One of the things everyone tells you in high school that you completely forget until it’s ten years later: read now, because you’ll never have this much time again.

While I’d love to read a book a day, like writer Jeff Ryan over at Slate, it’s just not going to happen with an active toddler, especially since, unlike Mr. Ryan, I loathe books on tape. The voices are never quite right, the spoken word is painfully slow, and it’s terribly difficult to, say, speed-read through the first sixty-odd, interminably green pages of Fellowship of the Ring.

So I’m hoping to get thirty books under my belt this year, and I started with Carol Rifka Brunt’s Tell the Wolves I’m Home. I know, I know: I should read one of the hundred-plus books on my shelves that I haven’t read yet, but when I read the description of this debut novel, I just couldn’t resist. Plus I needed to get to twenty-five bucks on my Amazon order to get free shipping.

It was worth it. Lovely writing, an engaging and memorable narrator, and a real sense of time and place. Highly recommended.