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Category Archives: Young Adult

All the five stars I can handle

24 Jul

There will always be the diamonds in the rough, there will also be plenty of average books when you read a lot. So it feels special when in a weekend, you get a few five-star books.

This retelling of the Medusa myth was a book I read in one sitting. Partly because the storytelling was engrossing as was the bittersweet romance between Perseus and the isolated Medusa and the unique addition of illustrations by Olivia Lomenech Gill. Without giving too much away, Burton turns the myth around and encourages deep thought about the cruelty of the gods but also about our pasts.

This is Ogle’s third memoir, the first Free Lunch was groundbreaking, the second was equally heartbreaking and hopeful, and this third one is groundbreaking, heartbreaking, hopeful, and gut wrenching. As tweeted minutes after finishing the book, of the thousands of books I’ve read I can still only count on one hand the number of times I’ve cried while reading. This is one of them by the time I got to the last page in which Ogle’s command of verse and his lived experiences collide to express the deep gratitude he has for his abuela.

I will continue to think about the book long after I’ve finished it. And thank you go Ogle for being as open and forthright about his experiences for this audience.

How did I miss this superhero graphic novel when it came out several years ago? Either way, I’m glad I read it and everyone needs to get themselves a copy of the swapped bodies trope. Two very different girls end up in each other’s bodies and have to learn to collaborate in order to both 1) fix the current situation, and 2) attain their goals as superheroes.

The entertainment factor is high as is the colors and character sketches. Also a book I read voraciously in one sitting.

 
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Posted by on July 24, 2022 in Fiction, Graphic novels, Middle grade, Nonfiction, Upcoming Releases, Verse, Young Adult

 

What I did

25 Jun

Yesterday, Friday, June 24th was the last day of school which ended with a few last booktalks to my colleagues to set them up for the professional reading groups I run over the summer for staff, moving the last few items over to the new library (where we’re still waiting for the furniture), and a picnic lunch.

Today, Saturday, June 25th was the first day of official summer vacation. There will be plenty of time for work this summer that’s generally bookish in nature. But today had to be a *little* special.

The breakfast of champions after a morning training run and sauna session included water, bagel and lox, rose cider, and tea while reading the paper. The runs usually include an audiobook (who am I? I thought I would never be the person listening to an audiobook while running- only motivating music please- but I am now that person). I was actually able to finish Nugent’s Little Cruelties this morning what a twisted piece of literary fiction.

I moved to doing some grading and prep work for the summer grad classes and picked up a flat of strawberries from our CSA which promptly turned into me making biscuits and homemade whip for strawberry shortcake after dinner.

Some more reading.

A dinner of grilled pizzas courtesy of my grill-master husband and sitting out on the patio where I started another book that I’m loving so far, an arc of All Signs Point to Yes: A Love Story for Every Star Sign short story anthology edited by Davis, Montgomery, and White. Then, the strawberry shortcake.

And last, a blog post while also plotting a personal readathon for this summer.

 
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Posted by on June 25, 2022 in Adult, Audiobooks, Blogging, Short Story, Upcoming Releases, Young Adult

 

Readers advisory from May ’22

31 May

Read As Long As The Lemon Trees Grow by Zoulfa Katouh and The Weight of Blood by Tiffany D. Jackson when they come out in September, Tin Man by Justin Madson, Dumplings for Lili by Melissa Iwai, and Soul Lanterns by Shaw Kuzki.

With dozens of books read, these sparkling gems shined the brightest.

 
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Posted by on May 31, 2022 in Authors, Childrens, Cover Love, Fiction, Graphic novels, Upcoming Releases, Young Adult

 

The joy of vacation reading

23 Apr

… and by vacation I mean staycation,. I have no picture of a book sitting on my sunkissed thighs with a drink to my left. This past week was our spring break from school that’s typically associated with the Easter holiday however it also coincided with Passover and is the monthlong celebration of Ramadan. For me that did include a handful of religious and family obligations plus a visit from my mother-in-law, but she was going to be flying out by early in the week and I would be able to tackle some to-do items like cleaning and organizing certain parts of the house but also hang with my kids also on break, and of course, read.

