It's Monday!

     More lovely books!

          Visit Jen at TeachMentorTexts and Kellee and Ricki at UnleashingReaders to see what they've been reading, along with everyone else who link up.  Others join Sheila to share adult books at Book Journeys. 

 

Come visit, and tweet at #IMWAYR. Thanks to Jen, Kellee, and Ricki for hosting!

This first book meets the criteria for the award challenge at Gathering Books. See the button on the right for more information. Or go here.

Memoir

Island Treasures: Growing Up In Cuba - written by Alma Flor Ida with illustrations by Elel Rodriguez and Antonio Martorell

           I took a while to read this book, savoring each part, a combination of three smaller ones by Alma Flor Ida, her memories of growing up in Cuba. The final one, Under The Royal Palms, won the Pura Belpré award. The writing was slow and easy, sweet times with mostly family, amazing stories like spending time with a great-grandmother who lived in a tiny house next door, one uncle’s reason for becoming a doctor, counting bats in the evening with a grandmother, Alma’s love for ballet and the special person, Gilda, and on. Each one introduced Spanish words (there is an extensive glossary), friends and family (noted also at the back), and a part I loved especially, the flora and fauna of Cuba. This will be a wonderful mentor text for writing memoirs.

Poetry

A Lucky Thing - written by Alice Schertle and paintings by Wendell Minor

          Published in 1999, I am thrilled to have found this book of poetry. If you need a mentor text for using metaphors and similes with the a theme (this time, writing) throughout the book, this is it. With Schertle's wonderfully clever poems, Minor shows well that there is poetry everywhere one looks. Or is it the other way round, with Minor painting, and Schertle writing? A young girl is shown through a window, at a table writing, mixing words and pictures as she writes the first poem, titled Right Here, in the book. Here is part of the poem: "I'll dig a pond right here./Dig down deep until/the water/and the words/run clear. Later, when Schertle writes Poem About Rabbit, she writes that she is "writing a poem/about//rabbit.//A pink-eyed poem/that watches/from the//edges/of the page, that nibbles/at the//corners/of my mind." It's a treasure of a poetry book, among others, of course, but I'm very glad I have read it.

Picture Books

It's Monday-All Kinds of Reading

           On Mondays, I share books read for children and teens and link up with Jen at TeachMentorTexts and Kellee and Ricki at UnleashingReaders.  Others link to share adult books with Sheila at Book Journeys who started the meme a long time ago. 

        Come visit, and tweet at #IMWAYR. Thanks to Jen, Kellee, and Ricki for hosting!

Behind The Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope In A Mumbai Undercity - written by Katherine Boo

          This book won the National Book Award for 2012, among others, and meets the criteria for the award challenge at Gathering Books.  Click on the badge on the right for more information.

           I really wish I could just give link after link of the glowing reviews of this book, long on my list of books to read, and I finally did take time to read slowly, savor the beauty that Katherine Boo shared of these people in circumstances hard to imagine. And I find it hard to see how they did/do survive. While there may be better circumstances here in the U.S., there are equally terrible places for children who are trapped in them with few ways to change. Boo follows several families, especially the children of those families, the way they start work early, at seven sometimes, the way they learn to scavenge and steal, then sell the goods for what seems like nothing, but to them, IS something. They live and survive in cobbled-together shacks in a slum named Annawadi, in sight, but fenced off, from the wealthy and beautiful Mumbai airport and its hotels. It is humbling to read this, trying not to judge my own life and others, wondering if I do enough to help. There is such need here and in other countries.  Here are some words that made me pause, among many others: “In America and in Europe, it was said, people know what is going to happen when they turn on the water tap or flick the light switch. In India, a land of few safe assumptions, chronic uncertainty was said to have helped produce a nation of quick-witted, creative problem-solvers.”

           Among the poor, there was no doubt that instability fostered ingenuity, but over time the lack of a link between effort and result could become debilitating. “We try so many things,” as one Annawadi girl put it, ‘but the world doesn’t move in our favor.’”

It's Monday - More Good Books!

