That Blog Belongs to Emily Brown!

Review: Cinder by Marissa Meyer

2012-03-10T08:27:00.006-08:00

A short review this time, ladies and gentlemen: Hurray for Asian heartthrobs! The End.

Just kidding. But seriously, I'm always on the lookout for leading Asian men in YA lit, because my boyfriend's Asian, and one thing he often points out is how rare it is to see an Asian man paired with a black or white woman in the media. You'll see Asian women with black or white men, but not the other way around. He believes this is related to the long history of stereotyping Asian men as asexual. So that's another fun game to play while watching commercials: tallying the varieties of interracial couples!

While I'm on the subject, shout-out to Jenny Han's North of Beautiful, which features a wonderfully complex Asian love interest.

Now back to Cinder. This book is based on a concept I wish I'd thought of: setting a fairytale in the future. Donna Jo Napoli, Gail Carson Levine, and Shannon Hale have mined the rich vein of fairytale plots for a number of popular and acclaimed novels. But usually, they use historical settings. Cinder is straight-up Sci-Fi. I can see this launching a whole subgenre, the way Pride and Prejudice and Zombies launched a mash-up subgenre including Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, and Android Karenina. Perhaps this book is even related to that adult lit phenomenon.

In this case, our Cinderella character is a cyborg mechanic working in future East Asia, where a strange plague is mowing down citizens. Cinder tries to hide her cyborg status, because cyborgs are considered second class citizens who can be drafted or sold by their legal guardians to undergo plague research--in other words, to be infected with a disease that has no cure and kills within days. Thus, Cinder tries to keep on the good side of her guardian, harvesting parts from the dump to keep her repair service running and handing over all the proceeds.

Shortly after we meet Linh Cinder, her market stall is visited by a surprising customer: Prince Kai. He wants her to repair an outdated robot. Mysterious, eh? Some chapters of the novel are told from the Prince's perspective, and he has problems of his own: his father has just been infected with the plague and he's being pressured to marry the evil ruler of a colony on the moon. Everyone on Earth fears the "Lunars," because they have evolved differently from Earth-bound humans, developing the ability to manipulate the thoughts and emotions of people around them.

Now, this is one aspect of the book that confused me a little. The story is set in future East Asia, and most characters have Asian names. The prince has "copper" eyes and straight dark hair, so I assume he has some Asian physical characteristics, and I assume the other characters with Asian names do, too. The Lunars, on the other hand, are described as almost preternaturally pale (milky white skin, etc.). So wouldn't the Lunars stand out in an Asian community? However, we learn part way through the book that there are a number of Lunars hiding in plain sight. So I guess it's better to assume that future East Asia is a very diverse community.

This is believable, since the story is set 200 years in the future--plenty of time for migration and intermarriage. And I bet the author didn't want readers to put her futuristic characters in census survey categories. But I wish she's been more explicit about the appearance of the characters since the plot hinged on Lunars being able to blend in. Since she wasn't explicit, you can actually read the novel as though everyone in future East Asia is white.

Although I had questions about the future society in which the story is set, I did like the setting: a gritty, high-tech city overlooked by a gleaming castle and research facility. I also found the main characters endearing, although I didn't find their romance entirely believable. But what really kept me reading were the more villainous characters--the doctor who studies Cinder and the Lunar Queen. The doctor was interesting because he was hard to figure out--he did some despicable things but didn't seem cruel. You could sense that he had reasons for conducting his experiments on cyborgs, and I found him interesting precisely because I didn't trust him. And the queen was wonderful because she was just so powerful. With a villain that evil and in control, you really wonder how the characters will defeat her.

Of course, you don't find out in this book, because it's the first in a series, which I didn't realize until I got pretty close to the end. In fact, despite what I liked about the book, I wasn't sure I wanted to finish it. I guessed some of the twists way before the author confirmed them, and I wasn't sure there were any surprises left. But as I got closer to the end, I found myself sucked into the action. One thing I can definitely praise this book for is the rollicking good story. There were times when I wondered why Cinder wasn't working a little harder on repairing the prince's android, but I can't complain about the pace at the end. It was action-packed!

