sequestered myself in the bathroom so no one would bother me and read until I had to get to bed.  It was a good night.

(Oh, and Career of Evil is excellent.  I'm about a quarter of the way finished and normally by now I've got a pretty good handle on the bad guy in books like this, but not this time.  Rowling has given four possibilities and right now each is as likely as the next.  I love it when I can't figure the whole mystery right out of the box!)

The Struggle is Real

Review: Robert Galbraith's The Silkworm

Buy from iTunes: http://goo.gl/v5lwU0
Buy from Amazon:  http://goo.gl/7pR6Dt

At first I was very happy with The Silkworm.  After all, it's beloved JK Rowling's latest and it picked right up where Cuckoo's Calling left off, both of which pleased me.  About a third of the way in I decided it was a little stilted.  I started to see some of the same flaws attributed to the much flawed author character (he's a pig of a person and his name is Quine - a thinly veiled analogy to a swine I thought.  It was a bit cheesy considering the book is about an author who writes a thinly veiled hit piece about his enemies.  But, Rowling knows how to tell a story and won me over. I finally plowed through the last hundred pages.  There weren't a lot of twists or turns, but there was a bit of Rowlings wonderful foreshadowing that you only realize was foreshadowing after you finish the book.  Also, for such a scrupulously planned and executed gory, gory murder, there's not a lot of suspense and the conclusion is almost thrown at you.  At times I found it a bit disjointed and in need of a good edit.  It's not as thoughtful as even Cuckoo's Calling much less Harry Potter or Casual Vacancy.  I was happy to see a tiny little step forward for Strike and his secretary, though Strike is an unlikeable character who seems to have a lot of inexplicably loyal friends.  I also liked the colorful characters and the way Strike's secretary, Robyn, was given a  more meaningful role.  So often characters like here are relegated to the sidelines as a useful but unimportant device or maybe comic relief.  Though flawed, The Silkworm a fun summer read and I look forward to the next "Robert Galbraith" book.  ;)