           Link up with Jen at TeachMentorTexts and Kellee and Ricki at UnleashingReaders. and Sheila at Book Journeys.  Come visit, and tweet at #IMWAYR. Thanks to Jen, Kellee, and Ricki for hosting!

      This first book was in the top ten of the best fiction books of 2013, thus meeting the award challenge from Myra, Iphigene and Fats at the blog, Gathering Books.

The Great Trouble: A Mystery of London, The Blue Death, And A Boy Called Eel - written by Deborah Hopkinson

              Deborah Hopkinson has interwoven her story of Eel, a thirteen-year-old homeless boy, a “riverfinder”, into the true story of Dr. John Snow’s discovery in the mid 1800’s that cholera is a water-borne disease. It is a middle-grade book and the plot events happening to the young people in the story seems fanciful, yet I enjoyed it as it also told of this terrible time when most people thought the “blue death” came from air, the horrible miasma from unclean and close living, mostly in poorer areas of big cities. “Riverfinders” were both adults and children on the streets, smelly and filthy because they earned what pennies they could by going through the muck by the river to find the few things, like pieces of coal, they could sell.  They slept where they found a place that seemed safe; earned it or fought for it. What a life! Eel’s life took different turns in the story. Luckily for him, he had gone to school for a while before both his parents died. He knew how to read and write! In this story, he ends up working as Dr. Snow’s assistant, and it turns out to be helpful to Dr. Snow and to Eel’s life. You’ll need to read the book to discover more about London at this time, and the brief few days when cholera struck and killed over 600 people. Middle grade students will enjoy the intrigue and the setting very much.

Goodbye Stranger - written by Rebecca Stead

           Thanks to Net Galley for allowing me to read this book before the actual publication, August 5th! As I think about how to review this book by Rebecca Stead, I first wonder about the title of multiple meanings. Can it be that Stead has written a book that as the reader reads, the characters are no longer strangers, to the reader, to their friends (and frenemies, too) and most important, to themselves. It’s definitely a growing up book, with alternating voices of Bridge and Sherm as well as a stranger who jumps in once in a while with her (his?) own adventure. We don’t discover the ‘who’ until almost the end. All the parts of growing up today are there, like social media problems; and quite a bit is there that has always been, young teen friends changing in different ways, divorce adding to some problems and finding out what kind of person one is adding to other challenges. It’s a mixed-up story like all of Stead’s books, compelling because one is lead on by the story structure of mystery and the authentic voices of the characters, growing up with friends, leaving old friends behind. One voice asks: “Is the new you the stranger? Or is the stranger the person you leave behind?” 

Final Books - A Great Year of Reading

           It's the final Monday of the year, time to share the latest books and link to our hosts: Jen at TeachMentorTexts and Kellee and Ricki at Unleashing Readers. Sheila at Book Journeys started a meme to share all kinds of books read each Monday, then Kellee, Ricki and Jen formed theirs for only children's lit. Come visit, and tweet at #IMWAYR.

     If you haven't seen it, here is the 2015 challenge by Gathering Books. It's always fun to participate in another reading challenge. Check it out! I'm aiming for level four- over 35 award winning books!

            Here's what I've read in the past week. Vacation, even with family visiting, offers lots of wonderful time for reading!

The Family Romanov – written by Candice Fleming

           This has been a great book to read over break, with long stretches of time to digest all the information about the tragedy of Tsar Nicholas and his family. I use the word tragedy because in the way he was presented here by Ms. Fleming, he seemed weak and stupid to me. I kept hoping he would literally “see the light”, yet he clung to the advice of his beloved and trusted wife, Alexandra. And you know how touched, then heavily influenced she was by the “starets” (Russian work for prophet) also known as Gregory Rasputin. If it weren’t so terrible for millions of Russians who died of either starvation or the war, I might hold some sympathy, but the years under the Tzarist rule as well as then Lenin and Stalin were never kind to the ordinary citizens. The story is fascinating to read and contemplate. Amazingly, at the end, I find that some of this story is still not complete!  You’ll need to read to discover what is still continuing.