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...

I'm having SUCH a good time reading middle grade speculative (or fantasy) fiction for the CYBILS awards.  I LOVE being a first round panelist.  It can seem overwhelming at times (90 chapter books before Christmas?!  GAH!!) and then you open one up and it's awesome and amazing and wonderful and then you remember, why it seems like such a good idea to do this!   This first one is exactly like that.  It's called "The Spinner of Dreams" by K. A. Reynolds.  It's about Annalise, who is 12 and was born cursed.  Her left hand is twice the size of her right and it has a black broken heart on it.  The people of the village know about the curse and are not happy to have someone cursed living in their midst, so her wonderfully kind and loving parents have built fences around the house to protect her but as she had grown bigger, her big hand had grown more powerful and the people of town more afraid of her.  Her parents decide to get her a pet (since sh...

I've been plowing through the fantasy fiction list for  CYBILS.  The librarians at my local library are stunned that I want to check out 12 books at a time.  I'm not sure if they're more surprised that I want to read that many or that I can CARRY that many at a time.  Either way, there have been some amazing titles! The first one is called a companion, but I think you could totally call it a sequel.  I'm not sure how well it stands alone, because I loved the first one SO MUCH.  This one is called The Bootlace Magician and it's by Cassie Beasley.  It's the companion or sequel to Circus Mirandus, which came out a couple of years ago.  The Bootlace Magician opens with Micah living in the Circus Mirandus.  He's a knot tier and doesn't really see how tying knots is going to be anything magical but he keeps going.  His guardian, the Lightbender, gives him a lot of support, as do the other magicians in the Circus Mirandus.  Micah's hopin...

I'm super excited to get to be a part of the CYBILS awards this year.  In case you don't know what that is, CYBILS is a group of people who blog about literature for young people and each year, they give out several awards in different categories.  I'm SO lucky this year to get to be part of the first round panelists for speculative fiction (which some people call fantasy fiction).  I've got a lot of reading to do over the next few weeks, but I thought I'd share a couple of the best ones here. My first new favorite is science fiction.  It's called "We're Not From Here" by Geoff Rodkey.  This story starts with Lan, who is living with his (or possibly her-in the book, Lan's gender is never specified, which was amazing to me!) family on Mars.  Earth has become uninhabitable and Mars is on it's way to also becoming uninhabitable.  Happily, there is another planet (very far away) that is willing to take them.  So Lan's family along with an...

Some stories are hard to tell.  Here are two that must have started in a place where it was hard to tell these stories.  They are voices we haven't heard very often, but these story tellers told them brilliantly. The first one is called "Maybe He Likes You" by Barbara Dee.  It's about 12 year old Mila who is in 7th grade and lives with her mom and her little sister.  Her dad is more absent than Mila would like.  Mila has a tight group of friends that she hangs with.  They are celebrating her friend Omi's birthday on the playground and have a group hug, when the boys from the basketball team come and ask to join the group hug.  Mila feels really uncomfortable  but tries to be a good sport because her friend Zara likes one of the boys and Mila doesn't want to make a scene.  But then the boys seem to keep wanting to touch her and keep making excuses about how and why it happens.  Mila continues to feel uncomfortable about it and the boys ...

I do love middle grade fiction.  Middle grade fiction has such an amazing array of topics that it's willing to discuss and hash out.  Here are my two new favorites. The first one is just about to be published.  It's called "Roll With It" by Jamie Sumner.  It's about Ellie who is 12.  She lives with her mom and because Ellie has cerebral palsy, she is mostly in a wheelchair.  Ellie's mom is worried about Ellie, but also about her dad (Ellie's grandfather), who is suffering from dementia.  So Ellie's mom decides to quit her job and move in with her parents.  Ellie thinks is on one hand, great.  She loves her grandparents and loves spending time with them.  On the other hand, terrible.  Her grandparents live in a small, single wide trailer.  Their trailer isn't handicapped accessible, which makes things difficult.  Ellie doesn't really have any friends at home, so she's not sorry to leave any of them behind.  She finds...