So after going back and forth about this first installment, I can promise I'll be reading part two. I think this book had brilliant ideas plus a few problems in execution. It still stands out as a romantic adventure story with plenty of action and a unique concept. Oh, and a sweet Asian hero.

*Edited to add: And there's a prequel called Glitches on the Tor site (via Read Now Sleep Later)! You can also buy a Kindle whatever-you-call-it-one-shot thing. But I remain conflicted about Kindle things. My favorite line from the prequel: "Condensation sprang up on Cinder’s steel hand as she went from the chilled air to the house’s warm entryway." And check out the artwork! The illustrator shows sketches and explains the concept here. Something about the Lunar Chronicles seems to inspire the kind of art I want on my wall.

Review: Everybody Sees the Ants by A. S. King

2012-02-12T12:48:00.001-08:00

Everyone treats Lucky Linderman like he's crazy since he proposed this for a social studies project: poll the students in the freshman class to see how they would kill themselves. But Lucky's not suicidal. He's just sick of being bullied by Nader McMillan, whose been torturing him since they were seven. And Lucky's not crazy, either. He just dreams about rescuing his grandfather from a POW camp in Vietnam. And then wakes up with bits of the jungle in his bed.

Lucky explains all of this while he's on an impromptu vacation to his Uncle's house in Arizona. His mom takes him there after Nader attacks him at the town pool and Lucky's father, as usual, shrugs it off.

The pace of the book is unusual. It's never boring but I didn't have a strong sense of where it was going. In fact, that's making it hard to write a summary, because I don't know where to stop. There are so many important things to talk about, but many of them aren't revealed until the novel is pretty well developed. This is compounded by the fact that Lucky doesn't exactly tell the story in order. I also couldn't tell which characters were going to be the good guys and the bad guys (with the exception of Nader who was a total villain). But together, this made it all more real.

Another thing I liked about the book is that the author never cops out. There's no it-was-all-a-dream and no bullies-are-just-misunderstood. The bad stuff is bad. And it's real. Including the things that happen in Lucky's dreams. They may not be real in the strictest sense of the word, but they're not just a delusion either. Without ever explaining it, the author shows that Lucky is truly connecting with his grandfather--who he's never met--in his dreaming life. I liked this so much, I think, partly because I was so burnt by Going Bovine, which didn't seem at all real at the end.

And speaking of real, the characters in this book are so real, that I'm still trying to decide if I like one of them. Maybe that's not so weird, but I can't think of this ever having happened before. Usually I know how I feel about characters, and usually I think I know how the author wants me to feel about a character. But with Ginny, I'm still veeeeeeeery conflicted. And before I explain further, I just have to point out that Ginny doesn't even talk to Lucky until page 131. How often is a significant character introduced halfway through the book? Cool.

Anyway, Ginny is a slightly older, fantastically attractive hair model Lucky meets in Arizona. Her parents treat her like a paycheck, so she sneaks out after dark to practice the Vagina Monologues with her butch friends. Lucky thinks she's fantastic, but I didn't dig the way she dragged him around like a lovesick puppy. I thought she got off on his attention, and I wasn't sure the Vagina Monologues were really about being free: I thought they were about rebelling against her parents.

And then there's this really weird scene in which Ginny is letting Lucky "practice" kissing her, while telling him that the first time a girl has sex is "pretty much never romantic." She warns Lucky: "So don't put any high expectations on it. Just try to get through it without hurting anyone ... Guys hate being out of control. And they hate emotions. And they hate feeling let down. So try not to take it out on the girl." She keeps insisting that Lucky has never thought about this stuff and that he needs to think about this stuff so he doesn't end up like "a date rapist or something." This is in between kissing him and telling him it means nothing.

Perhaps now you can see why I don't like Ginny. And I realize it's unfair for me to assume that Ginny is speaking for the author here, but I feel this authorial presence, this message coming through the prose. It's the only moment in the book where I was really aware that a woman had written it. Hmmmmm. I think I don't like it because there's no counterargument. Ginny makes these really negative statements about guys, and Lucky seems to accept them. No one else in the novel speaks up for guys. The only men in the novel are passive (Lucky's dad) or philandering (Lucky's uncle). Lucky himself is pretty wonderful, and maybe that's enough. But Lucky's been through so much crap that Ginny delivering this speech to him, of all people, seems harsh.

