Two of My Favorite (New!) Things

I saw a movie, recently, on Netflix that I fell in love with. "Dear Lemon Lima". Can you call a movie adorable? This movie is adorable. It has heart. It is charming and funny and poignant. You want to hug the filmmaker for making something so perfect right down to its quirky, catchy score and animated titles. The story revolves around Vanessa a girl living in Fairbanks, Alaska, who has been dumped by the love of her life, Philip, a boy from a wealthier background. He still wants to mentor her, though, and his family has helped get her into a private school through a scholarship based on her Eskimo-ish background (the father she never knew). All the actors involved in this are fresh and funny as are the characters they portray. I loved it so much I bought the DVD and downloaded the soundtrack from Amazon. Check it out on Netflix.


My other favorite something is the book "The Glass Demon" by Helen Grant. I loved Ms. Grant's first book: "The Vanishing of Katharina Linden" the story of a 10 year old German girl who sets out to solve the mystery of a missing neighborhood girl, the latest in a series of girls who've gone missing over the years.  It was a book I couldn't put down. Her latest, "The Glass Demon" is even better, if that's possible.
The Glass Demon 's protagonist is 17 year old Linn Fox who, together with her sister, fashionista step-mother and little brother are  whisked away to a run down castle in the woods in a rural part of Germany by their father,  a medieval arts professor with Indiana Jones aspirations and good looks, who is on the trail of a series of cursed stained-glass windows thought to have been destroyed 200 years ago but that could make his career if he could locate them.
Linn, the most fluent in German of her family, is finding that there may be something to that cursed glass legend after all, and it might be up to her to protect her family as the warnings keep piling up on their doorstep. This is a riveting modern gothic story that will keep you up reading till the last page.