I'm branching out from all the speculative fiction I've been reading to catch up on some realistic fiction. Here are two of my new favorites!
The first one is called "The Partition Project" by Saadia Faruqi. She also wrote this one that I liked a lot too called "A Place at the Table" It's about Maha (short for Mahnoor) who lives in Texas with her loving parents and her older brother. The story opens with the family at the airport getting ready to pick up Dadi, who is Maha's dad's adoptive mother. Dadi is going to come and live with the family and Maha is meant to act as a kind of a baby-sitter to Dadi. Maha is not happy about losing her bedroom (she gets her own room, but it's up in the attic) to Dadi and she's struggling to connect to Dadi, who is often abrupt and and kind of cranky. Maha's deepest passion is journalism and she's very excited when her teacher assigns them a documentary project. Except she has no idea what to do the documentary about. Dadi has been telling her stories about her earlier life and Maha decides to do the project about the partitioning of India, but she ends up so obsessed with the documentary that she forgets about a novel study project she was supposed to be working on with her best friend, Kim. They end up in a big argument and Maha worries that she will never be friends with Kim again. This is an interesting story to read-there are big themes of family and family history, especially family history that's painful. There are also themes of friendship and commitment to a task, of telling a good story and finding family. It would be fun to use this book as a springboard for a documentary project. It would also be interesting to use this a doorway to talking about the food of different cultures-Dadi is a really great cook and the food she cooks sounds amazing! I really liked this story and I think it a lot of middle graders are going to like this one too.
The second one is a sequel, which I don't typically read. I don't typically read sequels because there are so many new books published each year that I tend to prioritize new stories. BUT, sometimes a story is SO compelling you need to stick around for the second part and that was THIS story. This one is called Coyote Lost and Found by Dan Gemeinhart. I'm a BIG fan of Dan Gemeinhart's work, which you might know if you've been reading my blog. I really liked The Midnight Children. I also really liked Some Kind of Courage. But this is the one, The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise that is the prequel to Coyote Lost and Found. It's probably a good idea if you read Coyote Sunrise first, if you haven't and it's amazing. Because, spoiler alert-you need the backstory of Coyote Sunrise. Dan Gemeinhart will give it to you at the beginning of Coyote Lost and Found but the way Coyote Sunrise unfolds is total magic. Coyote Lost and Found then, is about Coyote (or Ella) who is no longer living in a bus with her dad, instead they have moved into a house and Coyote has started middle school. This is not an easy thing for a young woman like Coyote who has lived with just her dad, being homeschooled (or schooled by herself, mostly). She's so different from the other kids, the way she dresses, her lack of interest in a phone and social media, her love of books. So when she finds a box on the bus that contains her mother's ashes, Coyote and her dad go on a quest to try to find where her mom wanted her ashes spread. She left the directions in her favorite book, except that Coyote accidentally gave the book away several months ago. She doesn't want to tell her dad, because it makes him really sad. So once she convinces him to go on a road trip, she also recruits her best friend Salvador and her dad brings a friend along too, much to Coyote's dismay. So the lost and found, is not only about the book, but also about gaining closure from other big losses and trying to find what's new and what's enduring. This is just as wonderful as the first book and the kids who were too young to read Coyote Sunrise when it first came out are going to love discovering Coyote as a character and getting to read about both these chapters of her life.
Here's the cover:
And here's an interview that Colby Sharp did with Dan about Coyote Lost and Found.
I've been enjoying my spring break and since we were traveling, I had some long uninterrupted time to read (because when I'm at home, there's a lot of "Oh look! Something shiny!" going on). There are some terrific new middle grade fiction books in the pipeline. Here are two of my favorites. The first one is called "The Orphan Band of Springdale" by Anne Nesbet. It's historical fiction but it's based on the author's family stories. It's set in World War 2 and I really loved that it tells the story of what it was like growing up in America at that time, with some of the ugly prejudices that people held as well as some of the social issues that have since been resolved. Gusta's dad leaves her on a train as they were heading to Maine because Gusta's dad is a socialist and believes that workers should have rights and he is being pursued by the police. Gusta ends up at her grandmother's house, which is a kind of an orphan...
I've fallen deep in the dark heart of middle grade fantasy fiction this week and there have been many, many magical creatures! These were my two favorite ones! The first one is "Impossible Creatures" by Katherine Rundell. It's not her first book but it's the first one I've read and I thought it was great. The writing is compelling and beautiful. I fell into the book but I kept stopping so I could keep going back to it! As an example, here's the opening line: "It was a very fine day, until something tried to eat him." The story is about two kids-Mal and Christopher. Mal lives with her great aunt Leonor in a place where magical animals are commonplace. Neither of them knows what happened to her parents, but the man who brought her to Leonor left a big coat that allows Mal to fly. And then a murder shows up. Mal narrowly escapes but Lenor does not. Meanwhile, Christopher is going to spend the summer with his gra...
I'm super excited to be reading for the CYBILS again this year! I love reading all the latest speculative fiction and boy are there some great ones! Here are my two latest favorites. The first one is "Island of Wonders" written by Frances Hardinge and illustrated by Emily Gravett. It feels like an old fashioned story. The format of the book is big-like picture book sized, which is good because there are lot of illustrations. And the illustrations are just amazing-in three colors-black and blue and white, they almost feel like NC Wyeth or that Art Deco kind of traditional children's literature. But the STORY. Whoo-boy, is it great. A super creepy fairy tale kind of story and so beautifully written. It's about Milo, whose father is a ferryman, but a special kind of ferryman, HE ferries the dead to the afterlife. The islanders place a lot of trust in the ferryman, because if he doesn't do his job properly, the de...
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