Best Book Trailers:

Books for 3rd Graders that help explain a symphony

The Composer is Dead (with cd) (Snicket) (this one is on the longer side)

Zin, Zin, a Violin (Moss)

Philharmonic Gets Dressed (Kuskin)

Peter and the Wolf (with cd) (Dewhirst)

Remarkle Farkle McBride (Lithgow)

The Story of the Incredible Orchestra (Celenza)

Feliz takes the Stage (Lasky)

The Farewell Symphony (Celenza)

Moses goes to a Concert (Farrar)

Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra (Britten)

Those Amazing Musical Instruments! Your Guide to the Orchestra Through Sounds and Stories(with CD) (Helsby)

Story of the Orchestra : Listen While You Learn About the Instruments, the Music and the Composers Who Wrote the Music! (Levine)

2012 Recommended Books for Middle Schoolers

Adventure/Mystery

Poison Most Vial by Benedict Carey

Don't Turn Around by Michelle Gagnon

Safekeeping by Karen Hesse

Tokyo Heist by Diana Renn

Secret Letters by Leah Scheier

Double by Jenny Valentine

Realistic Fiction

Laugh with the Moon by Shana Burg

See You at Harry's by Jo Knowles

My Sister Lives on the Mantelpiece by Annabel Pitcher

The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight by

Jennifer E. Smith

Curveball: The Year I Lost My Grip by Jordan Sonnenblick

Humorous

The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde

Chomp by Carl Hiaasen

Ungifted by Gordon Korman

Cat Girl's Day Off by Kimberly Pauley

Historical Fiction

The Wicked and the Just by Jillian Anderson Coats

The Lions of Little Rock by Kristin Levine

For What It's Worth by Janet Tashjian

Tracks by Diane Lee Wilson

The Last Song by Eva Wiseman

Crow by Barbara Wright

Graphic Novels

Friends with Boys by Faith Erin Hicks

Ichiro by Ryan Inzana

The Girl Who Owned a City by Dan Jolley

Drama by Raina Telgemeier

Cardboard by Doug TenNapel

Pandemonium by Chris Wooding

 Fantasy

 Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo

 Arthur Quinn and the World Serpent by Alan Early

 Seraphina by Rachel Hartman*

 The False Prince by Jennifer A. Nielsen*

 Winterling by Sarah Prineas

 The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater

Horror/ Supernatural

Long Lankin by Lindey Barraclough

The Demon Catchers of Milan by Kat Beyer

Fracture by Megan Miranda

Transcendence by C.J. Omololu

Ripper by Stefan Petrucha

The Dead of Winter by Chris Priestley

Science Fiction

The Obsidian Blade by Pete Hautman

A Year without Autumn by Liz Kessler

Insignia by S.J. Kincaid

The Vindico by Wesley King

A Confusion of Princes by Garth Nix

Under the Never Sky by Veronica Rossi

Biographies & Nonfiction

His Name Was Raoul Wallenberg: Courage, Rescue,

and Mystery during World War II by Louise Borden

Teen Cuisine: New Vegetarian by Matthew Locricchio

The Fairy Ring, or, Elsie and Frances Fool the World by Mary Losure

Zombigami: Paper Folding for the Living Dead by Duy Nguyen

 The Mighty Mars Rovers: The Incredible Adventures of Spirit and Opportunity by Elizabeth Rusch

Art Lab for Kids by Susan Schwake

Poetry

Eva of the Farm by Dia Calhoun

The Arrow Finds Its Mark: A Book of Found Poems by Georgia Heard

Sisters of Glass by Stephanie Hemphill

Running with Trains by Michael J. Rosen

*I've read this book myself and liked it.

Children's Books about Tics

• Tic Talk: living with Tourette Syndrome, a 9 year olds boy's true story about living with Tourette Syndrome by Dylan Peters
• Hi! I’m Adam by Adam Buehrens
• I Can’t Stop by Holly Niner
• Mommy, I Feel Funny! A Child's Experience with Epilepsy by Danielle M. Rocheford

YA Review: Bitterblue

Bitterblue by Kristen Cashore Bitterblue is a sequel to Cashore’s fantasy YA novel Graceling and a companion novel to Fire. Bitterblue, the young Queen of Monsea, is the main character in this book. Unlike Katsa and Po from the first book and Fire from the second, Bitterblue has no Grace or superhuman powers or abilities.

Summary: “The long-awaited companion to New York Times bestsellers Graceling and Fire Eight years after Graceling, Bitterblue is now queen of Monsea. But the influence of her father, a violent psychopath with mind-altering abilities, lives on. Her advisors, who have run things since Leck died, believe in a forward-thinking plan: Pardon all who committed terrible acts under Leck's reign, and forget anything bad ever happened. But when Bitterblue begins sneaking outside the castle--disguised and alone--to walk the streets of her own city, she starts realizing that the kingdom has been under the thirty-five-year spell of a madman, and the only way to move forward is to revisit the past. Two thieves, who only steal what has already been stolen, change her life forever. They hold a key to the truth of Leck's reign. And one of them, with an extreme skill called a Grace that he hasn't yet identified, holds a key to her heart (Amazon.com, 2012)

Things I liked:

• There is humor. I like that. This book was very funny in parts. It certainly isn’t always funny, but especially in the beginning there were such funny things being said and discussed... sometimes very silly things.

