Tag: books

GRAYSON
By Lynne Cox
Harcourt, 2006

Category: Young Adult or Adult Nonfiction

I arrived home on Friday and have spent the time since reconnecting with my family, washing a few thousand loads of laundry, and lying in the hammock with GRAYSON. It’s good to be home!

Grayson is a baby gray whale that author Lynne Cox, a champion open ocean swimmer, encountered during an early morning training session when she was seventeen. The book opens dramatically, with Cox realizing, ever-so-slowly, that something is in the water with her:

“It wasn’t a rogue wave or a current. It felt like something else.

It was moving closer. The water was shaking harder and buckling below me.

All at once I felt very small and very alone in the deep dark sea.”

Can you say BEELINE FOR THE BEACH? But Cox is a much braver woman than I:

“… the sea’s surface erupted nearby. There was a rushing and plunking sound.

Like raindrops hitting the water. But nothing was falling from the sky. This was wrong.

Very wrong.”

This goes on for pages, for what must have been hours for Cox, and her main reaction is this:

“Stay calm. You need to focus. You need to figure out what this is.”

I am in awe. Somehow (how?), Cox stayed calm, focused, and figured out her companion was a baby whale that had lost its mother. What follows is a lesson in communication-beyond-words, quite possibly the most magnificent interaction between human and whale that has ever been recorded.

WHAT TO DO ABOUT ALICE?
Written by Barbara Kerley
Illustrated by Edwin Fotheringham
Scholastic, 2008

Category: Picture book biography

I love this book. Love it. Love it. Love it.

Barbara Kerley trimmed her rollicking biography of Alice Roosevelt Longworth with excellent word choices and perfectly used, perfectly accurate dialogue. Edwin Fotheringham added illustrations that convey the energy and spunk of Theodore Roosevelt’s first daughter. And the premise—that girls can be feisty AND adored—is one that will speak to tomboys everywhere. If you love biography, write biography for young people, or are in search of a girlish gift that is not pink or plastic, I strongly recommend this book.

Need further enticement? Here is the subtitle: How Alice Roosevelt Broke the Rules, Charmed the World, and Drove Her Father Teddy Crazy!

Still more? “Alice Lee Roosevelt was hungry to go places, meet people, do things. Father called it ‘running riot.’ Alice called it ‘eating up the world.'”

How can you resist?

 

THE LIBERATION OF GABRIEL KING
By K.L. Going
Scholastic, 2005

It turns out that I find it hard to blog about books when I am writing. This in addition to how hard I find it to blog about writing when I am writing. Who knew I was such a complicated artist? Anyway, I now have a To Blog pile that is nearly as tall as my To Read pile. It is time to get caught up and put some of the books in this house onto actual bookshelves.

So, THE LIBERATION OF GABRIEL KING.

I read this book with the kids and highly recommend it as a family read-aloud. It is the story of Gabriel, a “born chicken”, and his friend Frita, who dedicates herself to helping Gabriel face his fears. This book ignited amazing conversations about race and friendship and courage and cowardice.

My favorite scene takes place at the neighborhood pond. Frita and Gabriel have gone there to attempt the dreaded rope swing. To make their fear-facing moment even scarier, the pond is swimming with neighborhood bullies. “You’ll never make it,” the bullies taunt from the ground as Frita and Gabriel sit in the tree and stare at the rope. But Frita and Gabriel do make it. And as the friends—one white and one black, one confident and one not-so-sure—bask in their rope swing glory, the bullies run off with their clothes …

“But we didn’t care,” says Gabriel. “They could take our shoes and shorts, but they couldn’t take our courage.”

Amen.

 

Yesterday was the first session of my four week Book Bunch class at the local elementary school. (Since I taught Citizen Science to the older grades, which includes my two sons, fairplay dictated I come up with something for my daughter and the younger grades.)

