This is a Mother-Talk book tour.

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Since the moment I picked up The Middle Place by Kelly Corrigan, I’ve secretly wanted to be a Corrigan. Or, at the very least, be friends with the Corrigans.

I’m not usually a memoir fan, but Kelly has taken what could easily have just been a book about a typical woman who survives breast cancer while her father fights his own cancer (sadly, a common enough occurrence today) and made it into a completely absorbing and often heart wrenching story of the middle place. The place so many of us can relate to. “The Middle Place is about calling home. Instinctively. Even when all the paperwork — a marriage license, a notarized deed, two birth certificates, and seven years of tax returns — clearly indicates you’re an adult, but all the same, there you are, clutching the phone and thanking God that you’re still somebody’s daughter.”

I honestly can’t put my finger on what I loved most about this book. Maybe it was that I can relate? Not to having breast cancer, but to having a father with advanced invasive bladder cancer and certainly to thanking God that I’m still somebody’s daughter. Maybe it was the fact that it’s so easy to read? Maybe it’s her familiar style of writing; like talking to an old friend? I don’t know, but I can tell you that it’s a great book and you’ll love it. You’ll particularly love it if you’re a daughter and also if you have a parent with cancer, but you’ll probably love it even if you’re neither of those. I just can’t tell you why.

Kelly Corrigan is also the founder of the great website CircusOfCancer.org - a how-to site to help you step up when your friend is diagnosed with breast cancer.

The Daring Book For Girls is the one we’ve all been waiting for! It was shortly after my review of The Dangerous Book For Boys that I heard of the impending arrival of this one and I’ve been waiting ever since. I was SO excited to tear into the package when it arrived (so much so that the messy innards of the strange packing envelope had to be vacuumed from my floor) and the book did not disappoint right from the first page.

The Daring Book For Girls brought back memories of playing with my cousins at my Grandma’s farm and of our huge childhood backyard (and the wicked treehouse my dad built for me). It’s the kind of book you’ll want to read from cover to cover just because and then keep it to pull out anytime you’re looking for a little bit of adventure. It’s great if you have a daughter or a niece to share it with, but it’s certainly not necessary. You can have a blast with this book alone and parts of it can be enjoyed with your sons as well (just as the Dangerous book can certainly be enjoyed by many girls). I do love, though, that much of it is really geared to girls - unless your son wants to tie a sari, and more power to him. It’s a classic, and one that should never ever be freecycled or given away. I’m saving my copy along with a threatening note stating that it had better be kept in the family for my great great grandchildren to enjoy.

This book has you covered no matter what your interests…as long as you’re not limited to playing with dolls - barf - this is for the daring among us. From playing four square and other schoolyard games to making cloth covered books and tying a sari or bandana, from climbing trees to building a campfire to tying your hair up with a pencil (I’ve always wanted to do that and now I can!), you can (and I have and will continue to) have SO MUCH FUN with this amazing book.

Check out the book’s website here, watch the video and buy it here!

I got lucky enough to get my hands on a giveaway copy for one of you! To enter, email theopinionatedparent@gmail.com with DARING in the subject line. To qualify, tell me one thing from the table of contents that you’re dying to read (click on the book cover from here) or share a daring adventure from your own childhood. Come on - entertain me! Contest closes at midnight MST on 11/26/07. One winner will be chosen at random. Congratulations Lynn!

I’m the first to admit that I don’t use cookbooks. I copy recipes that I like at restaurants, see on tv or taste elsewhere by making them up myself and they’re often better than the original. Not because I’m a great cook but because they contain things that I like! If I really need a recipe, I get it from the internet. I use recipe books so rarely that I recently gave away 30 when I moved because I couldn’t foresee using one any time soon. However, I was an easy convert when I received Deceptively Delicious by Jessica Seinfeld. (Yes, she’s married to Jerry.)

It’s a book full of simple ways to sneak vegetables into your kids’ food. Like pureed cauliflower in scrambled eggs. Who’da thunk? I consider myself very creative in the kitchen and I’d never have thought of that one. My son is a fruit & veggie kid, but I know there will come a day when I need to perform these sneaky maneuvers so I’m grateful to have some great ideas from this book to add to my bag of tricks. The instructions on how to puree food are, well, duh…but I can see how someone who has never really cooked would benefit from that. I did love the idea of making a bunch and freezing them to throw into recipes when you need something quickly. That would also be a great way to use cases of fresh produce that’s on sale before it goes bad.

I tried a couple of the recipes and plan to try many more. My faves so far are the french toast (with pumpkin puree in the eggs), scrambled eggs (with pureed cauliflower that you totally can’t taste) and pita pizzas (which we make all the time but now will be spreading spinach puree on) and macaroni and cheese (with butternut squash). The four recipes I had time to try all took just a few minutes and hardly any work. And yes - they were delicious! When I have some more time, I can hardly wait to try the coffee cake and some of the muffins!

I can tell I’m going to love this book!

Though these books are CRAZY in demand, we were lucky enough to get an extra copy to give to a lucky T.O.P. reader. To enter, email theopinionatedparent@gmail.com by midnight tonight (10/19) with Deceptively Delicious in the subject line and include the answer to one or more of the following questions: What tricks have you used to get your kids to eat their veggies? How have you encouraged your kids to eat healthy? What are some of your nutrition goals as a family? Congratulations Alana!

(Here’s a contest from Harper Collins where you can also enter to win your own copy!)

It’s another Mother-Talk book tour and we’re proud to announce that T.O.P is one of the few Mother-Talk Star bloggers! (The highest rated bloggers who have first choice of the great books that Mother-Talk represents.) Since reading is one of my favourite things to do I was very excited to hear that. So is teaching reading, which made this tour a perfect fit for me!

This time, it’s a review of the first set of BOB Books, a box set of phonetic readers. Our review set hasn’t arrived yet but luckily I had a friend with the box I was to review and she lent them to me. These are some great books which made their way very quickly into my classroom (I’m an early literacy teacher in “real life”) and will definitely come home again (my own set, of course, when it finally arrives!) when my son’s a little older. Hopefully they’ll be joined by the rest of the box sets too!

There’s so much to love about BOB Books (fun stuff notwithstanding). They’re a lot like the books that I learned with that are now out of print and very hard to find.

When kids are first learning to read, they need books that focus on initial consonant sounds and one or two vowels at a time (short or long, not both, which is why Dick and Jane suck when they’re together)with large print and little illustration to distract from the words. BOB Books does all of this perfectly, and also integrates numbers from 1-10 in their beginner set (but not the number words, thank goodness) which is a nice touch.

As the sets progress, they move through more complex letter combinations with sight words and mixed short vowels, word families (words that all end in the same sound; the -at family would include cat, sat, that, fat, bat etc), compound words and long vowels.

These are exactly the kind of books I will be recommending to the parents of my kindergarten students when they inevitably ask me what they should buy for home reading books to help their child get started on decoding and independent reading.

I didn’t notice at first but these books are from Scholastic and that’s a huge bonus! That’s the company that your child’s teacher will likely send home book order forms from and the company that offers the in-school book fairs. They’re who I buy 99% of my books from and they have great products, great quality and great prices.