With our actual mock Newbery discussion just around the corner, we now consider the merits of the only book left on our shortlist that we haven’t discussed in depth yet: DARK EMPEROR.  Joyce Sidman has kindly granted us permission to examine a couple of her poems here, and the one I have chosen is “Night-Spider’s [...]

Jonathan and I will be leading the Heavy Medal Mock Newbery this coming Sunday December 12 in Oakland, and can’t wait to share the results with you!  A couple dozen of us will break into two groups, and so there may be two sets of results.  (If you’ve read all the books and are thinking of [...]

PLOT, CHARACTER, and SETTING Since plot refers to the specific arrangement of the events in the story, plotting in fiction is synonymous with organization in nonfiction.  If you felt like the events of a story such as SIR CHARLIE are already predetermined, and therefore leave less room for a creative interpretation, then I would suggest [...]

Jonathan’s Beating the Bushes post made me actually turn back to my spring reading, and look at a couple of titles that never rose to the top for me, but which I thought had strong, unique writing and that I connected with. Neither have gotten talked about much for Newbery, but I bet that at [...]