Cindy: My Indiana Hoosiers will not be making a lot of noise in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament—you have to actually be in the tournament to do that. Without a real horse in the race, I won’t have to watch quite as closely this year, which gives me more time for basketball-themed reading. Bookends followers […]
Lynn: All of you that work in the youth-book world will understand when I tell you that the number of adult books on my personal to-read list is in the hundreds. Yup—SO many enticing “grown-up” books and NO time to read them. Still, I keep putting them on my list. This year, a series opener […]
Lynn: In the author’s note of her first biography, Joyce Sidman recalls her first encounter with Maria Merian’s work in the Minneapolis Museum of Art when she saw prints of her intricate depictions of natural life. Like most of us, Sidman knew little about Merian. “In many ways, Maria was an enigma. She rarely wrote […]
Lynn: In Carolyn O’Doherty’s Rewind (2018), some people, known as Spinners, are born with the ability to freeze and rewind time. The general public fears the Spinners, but their unique abilities are perfect for solving crimes. Law enforcement agents take babies with this talent from their parents and bring them to training centers where they live […]
Cindy: The movie version of David Levithan’s Every Day has the book flying out of my middle-school libraries with even more speed than usual, but that’s not the only thing flying. Many flying and falling teens appear on book covers with a similar look to Levithan’s. Gather these titles together for a quick display of. . . […]
Lynn: Forget the Julian, the Mayan, and even the Fiscal calendars. For Cindy and me, the calendar year runs from ALA Midwinter Meetings to Midwinter Meetings. We are just back, loaded with exciting new 2018 books, and ready to read them. It’s going to be a great year for youth books, trust me! Here are […]
Cindy: Instead of listing our favorite books of 2017, Lynn and I thought we’d try handing out some special awards this year. I’m not talking about Newbery, Caldecott or Printz Awards; we’ll leave those to the official committees. We’re off to Denver this week for the 2018 ALA Midwinter Meeting, and we can’t wait to learn […]
Lynn: Susan Goldman Rubin’s The Quilts of Gee’s Bend (2017) feels like the perfect book for this amazing time of women standing up and speaking up, marching for our rights, and claiming respect for who we are. Yes, the book is about the spectacularly beautiful quilts made in Gee’s Bend, Alabama, but it is also the […]
Cindy: In West Michigan, we live in a snow globe for much of the winter due to the lake effect snow from Lake Michigan, but now other parts of the country are living in one as well—my daughter in North Carolina had enough snow last week to make a full-size snowman! The snow globe phenomenon […]
Lynn: I read for work and pleasure, so I think about both reading choices and the act of reading often. As reviewers, Cindy and I discuss who reads what all the time, but what I’m musing about today does not concern work, but personal choices. How do you, dear reader, decide what to read next? […]
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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