But another cool thing is that even though it's becoming clear that I don't like Ginny at all, that in no way diminishes my love of the book. If anything, it increases it. I love books that make me feel something, and this one definitely got to me. There's so much more I could say, but I'm going to stop and return it to the library so someone else can read it instead. I need more people I can talk to about it. It's definitely a conversation-starter.

Review: Breaking Stalin's Nose by Eugene Yelchin

2012-02-12T12:18:00.000-08:00

Are you suspicious of literary devices in children’s books? I guess I am.

What it's all about

I just finished Breaking Stalin’s Nose, and I am sincerely impressed. It’s the story of a little boy whose father is arrested the night before the boy is supposed to join the “Young Pioneers,” which are sort of like Stalinist boy scouts. Raised to be a good Communist, the boy is sure there’s been some mistake and that Stalin will fix everything in time for the induction ceremony.

The reader senses the truth from the beginning: that the boy is now truly alone. Not only will his father never return, but the other adults in his life will turn away from him. Even his kindly aunt fears that taking him in will brand her as a traitor, too.

However, what makes this book a true thriller is that our protagonist, Sergei, as well as two other outcast boys in his class, take matters into their own hands. They don’t wait for the adults to save the day. When the nose is broken off of a statue of Stalin in the school hallway—an “unspeakably monstrous crime,” according to the principal—each boy uses the act of vandalism to carry out a small rebellion.

I loved this book. Some people have said children would need a basic understanding of Russian history to appreciate it, but I completely disagree. The narrator may live in Stalinist Russia, but he doesn’t understand it. We discover the true, twisted nature of the regime along with Sergei. And you don’t need to understand the politics to appreciate the message about figuring out right and wrong for yourself.

Why I mention literary devices

There was just one scene that I questioned: it’s when Sergei has a dream sequence or hallucination or something in which Stalin’s nose appears, dressed in uniform with little arms and legs, smoking a pipe and telling a disturbing story.

Right before Sergei has this vision or whatever (he’s in a Biology lab, so maybe there are fumes?), he overhears a literature professor talking to students about a story called “The Nose.” I’ve never read the story, but apparently, it’s about a nose that dresses up in a uniform and starts giving orders. The moral of the story is that we can’t let other people (particularly not noses dressed in uniform) tell us what is right and wrong.

Breaking Stalin’s Nose makes use of literary devices—an unreliable narrator, heavy symbolism, allusions to other literature, dream sequences—that are familiar to me in adult literature. But I’m not used to seeing them in children’s books. There’s a particularly interesting contrast between Sergei’s voice—a perfect 9-year-old voice, in my opinion—and the intrusion of the Literature professor’s explanation.

Here’s Sergei:

“I hear teacher’s voices, feet marching to an accordion, chalk knocking against blackboard, someone practicing a bugle. Everyone is learning to be useful to our country. Everyone is marching toward Communism, everyone but me.”

Here’s the literature professor:

“What ‘The Nose’ so vividly demonstrates … is that when we blindly believe in someone else’s idea of what is right or wrong for us as individuals, sooner or later our refusal to make our own choices could lead to the collapse of the entire political system.”

Now, that’s the point of the whole novel, encapsulated pretty succinctly, but the passage is still more abstract than the storytelling in the rest of the book. Why is this explanation inserted? Is it an homage to Russian literature? Is it supposed to settle in the reader’s unconscious until the day when he or she can understand it? Does it enhance the story in some ineffable way, whether the reader understands it or not?

This brings me to a larger question about literary devices in general: do they work best when we notice them or when we don’t notice them? Are they like special effects in movies—as soon as you notice them it un-suspends your disbelief and ruins the story? Or are we more aware when we’re reading that the story is a construct—because we are constructing it as we read—in which case we enjoy the way literary devices take us behind the scenes?