• The librarian. His name is Death (rhymes with teeth). There are a lot of librarians in books written for youth and, while it is true, that many of them are heroic, lovely model human beings, some are not. The one fault I always found with the Harry Potter series was that Hogwarts had such a mean and vindictive (and old) librarian. Whenever I run across a mean librarian in fiction I imagine that the author is getting her revenge on some real-life librarian who did her wrong as a child or who refused to help her while she worked on her first book. The librarian in Bitterblue is different. At first he starts out as the stereotypical old-school, sour librarian, but so extreme that he makes me laugh. Out loud. As the book goes on and I get to know him more I came to understand where his behavior comes from; what shaped him into the dour person he has become. He wins me over as he wins over Bitterblue herself and he becomes one of my favorite characters in the book. Whatever you do, don’t skip over the list of characters at the end of the book as Death wrote it and it is also incredibly humorous – in a witty, biting kind of way.

• Cashore is a master of creating real and honest relationships on the page - relationships that I, as a reader, feel a part of. I actually went back and re-read Graceling and realized that even though I love so many things about the book the parts I treasure the most (and like to go back and reread) are the sections where Po and Katsa are becoming close. There is a quality of openness and honesty in those sections that takes my breath away in Graceling (for sure), but also here in Bitterblue.

• The theme of this story is not as original as the themes in the two previous books, but that isn’t necessarily a criticism. While Graceling is about a young woman with extraordinary physical prowess learning to face the only real fears she has – fears around loving and trusting and Fire turns teenage angst about appearance on its head by creating a character that possesses shocking, otherworldly beauty, but who desperately wants people to know her inner self, Bitterblue is a somewhat more standard young woman’s coming of age story. But Bitterblue is not just any young woman growing into adulthood she is also the leader of her country – a country that is coming out of the long shadow of the her father’s devastating tyranny. Although this is a fantasy novel, I felt like the problems that Bitterblue faces are not so far from reality… say if she happened to be the new leader of North Korea or Albania or Romania after the fall of communism instead of the Queen of Monsea.

I didn’t fall head over heels for Bitterblue as I did for Graceling which seemed so wildly new and eye-opening when I read it for the first time. However, I did thoroughly enjoy reading this book – which deals so much with honesty and truth and the cost of lies and I certainly heartily recommend it.


Citations: Amazon.com. (May 1, 2012). Available at: http://www.amazon.com/Bitterblue-Graceling-Kristin-Cashore/dp/0803734735/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1336419409&sr=1-1.

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YA Review: Drawing From Memory

Say, A. (2011). Drawing from memory. New York, NY: Scholastic Press.

In his new visual memoir, Caldecott Medal Winner Allen Say, tells his life story from his birth in Yokohama Japan in 1937 until he leaves Japan for the United States in 1953 at the age of sixteen. Portions of this book read like a traditional graphic novel with a regular distribution of panels and text, while other sections have a more varied layout and incorporate a variety of images including hand drawn maps, photos, old postcards and comic book panels. The author writes briefly about when and where he was born, where he lived during World War II and how, after his parents marriage falls apart, he was moved around from relative to relative. By the time Allen Say was twelve years old he lived alone in a small apartment in Tokyo and attended a private junior high school. The heart and focus of the story (and the vast majority of the pages - 40 out of the 57 pages) show us the three years that he spent as apprentice to the master cartoonist Noro Shinpei – the man who would become his, “spiritual father” (p. 59). He kept his apprenticeship secret from his family who did not approve of artists. At the end of those three years, when he was sixteen years old, Allen Say moved to the United States. A detail rich Author’s Note at the end of the book fills in more information about how he developed the idea for this book and includes additional photographs and artwork.

Reading this book, I felt as though I was able to experience through Allen Say’s simple use of language and illustration what life was like for him as a young man in post-war Japan. The sentences were spare, but conveyed so much meaning. For example, “When the war ended four years later, everything was broken” (p. 13), sums up the entire situation simply and completely. This sentence appears on the page next a photograph of the author, age 4, smiling broadly and holding a toy gun. The juxtaposition of the child’s joy with the sentence’s statement helped me to see how a young child could be oblivious of the destruction around him. Another example of Allen Say’s pithy writing, “When I was drawing, I was happy. I didn’t need toys or friends or parents.” (p. 9), made me think that as a child Allen Say was not often happy, or that happiness was elusive for him. He found a place of safety and joy in the act of drawing and yet it was also a place of loneliness. The poetic sentences, combined with the mixture of illustration techniques, pulled me into the story of a very young man who is emotionally alone in the world and who longs to be an artist. I remain haunted by the image of his spare one room apartment with the bare light bulb in the center of the ceiling. Using both written and visual storytelling techniques, the author helped me to feel his excitement on the day he moved in and “floated with joy” around that room and I felt his isolation when he returned to it alone one evening and found that it, “felt cold and lonesome.”

Sometimes, as an adult and as a teacher, I can feel that my students are not really paying close attention to what I say to them. And yet, in this story Allen Say remembered every little bit of encouragement that adults gave him - from the first affirmation of his first grade teacher, “Mrs. Morita said that my ability to draw was a wonderful talent. No one had told me that before” (p. 13). to the final goodbye from his mentor, “Be true to your art, Kiyoi, and journey well” (p. 56). I realized reading this poignant story how much the words I say, to encourage or discourage, matter to the young people I interact with.