The Book Search

We're on winter break now and winding down the CYBILS awards.  In fact, I was really surprised to come home from school on our last day and find two new books to read!  They were SO worth waiting for! The first one is "Homerooms and Hall Passes" by Tom O'Donnell.  It's about a group of adventurers who live in a magical, medieval kind of realm called Briandalor, where they spend their days searching for treasure and battling vile monsters.  To relax, they spend Thursday evenings playing a role playing game called Homerooms and Hall passes, which has each of the players assume the role of a student in a 21st century middle school.  The students have to try to navigate middle school without getting thrown out.  The leader of the group, a good wizard in training named Albiorix, is a big fan of the game (he has 26 reference books about the game that he carries with him).  The group also includes a second leader, Vela the Valiant, a paladin (or knight), as...

I'm getting down to the end of my list of books to read for CYBILS awards.  I always really love being able to read for this award, but it's kind of intense-the window for reading books is pretty short (3 months) and the list of titles is pretty long (for middle grade fiction, there are usually at least 100 titles), but oh my gosh, is it worth it.  Getting to read all the newest books is amazing, I'm so lucky I get to do it!  Like this year, these two new titles are terrific! The first one is called "Tristan Strong punches a hole in the sky" by Kwame Mbalia.  This is part of a new Rick Riordan Presents series.  If you by chance have never read any of Riordan's work, he started a series of books about a boy named Percy Jackson who struggled in school because it turned out his dad was a Greek god.  Riordan went on to write a series about a group of kids who's parents were Roman gods and then Egyptian gods and then Norse Gods.  He's now lending his name...

I might have mentioned before that I'm actually not a big fan of science fiction.  It's not my jam, but actually, after this round of the CYBILS reading, I might have to rethink that label, because there has been some righteous science fiction this year. The latest one I've read is called "The Time Traveler's Theory of Relativity" by Nicole Valentine.  It's about Finn, who's a middle schooler and a bit of a loner.  His mom has left the family and no one is talking about where she is or how long she'll be gone and she's not answering her phone or responding to text messages.  Finn is worried.  His dad sends him to stay with his grandmother in rural Vermont and that's kind of a good thing.  He adores his grandmother, it puts him closer to his best friend, Gabi, and since his dad has been really distant and kind of unresponsive, it's kind of good to be away from him.  Except that once he's there at his grandmother's, really weird...