I had amassed quite a few galleys via Edelweiss and Netgalley, plus I have an upcoming author panel I’m moderating, and then other print books on my shelf and from the library that I wanted to dive in to. I certainly got my reading time in with several gems in my favorite subcategories. Here were some highlights:

What in particular do I like about vacation reading? I think it’s the relaxed reading atmosphere, the deft movement between audiobooks and print or ebooks when I take a quick break to walk the dog in the middle of the day or decide it’s time to tackle that downstairs closet. The choice is all mine. And it feels extra special because it’s vacation time and it’s my choice and that’s what I choose to do. After all, Jung got it right– “you are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.” I am a reader.

 
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Posted by on April 23, 2022 in Adult, Fiction, Graphic novels, Nonfiction, Upcoming Releases, Verse, Young Adult

 

Readers advisory from March ’22

31 Mar

To try to keep up with reading everything you want to read is the same analogy as trying to find information on the internet which is that it’s like trying to take a drink from a fire hydrant- more will keep coming at you. So the task is always to enjoy it. Yes there are times when I have to read certain things like for a committee or a book review for a magazine that has a deadline, but this year I’ve found I have a lot more flexibility and I’m enjoying myself.

The Only Good Indians I already posted about here. That was a highlight from this month that warranted its own post. And a few others for various reasons which I’ll share now, going backwards from audience since The Only Good Indians‘ target audience is adult.

Anatomy: A Love Story by Dana Schwartz was a perfect Gothic tale to a YA audience. As I’ve shared in the conversations I’ve had since reading it is that while I knew that the subtitle was “a love story”, I think Schwartz could have kept it solely about Hazel’s pursuit of being a physician and it been solidly fabulous. I know why Schwartz included the romance and the ending relied, in part, on it’s existence, but Hazel’s strength of character was memorable all by itself.

I have a good friend who is a high school art teacher. As soon as I closed the book, I sent her a few texts asking if she knew much about Savage. Then I told her she needed to read Augusta Savage: The Shape of a Sculptor’s Life by Marilyn Nelson pronto and that I was just as taken with Nelson’s choice to write in verse but that there was historical context in addition to the biographical content and that I loved a quote that was included by Savage: “I have created nothing really beautiful, really lasting, but if I can inspire one of these youngsters to develop the talent I know they possess, then my monument will be in their work.” Immensely powerful.

And last, a picture book by Phung Nguyen Quang and illustrated by Huynh Kim Lien called My First Day. I will end up owning this book soon because the captivating artwork unlocks a reader’s imagination as much as it connects to every experience we’ve had with a “first”. Yes, the boy is on his way to his first day of school through a maze of obstacles, but perseveres. The writing matches the tone of the design and creates an all-encompassing experience. A feast for the eyes.

 
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Posted by on March 31, 2022 in Adult, Authors, Book of the Month, Childrens, Cover Love, Fiction, Nonfiction, Verse, Young Adult

 

Six for Saturday

19 Mar

… and in six words each.

  1. Magical Boy by The Kao

Brightly colored with action and heart

2. Poisoning the Pecks of Grand Rapids: The Scandalous 1916 Murder Plot by Tobin T. Buhk

True crime meets awkward family drama

3. Broken Wish (The Mirror series) by Julie C. Dao

Magical series each with separate authors

4. Dionysos: The New God (Olympians series) by George O’Connor

Is it really the end, George?

5. Manu! by Kelly Fernandez

Dark and funny for middle grade

6. Let’s Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped the World by Danielle Friedman

Curiosity meets research about exercising women

 
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Posted by on March 19, 2022 in Adult, Audiobooks, Fiction, Graphic novels, Middle grade, Nonfiction, Young Adult

 

Readers advisory: When to walk away

08 Mar

A girl came into the library yesterday looking for something to read. It was not for a class and she wasn’t looking for a particular author or title. I made my usual pitch that she was welcome to browse, but I could also provide some recommendations if she’d rather. She took me up on my offer and we walked to the fiction stacks because she said she was looking for fiction, that much she knew.

Then she dropped a few more categories: probably something realistic because the last book she read was realistic. I picked up Ibi Zoboi and Dr. Yusef Salaam’s Punching the Air, noting that it was verse if she had read that format and explained a bit about it. She shook her head and said that maybe something from a female’s perspective. So we rolled backwards from Z and I picked up Jeff Zentner’s Rayne and Delilah’s Midnite Matinee, gleefully telling her that he visited a few years ago. As I began to talk about that, she also threw in that she wanted a first-person perspective. I noted that the girls alternate the story but it was first person. She nodded but then asked about books that had some fantasy to which I replied that that was a different direction altogether and shifted our spot. I pointed out another book or two and realized that after a few minutes of watching her face and listening, that I needed to walk away. She did need to browse and I was getting in the way.