When I was in high school I looooooooooved noticing literary devices because it made me feel like I was cracking the code of great novels. As I got older, I was much more likely to roll my eyes and say, just tell me a story, author. I think that’s partly because of what’s happened in literary criticism—we’ve veered away from deconstruction and are back to comparing literature to reality and discussing how things in the real world are portrayed in novels.

The verdict

To bring it back to Breaking Stalin’s Nose, I feel like the author indulged a little with the Nose sequence. It’s like the radio addresses in Atlas Shrugged but not as bad. I think whether children understand it or not, it will take them out of the story, because it’s so obviously laden with meaning and unlikely to happen in real life.

However, I can think of one reason why the author may have intended to knock the reader back to reality: to make the reader reflect on his or her own life. Maybe the author wanted to go timeless for a minute, to stop the story and make his larger point so you would get the message that this isn’t just about Stalinist Russia, it’s about all people having to sort out right and wrong for themselves.

Or maybe not. Either way, I’ve read it and I’m a believer: this is a great novel for children. Twists and turns. Bold acts of rebellion. Expressive illustrations. Glittering city setting. Cold hard truth. No Deus Ex Machina. That’s how I like my historical fiction.

And now for some eco-criticism

2012-02-11T08:31:00.001-08:00

A recent study found that award-winning picture books today portray man-made environments twice as often as natural environments. I know, it sounds like a bad thing, but part of me loves it. As a librarian in an urban environment, I've always felt like there was a bias towards farms and woodlands in children's books. Turns out I'm wrong!

I was introduced to this study by a blog post that does a pretty good job of putting it in context, challenging the study's conclusion that "today’s generation of children are not being socialized, at least through this source, toward an understanding and appreciation of the natural world and the place of humans within it."

I've seen this kind of literary criticism before: studying the portrayal of the natural environment the way you might study the portrayal of women or minorities or people with some kind of "otherness." I'm not sure I buy the natural environment as an "other," although I do think it would be interesting to study its portrayal. I guess I don't think those two categories--natural and man-made--are that helpful.

Some of my favorite books for teaching children about natural phenomena feature "built" environments--Peter Brown's Curious Garden, Addie Boswell's (or should I say Eric Velasquez's) Rain Stomper, G. Brian Karas's Village Garage. I just handed two of those three to a kindergarten teacher who was doing a unit on weather.

So I'll keep looking for a better model for analyzing the role of the environment in children's books. Although there's lots of personification of the setting in books for kids, I don't think treating the natural world as a character is the way to go.

Review: Jefferson's Sons by Kimberly Brubaker-Bradley

2012-02-06T18:41:00.000-08:00

I really wish I had liked Jefferson's Sons by Kimberly Brubaker-Bradley. It focuses on such an intriguing bit of history, and yet I feel like some of the untold stories were even more interesting than the told ones.

The novel follows three boys who live in slavery at Monticello. Two of them are the sons of Thomas Jefferson by Sally Hemmings, and from the moment they are born, Sally is planning their future as free men.

The boys' parentage is an open secret, and one thing that struck me was how nice everyone is about it. None of the other slaves seem to mind that Sally Hemmings' children will be set free when the turn 18 while everyone else is property forever. I mean, they mind, but it doesn't create any distance between them and the Hemmings. In addition to being nicey-nice, the adults are very into explaining things to the kids, and other bloggers have been bothered by these modern-sounding conversations.

I didn't mind the conversations so much, but I was disappointed by the novel. Here's why: not much happens. There's the obligatory whipping scene, the boys get violin lessons, a slave gets sold to another family, and lots of fancy dinners get served. Plenty of chapters have this feeling of impending doom, but they tend to conclude suddenly without anything particularly bad happening. If I were trying to convince a child to read this book, I wouldn't know what to tell them.

I'm interested in books that complicate our mental picture of slavery. I think of the images that have stayed with me since I learned about slavery in school--the diagram of a ship with slaves packed in like sardines, that famous photograph of the scars on a former slave's back--they tell important stories. But I'm almost used to those stories. And there are so many other stories. Hearing a new one reminds me that, yes, slavery was really that bad. That crazy. That complicated. Is it important to be reminded? It feels important.

