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Showing posts from March, 2022

Spring 2022-new speculative fiction for middle graders

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 Who doesn't love being able to escape the current state of affairs by diving into a magical world?  Especially magical worlds as compelling as these... The first magical world you should visit is in Skandar and the Unicorn Thief by A. F. Steadman.  It's about Skandar, who lives with his big sister and his dad in a world where unicorns are not the colorful, gentle, cupcake pooping, glitter spewing creatures that we often see in current literature,  but terrifying beasts that can only be tamed by a single person who is meant to bond with the unicorn at their hatching.  Without that bond, the unicorns run wild, endangering people, property and other unicorns.  The unicorn riders control their unicorns using elemental magic and help to protect people from the wild rampaging unicorns.  Skandar's family struggles-his mother died when he was small, his dad isn't coping well, and his sister failed the unicorn rider test, and so even though she wanted to be a ...

Catching up! New non fiction titles to look for!

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 GAH!  I can't believe it's been almost four months since I last posted.  I'd like to tell you that I was busy doing something really amazing but it's really just living life!  Anyway, let me tell you about some of the amazing nonfiction I did manage to read. The first one is called Honey Bee Rescue by Loree Griffin Burns.  I'm a big fan of Burns other works like Tracking Trash or Hive Detectives.  She writes nonfiction books about things lots of people are interested in and tells them with lots of photographs and details that really brings her research into clear focus.  This one is no different. It's about two men, one a bee keeper and one a bee relocater.  Mr. Connery finds that some of his bees have set up housekeeping in his garage, which is not a safe place for the bees.  So he calls Mr. Nelson to come and relocate the bees.  Griffin and photographer Ellen Marasimowicz carefully document how Mr. Nelson gets the bees out of the gara...