Our Book Bunch concept is pretty simple: we get together once a week for a month and read books out loud. To make things interesting, my assistant (Hooray for Mrs. Wattu!) and I came up with a silly theme. To make things interesting AND fun, we didn’t tell the kids what the theme was; instead we gave them a chance to guess the theme after each book.

We started with BAGHEAD, written and illustrated by Jarrett J. Krosoczka. The kids loved this story of Josh and his bad hair day, and they guessed our theme was probably hair.

The second book was A BOY AND HIS BUNNY, written by Sean Bryan and illustrated by Tom Murphy. The boy in the story has got a bunny on his head, and our students are pretty sharp … at least one of them guessed things on a person’s head. The majority, however, were still voting for hair. (I didn’t understand their insistence at first, but I now think my clever book bunch-ers recognized the word hare as a synonym for bunny and a homonym for the word hair. I am dealing with brilliant children here and will clearly need help with subsequent themes; more on this below.)

The final book, SHE’S WEARING A DEAD BIRD ON HER HEAD!, written by Kathryn Lasky and illustrated by David Catrow, sealed the deal. The kids were (mostly) patient for this story of how the Massachusetts Audubon Society was founded; the moment it was finished they screamed our theme: silly things on a head.

We didn’t have time for the other books I had brought, but I’ll include them here for the theme picture book readers out there: THERE IS A BIRD ON YOUR HEAD! Written and illustrated by Mo Willems and ROCKS IN HIS HEAD, written by Carol Otis Hurst and illustrated by James Stevenson.

Okay, dear readers … next week’s theme needs to be more cleverly disguised. Put on your (silly) thinking caps and send me your thoughts and ideas. Please?!

 

ELEVEN
By Patricia Reilly Giff
Random House/Wendy Lamb, 2008

Category: Middle Grade Fiction

I am a Patricia Reilly Giff fan. I often read her books twice, once for the pure pleasure of the story, and then again to study the way she crafts her fiction. This week the kids and I finished ELEVEN, and it is another gem.

Despite his struggles with reading and the early loss of his parents, eleven-year-old Sam has a good life with his grandfather, Mack, and the ‘family’ they’ve cobbled together. But an unexpected discovery has Sam wondering who he really is and, worst of all, who Mack really is. Giff does a fine job of carrying the tension of Sam’s mystery through the book, and the kids and I agreed: in the story department, ELEVEN delivers.

As to craft, ELEVEN left me thinking about subplot. Giff weaves her subplots perfectly and with what seems to be no effort at all. Having attempted such weaving myself, however, I know the truth: effortlessness like this takes a whole lot of effort.

 

MY TEACHER IS AN ALIEN
By Bruce Coville
Scholastic, 1989

Category: Middle grade fiction

I missed Nonfiction Monday.

I missed Charles Darwin’s 199th birthday Tuesday.

Thank goodness for MY TEACHER IS AN ALIEN Wednesday.

Okay, I made that last holiday up. But Bruce Coville did the impossible in the Burns house this week—he bridged the age and gender divide—and that is something to celebrate. All three of my kids enjoyed MY TEACHER IS AN ALIEN … and I was reminded that nothing seems impossible to the very young.

 

MADAM PRESIDENT, The Extraordinary, True (and Evolving) Story of Women in Politics
By Catherine Thimmesh
Illustrated by Douglas B. Jones
Houghton Mifflin, 2004

Category: Middle Grade Nonfiction

A super book for Super Tuesday …

I met with the one and only Erica Zappy yesterday so that we could hammer out a presentation we are giving together at the Cambridge Science Festival in May. (Details on that soon.) I came away, as I always do, wowed by Erica’s passion for her work. I also came away with a pile of great books (Thank You, Erica!) … including MADAM PRESIDENT.

“Revised and Updated” since its 2004 publication, the book is a compendium of the history of women in politics. Author and illustrator use a clever frame to organize their profiles of twenty-two female political pioneers: a sassy, contemporary young lady who declares in the book’s opening spread,

“When I grow up, I’m going to be the president of the United States.”