I decided to walk away.

I asked if she’d be good to browse alone because it sounded like she had ideal books bouncing around in her brain that I was stopping her from discovering, especially after watching her pull a book off the shelf she had been eyeing midsentence. Her response told me what I needed to know, and I told her I’d be at the desk when she was ready with books to check out or suggestions later on.

Fifteen minutes later she came to the desk with two books because she couldn’t decide. I excitedly checked her out and she chatted about how she has rediscovered reading again and wants to keep the momentum going. I was happy to get out of her way when I knew the vibe between my recommendations and her vision of shopping for books wasn’t working. Ultimately she found her books through self-discovery.

Librarians do need to walk away from patrons during readers advisory because we get in our own way or the way of readers discovering their own power within the stacks. I’ve done this before and I’ll do it again. There is time for readers advisory like there are fabulous book displays and shelf talkers to do the recommending. It all works together like magic in the library if you’re doing it right.

 
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Posted by on March 8, 2022 in Miscellaneous, Reflections, Young Adult

 

Let’s talk about it

05 Mar

I don’t usually fall asleep on the couch at 6pm, but when I do I have an excuse. It was a Friday night after a day that included instruction in the morning about citing sources and then a book discussion virtual author visit collaboration with an outside agency that was doubling as my observation for the afternoon. There was some heightened stress with this event because it had been postponed two weeks earlier due to physical violence at our school that led to a lockdown and early student release. I wanted to make sure this went off without a hitch.

There were a few obstacles to get here:

  1. This was strictly student interest based. This was a collaboration with our county’s case manager for crime victims and those experiencing sexual violence who wanted to pair a book about dating violence with discussion of resources and what healthy relationships look like. We settled on Bad Romance by Heather Demetrios, bought the books, and distributed them to students interested during lunch periods using an “all call”. We had a range of ninth through twelfth graders, though some had signed up because their friend was signing up. Their buy-in waned as we got closer to the event. Students chose not to attend either because of the vulnerability of the discussion or because they weren’t truly interested at the start (maybe it was the donut they got with the book?)
  2. Scheduling the event. Due to the pandemic, our school day shifted start and end times and after school looks vastly different than it used to be. Namely, unless it’s a specific club or sport, they don’t stay after school anymore, so the option to do an after school event wasn’t really discussed. We settled on an “in-house field trip” for the event spanning several periods. But this posed problems for students who had quizzes and tests they couldn’t miss. They came for a little while but didn’t get the impact of the full event.
  3. It was rescheduled. They’re teenagers and my fifteen years as their high school librarian has taught me one thing that is best summed up with the Zits comic from a few weeks back–

I sent emails, I made invitations, I made an updated invitation bookmark, I put it on social media. Yet, some students still didn’t show up.

But with all of that, here were the wins:

  1. For newer librarians, I want you to repeat after me “quality over quantity”. I learned this for my first author visit more than ten years ago. It’s been to have a smaller group of students who want to be there, than pack an auditorium of students who don’t. I will take authentic, meaningful connection even in a school as large as ours rather than trying to force the connection. So when we first started warming up with introductions and book discussion and the student exclaimed that “this was probably like the best book I’ve ever read” you could have wiped up the puddle of tears from underneath my chair. This is why we do the things we do.
  2. We had the author virtually! This was something our community partner had checked in on and when Demetrios was available, we were behind excited. It went deeper when Demetrios told her story and shared super powerful exercises that the students did in addition to the Q&A.
  3. Snacks! You can’t have a program like this without snacks. And because I’m a nerd and had to reread the book anyway, I decided to take notes on any food mentioned in the book to see if that would work. Yup! Snacks included Doritos, Pepsi, Oreos, Twizzlers, donuts, and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. Was that a general mix of unhealthiness? Sure, but it works for snacks for teens who regularly show up with a Monster and Takis at 8am. I won’t always encourage this, but it worked for an afternoon book discussion pick-me-up. And the donuts were the first to go.
  4. True connection. The students that were there were highly engaged with each other and with our community partner, the author, and myself. They valued the conversation and asked whether more of these types of activities would continue. The community partner and I looked at each other and knew that that’s exactly where we were going if this was successful.

