Peace, Love, and Baby Ducks

Lauren Myracle is a name that I have heard frequently in the blogosphere, but I had yet to read any of her books. Though I was more familiar with her titles, ttyl and ttfn, Peace, Love, and Baby Ducks was the only one available on audio CD at my university library. I was curious to see what her writing style was like.

I chose to listen to her book first out of the three that I picked up about a week ago. The voice of the novel instantly had me hooked. However, to my dismay, my car CD player is not the highest quality and the CDs would play to about mid CD and then it would jump a bunch of tracks. On the bright side, my laptop was able to play them just fine, but that meant that listening to it was delayed.

Before I began to commute, I never thought that I would listen to audio books. Now, I have started thinking that it is also perfect when I am doing house cleaning. That's just what I did today. Among loading the dishwasher, putting away dishes, loading the washer and dryer, folding and stacking, and scrubbing my bathroom counters, I was listening to Carly's story. In fact, even after I had cleaned what I was going to, I found myself looking around for something else to do so I could keep hearing the story.

In the book Carly is dealing with her little sister Anna growing up and entering her freshman year of high school. She wants to play the big sister role, taking care of her at school. The only glitch is she finds herself jealous of her sister, which makes for an interesting plot throughout the book as their relationship evolves in this new stage of their lives.

The girls are surrounded by privilege - they live in a rich neighborhood and go to a private school. However, Carly is sick of it all. She looks around and sees that she is living among a bunch of fake people. Carly's search for self and making sense of the various relationships in her life added different layers.

Based on this book, I would expect that I would love all of her books because of Carly's strong voice. I'm sure that I will be picking up more of them in the future.