So this novel tells one of those "other" stories: the story of kids who walked the line between black and white. But like I said, not much happens. I want to know more about Sally Hemmings' life in Paris, where she was paid like a servant instead of treated like a slave. I want to know more about the experiences of Sally Hemmings' children when they leave the plantation and learn to "be white."

But it occurs to me that those would be YA novels. It's damn hard to write a children's book about slavery. For one thing, you have to be delicate about the sex and violence of slavery, which feels like cheating. For another thing, childhood is a narrow window in which to tell a sweeping story. This is one area in which Brubaker-Bradley comes up with a clever solution: she cycles through three different protagonists. As one boy reaches his teen years, she switches perspectives, telling the next part of the story from a younger boy's perspective.

So I applaud Brubaker-Bradley for telling the story that so intrigued her and I hope it inspires others. I'm glad the book is getting good reviews in Horn Book and that it's championed by Elizabeth Bird. But I can't say I'll be recommending it to a lot of kids at my library.

Youth Media Awards Yay!

2012-01-23T12:26:00.000-08:00

Anyone who was at the RI Mock Newbery with me knows that I am thrilled Okay for Now didn't win anything. Yay! I think Gary Schmidt is a masterful writer, and it's true, as people said at Mock, that he can sweep you off your feet and through a madcap series of events, leaving you breathless, disheveled, and romanced. But then there's that morning after feeling, when you wonder if it's really right [spoiler alert] to rehabilitate a chronically abusive character and strike the strongest female character with cancer. I mean, cancer! He could have given her laryngitist!

I have a lot of love for Gary Schmidt and Okay for Now. If I didn't, I wouldn't be so passionate about it not winning. I have no doubt Schmidt has a Newbery winner in him, and I sincerely hope that he wins later in his career for a book in which he does not kill off (or almost kill off) the spunky young female!

I'm also happy to see a wordless book win the Caldecott and thrilled that Xavier Garza is getting the recognition he deserves.

Well, I'm thrilled, and I also feel a little like my favorite indie band just got signed by a major label ... but my better angel reminds me that children besides the one in my library deserve to have access to books about luchadors. Because they are awesome.

Oh, and Roger must be patting himself on the back about this one.

My Graphic Novel Selection presentation

2012-01-21T11:32:00.001-08:00

Thanks to everyone who braved the weather to attend!

Graphic novel selection

View more presentations from xmsbrownx.

Richard Peck labors for 40 years and produces a mouse

2012-01-07T08:09:00.000-08:00

I just stole the funniest line from Peck's Horn Book acceptance speech for my blog post. But it's not the best line! There are many good lines in his speech. In it he explains that the best way to talk to young people these days is through a book. He seems to say that we can't reach them directly, because they're far away from us, checking their phones and their friends' hairstyles. They live in a different world than adults do. This seems quite true to me.

It was the perfect thing to read (because I agreed with it so wholeheartedly) after fuming about the Nazaryan piece I mention below. (Oh. I think my heart rate just spiked again. Anyway.) However, the speech is not without controversial statements. I also encourage you to read it because of what Peck has to say about attacks from the "family values right" and the "multicultural left." And his comments on Stuart Little's oddness remind me of the time I read the original Curious George to a kindergarten, forgetting about the monkey's pipe-smoking habit ...

In which I attack the attack on Walter Dean Meyers

2012-01-06T14:48:00.000-08:00

I love a good polemic, and this one is delightfully hair-curling, so I hope everyone will pop over and read Alexander Nazaryan explain why Walter Dean Myers will FAIL as National Ambassador for Young People's Literature.

Of course, I'm a librarian, so maybe my reaction to this opinion piece just shows that it's a good thing I'm not a literature teacher, but I completely disagree with Nazaryan. I mean, I hardly know where to start.

I also don't know much about what the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature is supposed to do exactly, but the title suggests to me that they are supposed to promote young people's literature. And Homer is not young's people's literature.

Also, you can't read Homer all day long. I want my students to become readers, which means to me that reading will be part of their lives in many ways. I want them to read for pleasure as well as enlightenment, and I want them to be able to read the millions of forms and news stories and emails that will fill their lives. And I don't think you have to put down one kind of reading in order to promote another.

