Cylin Busby

Jacob Tibbs is the runt of his litter. He watches as, one-by-one, sailors buy and bear away his brothers and sisters to be ship cats on other ships - leaving only him and his mother. The captain's daughter begs her father to save Jacob despite his small size and his white paws (that are glow-in-the-dark beacons to the ship rats). And it's a good thing the captain saves Jacob, because he has his mother's talent for predicting weather...and a huge storm is brewing.

I know I bragged about how show more awesome my last NetGalley book was, but this book was equally awesome for different reasons. This was just an adorable and fun book to read. I actually learned some interesting tidbits about ships from this book - Busby must have done a lot of research. I'm a cat person, and I loved the way Jacob always explained his actions with cat-like anthropomorphic reasoning (instead of just sounding like a human mind in a cat). I was surprised at how much action could be packed into a book this short. There was always something going on that made me want to read the next chapter. This book was so sweet and fun! I wish I had an appropriately-aged kid to read it to.

I highly recommend this book for middle grade readers starting with precocious third graders. While you're getting it for your child, read it yourself. You won't regret it. show less

This book was billed as a “father-daughter memoir,” and my daughter expressed interest in reading it. Thus, we decided to read it together. Multiple narrators give voice in this work, and authors are cycled in chapters between Cylin (the daughter) and John (the father).

This is no normal father-daughter relationship, however. The father John, a police officer in Massachusetts, was targeted in a shooting by a crime family. Over decades, he had his face surgically reconstructed after the show more bullet destroyed his jaw. His family lived under the constant fear of being further targeted. Obviously, this affected their family dynamics. This story seems ripe for a memoir.

Both my daughter and I enjoyed Cylin’s telling more than John’s telling. Cylin seems more focused on adjusting to life; John seems more purely angry at the perpetrators, an understandable reaction. John’s wife and two sons also had their lives upended, but Cylin seems to have the most perceptive insight.

I kept waiting for the metaphorical dam to break. I kept waiting for their lives to get back to “normal.” That seemed never to happen. These events changed their lives. They disappeared for a year, yes, but they also changed forever. The family did try to bring good from this horrific circumstance, and they deserve credit for that.

Although written in father-daughter pairings, this story is more about crime than it is about a parent-child relationship. The crime and its aftermath are profoundly interesting. It seems that each family member dealt with the crime in their own way. Eventually, they resumed with life. I’m not sure I’d say that it drew them closer together. The circumstance just made each of them more resilient as individuals. They each grew to have more inner strength. That’s the legacy of this horror, but in the “Where They Are Now” section, the family members seemed to have adapted to their future lives. Overall, it’s a great tragedy. show less

Full review on Reader's Dialogue: http://readersdialogue.blogspot.com/2012/12/blink-once.html

I love the tone of this story. West doesn't actually talk while he's in the Wilson center, but we get to know him fairly quickly by the way he tells the story, even without seeing him interact with Olivia. He tells the story with a sort of dry humor, but at the same time he's very serious and somber. It's an interesting mix.

The way the story moves from West's current experiences to his dreams and show more memories is really great. The tense shift from past to present in his dreams and memories makes his inner stories more immediate, which adds to the effect of the fog West is in while he's hospitalized. And the way they're interspersed at matching points, the way the end of each dream matches what's going on in real life, really made me wonder what the significance of his dreams are, where his memories are going to take him...

The mystery (mysteries, really) of what is really going on is really compelling. How does Olivia get away with everything she does, visiting West, stealing files from the nurses' station...? Who are these people West is dreaming about? What happened to the patient who was in his room before West, and is he connected to West or Olivia in any way?

It's really powerful when West recovers and finds out the truth about all this. Accepting the truth is hard for him, but I love how it affects him and how he manages to go one from there. Recovering and going back to normal life is hard enough, but it seems that experiencing this added bit of strangeness actually helps him get back on his feet mentally and emotionally, regardless of what everyone else thinks. show less

Absolutely compelling story told from two perspectives. Cylin was 9 when her father, a hard-nosed cop in a small Maine town was shot in the face at point blank range on his way to work. She recounts the terrible effect it had on her family (mother, 2 brothers and live-in older female cousin Kelly) when they all feared he would die from his wounds and then the horrible realisation when he lived that this was in fact a "hit" gone wrong; and that soon, the person who came after John might come show more after the rest of the family. The second perspective is that of John - how his anger and need for revenge kept him alive and then how he slowly saw what was happening to his family as they lived in fear and how he realised what he was feeling. Throughout the whole novel, you feel for John and Cylin and their hardship; but my greatest concern was for John's poor wife Polly who had to hold the entire family together, become the breadwinner and (because of her nurse's training) carry out the care of John while he was in hospital. A riveting read that is suitable for older readers due to the number of "f" words and the graphic descriptions of the violence that John suffered. Highly recommended. show less