A Girl Called Problem By Katie Quirk Eerdmans Books for Young Readers $8.00 ISBN: 97800-8028-5404-9 Ages 9-12 On shelves now. Who says that mystery novels for kids all have to include the same tropes and settings? I tell you, half the time when a kid comes up to a reference desk asking for a mystery [...]
Summer of the Gypsy Moths By Sara Pennypacker Balzer & Bray (an imprint of Harper Collins) $15.99 ISBN: 978-0-06-196420-6 Ages 9-12 On shelves now Spoiler Alert – I am giving away every little detail about this book in this review. You have been warned. As a librarian I’m always on the lookout for good middle [...]
Starry River of the Sky By Grace Lin Little, Brown and Company $17.99 ISBN: 978-0-316-12595-6 Ages 9-12 On shelves October 2, 2012 I remember when Grace Lin first started writing chapter books for kids. She’d been doing picture books (mostly for others) for years and when at last she started creating small semi-fictionalized memoirs based [...]
The Mighty Miss Malone By Christopher Paul Curtis Wendy Lamb Books $15.99 ISBN: 978-0-385-73491-2 Ages 9-12 On shelves now. *Spoilers Included!* Fact: It is a truth universally acknowledged that a new book from Christopher Paul Curtis is a great good thing. Fact: There is a new book out there. It is by Christopher Paul Curtis. [...]
Ghetto Cowboy By G. Neri Illustrated by Jesse Joshua Watson Candlewick Press $15.99 ISBN: 978-0-7636-4922-7 Ages 10 and up. On shelves now. Fun Fact: Parents these days speak in code. As a New York children’s librarian I had to learn this the hard way. Let’s say they want a folktale about a girl outwitting a [...]
Hidden By Helen Frost Frances Foster Books (Farrar Straus & Giroux) $16.99 ISBN: 978-0-374-38221-6 Ages 10 and up On shelves now. If poems had been introduced to me as a child as puzzles, maybe I would have taken to them a little more. A poem is a kind of puzzle, isn’t it? Depending on the [...]
Words in the Dust By Trend Reedy Arthur A. Levine Books (an imprint of Scholastic) $17.99 ISBN: 978-0-545-26125-8 Ages 11 and up. On shelves now. A children’s book, written by a soldier about an Afghani girl, set in the recent past. That’s a toughie. There are a lot of easier books out there to review [...]
Eliza’s Freedom Road: An Underground Railroad Diary By Jerdine Nolen A Paula Wiseman Book (Simon & Schuster) $14.99 ISBN: 978-1-4169-5814-7 Ages 7-11 On shelves now Name me all the films you can that involve slaves escaping via The Underground Railroad. No? Okay then, I’ll make it easy on you. Name me a single film, just [...]
This is a new series in which I determine big time gaps in children’s literature. Themes and issues and elements that should be written about and yet somehow haven’t. This week, a patron contacted me with the following request: Name me one, just one, middle grade chapter book (5th-7th grade) that’s about African-American kids on the [...]
Where the Streets Had a Name By Randa Abdel-Fattah Scholastic $17.99 ISBN: 978-0-545-17292-9 Ages 9 and up On shelves November 1, 2010 When I was a child I had a very vague sense of global conflicts in other countries. Because of my Bloom County comics I knew a bit about apartheid in South Africa. Later [...]
Bamboo People By Mitali Perkins Charlesbridge $16.95 ISBN: 978-1-58089-328-2 Ages 10-14 On shelves now. There is a perception that many children acquire over the course of their education that learning and fun are mutually exclusive ideas. If a book has so much as a smidgen of a fact in it then it’s no good to [...]
Healing Water: A Hawaiian Story By Joyce Moyer Hostetter Calkins Creek (an imprint of Boyd Mills Press) $17.95 ISBN: 978-1-59078-514-0 Ages 10-14 On shelves now Leprosy just isn’t the hot topic of children’s historical fiction it could be. I mean, walk up to a kid and ask them what their primary associations with leprosy (today [...]
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