Finally, I doubt very much that Walter Dean Myer's mission, as ambassador, is to promote his own literature. I expect he will promote reading and literature in general to many children, and I would argue that he will succeed in an area that Nazaryan and I will undoubtedly fail: in convincing minority kids that reading isn't just for white people. Or old men. Or nerds. Or plucky suburban school girls with adorable quirks who like to read books about butter churns and sleigh rides.

Anyway, the article doesn't even offer an intelligent critique of Dean's writing. It's just an excuse for Nazaryan to talk about his own awesomeness. Way to go, dude. Seriously. He got kids to read and relate to the classics. But why put down other kinds of reading and writing? What I dread much more than the thought that kids will stop reading Homer is that they will assume that all the important books in the world were written hundreds of years ago by dead white men.

* Edited to add: I just went over to the article and posted a comment, and Sarah Flowers, the President of YALSA comments, too! Let the jousting begin!

“what does it profit them if they read many books and love none?”

2011-09-27T17:44:00.000-07:00

So the day after I present at OLIS and make all these declarations about how summer reading programs have changed little from the 1970s, I learn that they have actually changed little since the 1900s! While putting together the powerpoint for the presentation, I stumble upon this blog post from NYPL describing the evolution of the online component of their summer reading program. Sort of interesting.

But the blog post links to this master's thesis: A History of Youth Summer Reading Programs in Public Libraries! Fascinating! In the early literature, some librarians accuse other librarians of doing summer reading programs just to increase circulation. How funny, when these days I don't think anyone would be abashed about trying to get their numbers up.

But what really got me were the excerpts from an attack on summer reading programs written by one librarian Latimer (his or her first name isn't mentioned) in 1923. That's where the title of this post comes from. According to the thesis:

This was the first negative response encountered to summer reading programs. It raises the issue of incentives used for reading, one that is still debated. It is critical of creating an atmosphere similar to school during the vacation, when children should be on a break, and creating a negative connection with the library and reading by forcing children to read. In the article the first mention is made of a private company, Gaylord, publishing materials, available for purchase, to support summer reading programs in public libraries.

I can't decide if it's encouraging or discouraging that people have questioned the distribution of prizes and the emphasis on quantity of summer reading for almost 90 years. It's encouraging that other librarians (dead librarians, probably, but whatever), agree with me. It's discouraging that these questions have been raised for so long, but still prizes and logs are default parts of summer reading. Prizes and logs can be used to support specific goals, but I feel like in some cases, they have replaced the goals.

Some questions I think everyone could ask while planning their summer reading program:

How does this fit into my year-round relationship with children and schools?
How can I bring new people into the library community this summer?
What is necessary for children to have positive reading experiences? (Think really basic, like a place and a time to read.)

My Summer Reading presentation

2011-09-26T15:25:00.000-07:00

Today I presented some of my summer reading research at the state children's librarians' meeting. It was magical to be surrounded by so many librarians! I love professional development.

Summer Reading Research and Public Libraries

View more presentations from xmsbrownx.

The complete citations for the studies I mention are:

Dominican University (2010). The Dominican study: Public library summer reading programs close the reading gap.” Retrieved from http://www.dom.edu/academics/gslis/imls/ClosetheReadingGap/

Heyn, B. (1978). Summer Learning and the Effects of Schooling. New York: Academic Press Inc.

Kim, J. S., & Guryan, J. (2007). “The efficacy of a voluntary summer reading intervention on reading activities and reading achievement.” Journal of Educational Psychology 99, 505‐515.

McTague, B., & Abrams, B. (2011). “Access to books: A scaffolded program creates readers.” Reading Improvement, 48(1), 3‐13.

Book Review: Marvel Origin Story Picture Books

2011-08-27T09:08:00.000-07:00

I picked up three of the Marvel Origin Story picture books at Borders for about $4.50 each. I figured they'd fall into the category of "books with high kid appeal and questionable literary merit." That said, don't ask me why Marvel picture books bother me less than Disney books. I never buy Disney books.

