As indicated by the subtitle, Sara O’Leary’s Owls Are Good at Keeping Secrets isn’t your typical abecedary. While children will recognize many of the animals introducing letters of the alphabet (alligators for A, foxes for F, giraffes for G), others such as iguanas and meerkats may be exciting and new. Through his illustrations, Jacob Grant expertly highlights another […]
Originally planned for 2017, Susan Kuklin’s We Are Here to Stay: Voices of Undocumented Young Adults faced an almost two-year delay due to the attempted repeal of DACA and political unrest in a more divided America. Portraits of and information about the interviewees had to be removed to protect the identities of the participants, but even with those […]
For this Book Trailer Thursday, here’s something a little bit different. The 90-Second Newbery Film Festival is an annual video contest in which kid filmmakers create short movies that tell the entire stories of Newbery-winning books in about 90 seconds—often with a weird twist. For instance, here’s a 90-Second Newbery of Kate DiCamillo’s 2004 Newbery […]
What if you took a journey to a fantasy world such as Narnia, but then had to come back to the real world where nothing has changed? In Laura E. Weymouth’s The Light between Worlds, Jamie, Philippa, and Evelyn Hapwell have spent six years in the kingdom of the Woodlands before coming home to 1944 […]
Attucks! Oscar Robertson and the Basketball Team That Awakened a City by Phillip Hoose, will tug at your heartstrings in all the right ways. Written for high-school readers, this is an inspiring and compelling account of Indianapolis’ Crispus Attucks High School varsity basketball team, winners of the Indiana state championship in 1955. With coach Ray Crowe […]
When a mysterious girl turns up in the cornstalks of his family’s farm bleeding and refusing to give up her name, 17-year-old Cade has no choice but to call her Jane Doe and hide her in the barn to honor her only request: “Hide me.” Sorboni Banerjee’s debut novel, Hide with Me (Razorbill), keeps readers on the […]
The peculiars return A Map of Days, the latest installment (and first in a new trilogy) of Miss Peregrine’s Peculiar Children. Although the wights were eliminated at the end of Library of Souls (2015), there is much work to be done to rebuild the world they destroyed. The first task facing the peculiars is learning how to blend in […]
Lauren Oliver (Replica, 2016) continues to thrill teen audiences with her latest novel, Broken Things (Harper). Who killed Summer Marks five years ago? It wasn’t Mia or Brynn, her best friends, who everyone thinks are prime suspects, who were obsessed with Summer’s favorite novel, The Way into Lovelorn. When a discovery reopens Summer’s murder case, her friends […]
What makes someone a citizen? That’s what Dave Eggers hopes to explain to young readers in What Can a Citizen Do? (Chronicle). Collaborating once again with illustrator Shawn Harris (Her Right Foot, 2017), Harris’ art acts as a whimsical backdrop to bite-size examples of actionable things people can do in order to become great citizens, from picking up […]
Encouraging Middle-Schoolers to Choose Books
There’s been a lot of discussion among the librarians I know about what to do with middle-schoolers: they just don’t seem to read as much as they used to. I know that here in Chicago, we have a unique perspective on this situation, since our schools run K–8. In my former school system in Maryland […]
Getting Started with the Global Read Aloud
The 2017 Global Read Aloud kicked off yesterday, and I’m here to help. Author and educator Pernille Ripp founded the program as a way to connect students and teachers from different locales around the topics of books. (Think One Book One School or One Book One City, but on a global scale.) Each year, Ripp […]
TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE: Practice Recognizing Fake News
Cindy: There have been a number of YA fiction books with the title “Two Truths and a Lie,” but we’ve found a creative, informational book for middle-grade students that reinforces evaluating information for truth. Fake news, anyone? Two Truths and a Lie: It’s Alive (2017) by Ammi-Joan Paquette and Laurie Ann Thompson is the first […]
Encouraging Middle-Schoolers to Choose Books
There’s been a lot of discussion among the librarians I know about what to do with middle-schoolers: they just don’t seem to read as much as they used to. I know that here in Chicago, we have a unique perspective on this situation, since our schools run K–8. In my former school system in Maryland […]
Getting Started with the Global Read Aloud
The 2017 Global Read Aloud kicked off yesterday, and I’m here to help. Author and educator Pernille Ripp founded the program as a way to connect students and teachers from different locales around the topics of books. (Think One Book One School or One Book One City, but on a global scale.) Each year, Ripp […]
TWO TRUTHS AND A LIE: Practice Recognizing Fake News
Cindy: There have been a number of YA fiction books with the title “Two Truths and a Lie,” but we’ve found a creative, informational book for middle-grade students that reinforces evaluating information for truth. Fake news, anyone? Two Truths and a Lie: It’s Alive (2017) by Ammi-Joan Paquette and Laurie Ann Thompson is the first […]
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