Visit Jen at Teach MentorTexts and Kellee and Ricki at UnleashingReaders to discover books you'll love! Thanks to Jen, Kellee and Ricki who share so much from their own reading lives and support this meme, too.
This first book is a rather fun serendipity that happened to me this week. In addition to starting the book about darling mice dancers, I was trying to catch mice in my house. While I love the books that are written about tiny mice leading extraordinary "human" lives. my "house mice" simply had a wonderful time eating out of a box of dog bones that I keep for visiting dogs. They are gone, and no more need be written.
Thanks to Candlewick for the advanced copy of this book, out just a few weeks ago.
Young Esmeralda mouse, the main character in a new holiday story has quite an adventure while saving a production of The Nutcracker in a marvelous holiday tale from the author of The Gingerbread Pirates and the illustrator of A Series of Unfortunate Events.
Imagine what mice really think when they learn the story of the new ballet titled The Nutcracker when mice are shown as villains. Hidden in Saint Petersburg’s famed Mariinsky Theater are the world’s tiniest ballet fans: the Mariinsky mice. Esmeralda is one of the troupe, a dancer aspiring to be a star in the Russian Mouse Ballet Company. Through a horrible accident with a trap, the lead has been injured and Esmeralda has just been assigned the lead role of Clara in a ballet debuting at Christmas: The Nutcracker. She knows that the mice of Saint Petersburg won’t support a production of this new ballet with mice as the enemy.
On the human side of the story, nine-year-old Irina is convinced that the mice she’s seen in the Mariinsky — the mice her father, the custodian, is supposed to exterminate — are not only fans of the ballet, but dancers themselves. No one will believe her, so Irina must help save the mice others want gone . . . and perhaps to help Esmeralda save the future of the mouse company. It is a tale for anyone who has seen and loved this holiday production. The dance descriptions and the new characters introduced, even rats as friends, created a new world that young readers will love Kristin Kladstrup’s ballet fantasy features artwork by illustrator Brett Helquist, tense drama in the mouse escapades especially, and a good bit of Christmas magic.
In a rhyming story, Caroline Starr Rose has written the rip-roaring story of the legendary Bill Cody who rode for the Pony Express in his teens, and it is told that he met a challenge one time out of need. He supposedly rode 21 horses in 21 hours and forty minutes straight. Joe Lillington’s illustrations fill the pages with never-ending energy as young Bill Cody, later known as Buffalo Bill, rode and rode again. The rule was that the riders changed rides at certain stations, but Bill got to the stations this time only to find there was no rider ready, so he changed horses often: “Trade a Morgan for a Pinto,/Bronco for a Thoroughbred./Racing, flying,/ever riding,/hurry, hurry on ahead.” The book will be great for anyone studying western history, Buffalo Bill or other western figures. There’s a great added piece from the author at the end.
