A Handful of Stars (Cynthia Lord)

You know those kid movies that have lines that just the adult get? Kids an parents both often rave about those movies.

This book is like that. It would be be great one to read with your favorite child.

Lily's mother died when she was two and now she lives with her grandparents. There is so much she doesn't know about her mother. Her friendship with Salma, a girl just there for th summer to work in the fields, gives me her experiences that give her new insights into her mother.

P. 110 I wonder sometimes, if time travel were real and I could magically go back and meet her when she was my age, would we like each other? I've always been scare that I'd like her, but she wouldn't like me back. She'd think I was boring.

Favorite quotes:

P. 113 I wish that book (Blueberries for Sal by Rob McCloskey) were real, except for the bear parts. I wish Mama could just turn around and realize she'd gone too far ahead without me. Then she'd turn around and find me.

Personal Growth
Being in the pageant and painting the bee houses is proving a point: you can be anything you want to be.
P. 151 what I love about art is that anything is possible. Bees can be pink. Trees can be purple it's like taking the world as it is and then swirling it around to show how it could be.

P. 121 Sometimes understanding comes in little drops, and other times it rushes in like the tide, rolling everything over as it comes.

Friendship:
P. 125 Hannah and I had been two peas in a pod for a long time, but she had left that pod first.
Now I had, too.

Personal growth: she discovers she is a flower, not a weed....a Tigerlilly....just like her mother named her.

She discovers she needs to "put the template away and just paint freely".

P. 170 That"s something we could learn from dogs, isn't it? They don't keep looking backward at what they've lost or asking, 'why me?' They just move on and find a new way to be happy again."

P. 170 Giving up is admitting you're beat and walking away. Letting go means you're setting something free. You're releasing something that's been keeping you stuck. That takes faith and more than a little courage.

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I love that Lilly's family is French Camadian.

P. 128 She wanted to show everyon that French Canadian girls were as good as anybody else.
"It's hard to imagine anyone felt that way about French Canadians."
Pepere nodded. "Time change. And it's good that they do. But it only happens if someone is brave enough to be first."