“You …?” she’s asked, “a … GIRL? Well, maybe you could marry a president …”

And so we meet first ladies with passion and grit: Abigail Adams, Edith Bolling Wilson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Ladybird Johnson, Rosalyn Carter, and Hilary Rodham Clinton.

“And, of course, when you’re eighteen you can at least vote for the president …”

And we meet women who fought for our right to vote: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Charlotte Woodward, Susan B. Anthony, Sara Bard Field, Mrs. J.L. Burn.

Thimmesh and Jones go on to introduce Congresswomen, Cabinet women, female political candidates, and international leaders, each with the perfect amount of detail. I learned new things about women I admire, met women I had not known before, and was inspired by the sassy heroine and the brilliant final art spread (a photomosaic of the White House composed entirely from images of women) to wonder about my own place in women’s history.

So, Dear Readers, go forth today and read about amazing women.

Go forth today and vote.

And if you really want to make my day, go forth today and vote for an amazing woman:

 

FROGS
By Nic Bishop
Scholastic, 2008

Category: Nonfiction picture book

Nic Bishop’s name on the spine of a book is fast becoming the mark of a must-read for me. There are his “Scientists in the Field” books, of course. And there is SPIDERS, which just last month was awarded a Sibert Honor medal for excellence in children’s nonfiction. And now, there is FROGS. And it is S-T-U-N-N-I-N-G.

The format is the same as for SPIDERS (Is there a whole series planned? Oh, I hope so.). Bold-colored pages and pullouts (sentences visually pulled from the text by changing the font size and color) are superbly coupled with images of frogs … the gleeful leap of a grass frog, the pulsating-on-the-page underside of a glass frog, the wide grin of a satisfied horned frog. Simple backgrounds and incredible lighting give the images an artistic feel, and as a viewer/reader you have no choice but to sit in awe of the unfettered beauty of a frog. The effect is breath-catching.

FROGS got my highest seal of approval: today I bought a copy for me and a copy for my soon-to-be-six nephew. It’s that good.

To read about more great nonfiction for kids, visit today’s Nonfiction Monday roundup at the Anastasia Suen’s Picture Book of the Day blog. (The Roundup won’t be up until later in the day.)

 

WALT WHITMAN, Words For America
By Barbara Kerley
Illustrated by Brian Selznick
Scholastic Press, 2004

Category: Picture book biography

Happy Nonfiction Monday!

In a perfect world I would have prepared this inaugural Nonfiction Monday post last week, polished it over the weekend, and posted it before the sun was up this morning. But my world is decidedly imperfect: last week was mayhem, the weekend was chaos, and I am still not entirely certain where this morning has gone.

In times like these I find the best thing is to stop and breathe … and read a book. Today I picked up WALT WHITMAN. Picture book biographies are one of my favorite genres, and I have been meaning to read this once since Elizabeth Partridge recommended it. It feels right, too, that my first Nonfiction Monday post have a poetry connection. (Read why here.)

I often feel, when reading poetry, that I have been given a dozen pages from the middle of a breathtaking novel– the climax of the book, perhaps–but nothing more. The import of the pages is obvious; there is something exhilarating and nearly-meaningful in the words, but without the opening chapters to lay the groundwork and the final pages to lay out the resolution, I can’t quite understand what the author was trying to say. I end up feeling frustrated … and more than a little dense.

Today Barbara Kerley, Brian Selznick, and WALT WHITMAN changed all that. Today, after snuggling up with a picture book, I realized something important about poetry: context helps. And now I can read O Captain! My Captain! (printed, along with other poems cited in the text, in the backmatter of WALT WHITMAN) and understand, at long last, the mixture of joy and sorrow. Kerley and Selznick let me glimpse the heart and times of Walt Whitman, and this glimpse, in turn, gave me access to his poem.

Not bad for a children’s book, eh?

Hooray for Mondays, Nonfiction, and books that teach and center at the same time.

For a summary of today’s Nonfiction Monday posts, visit Anastasia Suen’s Roundup.