Monday Reading! Lots of Great Books Here!

      

        Visit Kellee and Ricki at UnleashingReaders and Jen at Teach Mentor Texts to see what they and others have been reading! Your TBR lists will grow!    I'm back from Costa Rica, trying to catch up with those books I read right before and after! It was a great trip, now missing the beach!

       Ariel Lawhon writes historical fiction. This book is her latest, a complex story of a real-life heroine who worked for and led the resistance in France. It's a riveting story of love and war and frightening scenes but she never stopped doing the hard things in order to win! The saddest scenes are of the goodbyes. The happiest ones are the hellos! From her start as a free-lance reporter, viewing a whipping of an older woman by a Nazi named Wolff, bringing her eventually to Marseilles and a bartender with quiet, secret work, to a man who calls her "ma fille qui rit" (my girl who laughs), and to a life she never imagined but accepted. Lawhon weaves the chapters back and forth in time, following Nancy Wake's four code names she went by. Yes, there was a real Nancy Wake, fighting to get the Nazis out of France. It's a special and spectacular story! 

           Thanks to Candlewick Press for the following three books!

      Cynthia Leitich Smith offers a great follow-up to Hearts Unbroken. Out last year, but now time to prepare for Halloween, readers are back in the town that is preparing their "Harvest House", a spooky experience for everyone. When Hughie finds that the fall school play is out because of budget cuts, he's glad to be a volunteer to create the 'show' with his friend, Sam, and others. That is, he's fine until he discovers that the plans include someone will play the "vengeful maiden", a folktale from their Crossroads. Hughie is a great kid, willing to create and find ways to tell the person in charge that there are better ways to scare than using Native American tropes. He leans on friends and family for help while he navigates those who threaten. As Halloween draws closer, Hughie and friends begin to investigate what's really happening at night at the Crossroads and Smith leads us into what indeed might be ghosts because of a real-life event years earlier. It was not easy to predict the ending, but I enjoyed the way the friends stuck together, questioning and helping, no matter how challenging, or frightening! 

          Clover Robin's collaged illustrations show the reality of these amazing swifts, told in brief text by Justin Anderson, wowing me on every page as I learned about them. From the back matter: "There are about one hundred different species around the world." Anderson tells of four on that page, but the book features the Common Swift. Don't miss this story of those swifts who, yearly, fly from Africa to Northern Europe (without stopping!) to find a mate or re-unite with their mates. There's more about how they manage, what happens over various areas, raising their chicks. I know that there are swifts, but had no idea they had these powers, had the adaptations to survive in the air for days and days, AND DAYS! 

         If you're interested, go to this site to learn all about these "swift" things: https://www.swiftmapper.org.uk/  Anderson adds an index to his book, too.