Then the bell rang and students were done for the day and week as it was a Friday afternoon, but they left happy and fed. The minute they walked out the door, the reflection conversation immediately began in my head and with the community partner. How did that go? What could we do better? What would we change next time?

There will be a next time…

 
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Posted by on March 5, 2022 in Authors, Events, Fiction, Reflections, Young Adult

 

Readers advisory for February ’22

28 Feb

The end of month brings a brief pause to reflect on what I’ve read over the past month. I’ve usually always worked toward identifying that one book that made me pause. I also read a lot so one book each month is difficult and why I generally break the one book rule I’ve self-imposed, hence why I changed the title of the month’s-end post to readers advisory.

This month I decided to pull my favorite children’s book, young adult, and adult title. In order, a nonfiction, a graphic novel, and the audiobook.

Born Hungry: Julia Child Becomes ‘the French chef’ written by Alex Prud’homme and illustrated by Sarah Green was an easy choice for a book everyone should read because children’s biographies are superbly informative in addition to capturing (when done right) the essence of the topic at hand. In this case, the nephew of Child, writes a celebratory story of how Child didn’t become ‘the French chef’ until very late in life, proving that you can do anything you set your mind to and have a passion for. Using Green’s bright and vivid illustrations to compliment the story, it is a feel-good story that’s food-centered.

Yasmeen written by Saif A. Ahmed and illustrated by Fabiana Moscolo is a graphic novel with a hard truth to face. That many girls were kidnapped, raped, tortured, and maimed as part of the unrest in the Middle East. Yasmeen is an Iraqi girl whose family settled in Texas after leaving their war torn home but without her because she had been captured and used as a pawn. The graphic novel does not sugarcoat her trauma and the fight she gave to break free. But what levels this graphic novel up is the intricate use of time in the panels and on the pages which takes an astute reader of the format because of the level of understanding of the story, characters, and setting. A passive reader will not understand the story completely. And it’s powerful. You do not want to miss anything.

I listened to the audiobook read by Michelle Zauner, the author and subject of Crying in H Mart: A Memoir. While I did not know who she was and had only downloaded the audiobook because of it’s popularity and subject matter (you’ll often find that I read and share about food memoirs or food stories). I recognize that there is wide general appeal, but it went deeper for me as I’m sure that others who feel like they do about the book can attest; it’s Zauner’s relationship and caretaking of her cancer-stricken mother and simultaneously about the food of her life through the lens of her now suffering mother. Food is balm. Food is love. Food is history. Food is memory. I don’t often reread books, but because I had listened to the audiobook, I’ve considered rereading it in print because I remember several times stopping in my tracks while listening to a poignant phrase or sentence or scene.

What did you read this past month that you loved?

 
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Posted by on February 28, 2022 in Adult, Audiobooks, Book of the Month, Childrens, Fiction, Graphic novels, Nonfiction, Young Adult

 

Down the rabbit hole

26 Feb

Several years ago I read Higginbotham’s Midnight at Chernobyl and recognized the depth of research that went in to writing a book of that heft, literally and figuratively. I had also read Blankman’s historical fiction called The Blackbird Girls that deals with Chernobyl and religion for a tween audience. Then with the attack on Ukraine by Russia this past week, I decided to put Marino’s Escape from Chernobyl at the top of my TBR where it was sitting somewhere in the middle and it brought me back to the tragedy, drama, and cover up that was the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, especially with the ticking clock to start each chapter.

And it didn’t end there; in a rare move, my husband ordered the HBO miniseries Chernobyl that had aired several years ago that so many had talked about but we had never watched because I had mentioned it.

He is glued to the TV watching the news coverage on multiple channels plus the radio. So between my reading and the current state of affairs, we mixed some drinks and sat down to binge the series on a Friday night. What a powerful mix of dramatic storytelling and truth. I can learn quite a bit from books, but there’s something about the visual elements of the series that aided in a deeper understanding of the politics and science that dominated the narrative of this disaster.

And what did I spend some time doing this morning? Researching other books to read and putting a few on hold at my library and downloading another via Hoopla. I’m already down the rabbit hole. I figured I would keep going.

What topics have wrapped you up in a multimedia quest to learn as much as you could about them?

 
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Posted by on February 26, 2022 in Adult, Fiction, Middle grade, Nonfiction, Research, Shows, Young Adult

 
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