Lynn: Are you still watching videos of Meghan and Harry’s wedding on YouTube? Yup, me too. If you and your teens are ready to move on to royal-watching in a different format, here’s a delightful new book that checks all the boxes for fans of crowned-heads-on-anything. Gorgeous clothes? Check. Handsome princes? Check. Behind-the-scenes secrets? Check. […]
Lynn: Maureen Johnson sets her latest mystery, Truly Devious (2018), at Ellingham Academy, a unique private school in Vermont where all the students have a “spark.” “If interested,” reads the school literature, “[just] get in touch.” Ellingham Academy is famous for more than its unique approach to education: It is the site of a famous, unsolved 1936 kidnapping […]
Lynn: Author Sarah Albee makes it clear right at the beginning of Poison: Deadly Deeds, Perilous Professions and Murderous Medicines (2017) that her book is NOT a how-to manual for murder! Rather, it’s a history with far more than murderous intentions. But what mystery fan doesn’t want the inside scoop on this crime-writer favorite method? Authors from […]
Lynn: Many mystery fans will happily follow the trail of a good mystery into a wide variety of other genres. Mystery and fantasy fans take note: Makiia Lucier’s Isle of Blood and Stone (2018) is right up your dark alley! In the prologue, we learn of the tragedy that has befallen the island nation St. […]
Cindy and Lynn: It’s May, and you know what that means! Booklist is rolling out their May 1 Mystery Showcase and The Booklist Reader will be focused on mysteries, crime, and sleuthing all month long. We have been training our magnifying glasses on recent book covers to fit the theme. It’s no mystery that despite admonishments […]
Lynn: Renowned editor Lee Bennett Hopkins opens World Make Way: New Poems Inspired by Art from the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2018) with this important thought from Leonardo da Vinci: “Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.” This book, a glorious new celebration of art […]
Cindy: Unlike Lynn and me, few teens today probably grew up playing with paper dolls, but that hasn’t kept them from gracing teen book covers in recent years. Mary Hogan may have started this cover trend in 2006 with the first of her Susanna paper doll covers, Susanna Sees Stars. Then the memoir, Popular: Vintage Wisdom […]
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 […]
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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