The Book Search

I am not usually attracted to science fiction.  I blame a steady diet of fairy tales and magically related books in my youth, but one really great thing about CYBILS is that it sends you places you didn't even know you wanted to go, reading books you didn't even know you should look for.  So here are two of my new favorites (go ahead, call me fickle). The first one is called Cog and it's written by Greg Van Eekhout.  It's about COG, which is short for cognitive development.  Cog is a robot with artificial intelligence, so he's meant to learn things and he looks exactly like a 12 year old boy.  He lives with his inventor, Gina and she's trying to teach him lots of things, like shopping and smiling.  Gina tells him that he learns from his mistakes.  So one day Cog decides to make a mistake to learn something new.  He goes outside by himself.  He sees a dog in the street and car coming straight for the dog.  He calculates the speed at whi...

My students are super excited about dragons.  They love Tui Sutherland's series Dragonwings but these two new ones are going to thrill them! The first one is by one of my favorite authors, Sarah Beth Durst.  If you missed it, she wrote an amazing magical story called "The Girl Who Could Not Dream" that had one of the best characters (Monster) that I've read in a long time.  Her newest one, Spark, is about a girl named Mina who is quiet and lives with her very noisy family in a country called Aloria.  Aloria is special because they always have perfect weather, thanks to storm beasts and their guardians.  There are different kinds of storm beasts, wind, rain, sun, snow, and lightning that each provide things that their country needs. The guardians spend two years bonding with their storm beast while it's still inside the egg, but they don't know what kind it will be until it hatches.  Everyone is very surprised then, when Mina's egg hatches and it is a lig...