The Book Search

  There have been some amazing books that came into the world in the last month.   Here are two of my favorites! The first one is called “Glory Be” by Jamie Sumner.  Jamie has such a gift for giving a voice to people with big hearts and quirky personalities.  You might remembers some of her other work, like “Roll On”.  This one is a new set of characters and  you are going to love it.  Glory lives with her mom and her dad and their dog Roux.  Except that Roux is missing and Glory is heartbroken.  It takes until almost the end of the book to find out really what happened and it is super fun ride.  The story is written in free verse and as usual, Sumner has a wonderful way of describing not only the setting but also helping readers to understand the depth and complexities of the feelings of the characters.  This would be a great one for teaching personal narrative, for character analysis, for foreshadowing and inferencing.  There...

 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 w...

It might be feeling a little like realistic fiction is the wrong way to go right now, real seems a little too real to me some days, but these are terrific stories and you don't want to miss them! The first one is actually perfect for right this minute, when racism is front and center in people's minds.  It's called "A Place at the Table" by Saadia Farqui and Laura Shovan.  It's told from two viewpoints-Sara and Elizabeth who live in small town in Maryland.  The girls have just started middle school and are struggling to find their places.  Sara is an artist and her parents want her to be a scientist or a doctor.  They are Pakastani immigrants and Sara's mom is teaching a cooking class at her school.  Elizabeth is taking the cooking class along with her best friend Maddie and a new girl named Stephanie whom Elizabeth feels is coming between her and Maddie.  Elizabeth's mom is also an immigrant-she's from England and is struggling with depression s...