The Book Search

Hoo boy, did it feel like a long slog to get to winter break.  In their wisdom, our district decided our kids should go to school until December 22 and we should have December 23 as a teacher workday.  It's so much fun to have special holiday events, concerts, tree lightings, parties, but wow, the level of excitement and anticipation (which has been building since OCTOBER) was pretty intense.  I was relieved to see at a local retail outlet that we have Valentine's day to look forward to, so thank goodness we have something to keep the crazy level high. But so now, we are back home after a wonderful visit with family and we have some time to relax and finish up projects and READ.  YAY!!!  I told the kids that my goal was to read a book a day all winter break, and frankly, I'm failing at that so far, but I'm hoping to catch up a bit now.  I did get to read a couple of brand new picture books on the plane and they are just terrific.  The first one is called "There,

I found some great new titles on Netgalley this week.  This first one was a big surprise to me.  It's the second in a series by author Gene Swallow about a girl named Elspeth who is living between two worlds-the real world where she is a middle schooler adopted by two relentlessly boring people who love her very much and the other is a nursery rhyme world, where she is the daughter of Jack and Jill (the fetch a pail of water duo).  The nursery rhyme world, New Winkieland, is full of funny characters as well as danger-the evil Mary, Mary has taken Elspeth's best friend as a hostage and now it seems the only way to get Farrah back is to make a deal with the evil Krool, who nearly killed Elspeth in her last visit to New Winkieland.  This one is full of text references to lots of different nursery rhymes (I had to stop and do a little research half way through the book to find out about one of the nursery rhyme references and was fascinated to find that nursery rhymes actually have