So I read them (The Mighty Thor, The Amazing Spider-Man, and The Uncanny X-Men) and I thought they were solid choices. They're written like fables--all narrative and no dialog. I did feel like there was a huge missed opportunity there. I mean, these are stories from comic books. Why not add some word bubbles to the art? The readers would understand Spider-Man's character better if they got some of his witty banter.

Without the dialog, the characters seem very serious. There's a surprising lack of humor in the stories. But that's not exactly a complaint. You do get a sense of the epic-ness of these comics, which works particularly well with Thor's origin story.

The main thing Marvel got right was the amount of text on each page. Unless you're Patricia Polacco, you can't get away with too many words on the page anymore. At least, not if you want to appeal to 7-year-olds. These are the right length for read-alouds, even if they are 48 pages rather than 32 (wow, I just counted and that surprised me), except for maybe the X-men story. I feel like they could have cut that one off earlier. They tried to cram a lot in.

The way that these work well in a school is that they give you so many opportunities to talk about character traits. Again, the Peter Parker and Thor stories are all about how those characters developed into decent people who took responsibility for their actions, and for their community. Obviously, the Thor story also gives you an opportunity to talk about mythology. In case it isn't obvious, the X-men story is the weak link. I don't really know what you'd do with that. Science? Mutations? Tolerance? The story skims too much. It doesn't give you a lot to work with.

There's also a Captain America Origin Story, but I didn't find that at the Borders where I was shopping. I bought these partly because I already have Ralph Cosentino's picture books about Batman, Superman, and Wonderwoman. I love them, because the art has this really retro vibe. They capture the feeling I imagine 1940s kids having when they read the original Amazing Stories, etc. These Marvel Origin Stories are much better, in my opinion, than the easy readers Capstone is putting out there (although I may buy those, too).

And basically, I'm a fan of introducing kids to this American mythology. People try to say Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed are our mythology, but I believe it's comic books.

Tween: it rhymes with scene!

2011-08-08T09:59:00.000-07:00

As some of you know, I'm working as a consultant for two different libraries this summer. (What is this "vacation" of which you speak? We do not have this where I come from ...) At the Derry Public Library, in New Hampshire, part of what I did was look at their programming schedule, plus data from past programs, to identify gaps in service.

I discovered that there were 4 regular programs for kids between 0 and 5, but only the occasional program for kids 6 to 11. I'm surprised by the number of libraries at which this is true. Of course, there's a lot less competition when you're offering programs for 0- to 5-year-olds. While elementary school kids also have karate and piano lessons and homework and street gangs (not funny, but true), the only other demands on preschoolers' time are nap time, snack time, and play time.

But I think there are two other factors at play:

There aren't the same tried-and-true formulas for working with kids in "middle childhood." You have to respond to the needs of your community and play to your strengths. You can't just look up a story time format in a book and execute a successful program. I'm not saying preschool story times aren't super important. They are super important! But, sorry. They're just not rocket science. It's really hard to fail with them. Whereas it's easy to fail with programs for older kids.
Many libraries lump 6- to 8-year-olds and 9- to 11-year-olds into the same programs. You're not going to attract 9- to 11-year-olds that way. Maybe that used to work, but have you heard the maxim KAGOY? It stands for "Kids are getting older younger." Love it. Marketers have created this "tween" category, and there's no way we can go back to lumping those budding adolescents in with the kiddies. We've got to show that we "get" them and we welcome them.

In response to this, I have searched the Internet high and low for resources on programs and services for tweens. And I've found some real gems, so I thought I'd share:

Amanda Crowley's "What is a Tween?" website for the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Tween-friendly Programs from the ALSC's Kids@Your Library Publicity, Programming, and Promotion Tool Kit.

Joanna Axelrod's presentation to the California Library Association on a Tween 2011 Summer Reading Program [PPT].

Rita Solan's article on The Tween Market in the Michican Library Association Forum.

Brianne Wilkins Bester and Tiffany Pahman's "The Tween Scene" presentation [PPT] from the 2010 Ontario Library Superconference and "The Tween Scene: A year of programs for 10- to 15-year-olds" website.
Faris, C. (2009). Betwixt and Between: Tweens in the Library. Children & Libraries, 7(1), 43-5. Retrieved August 4, 2011, from
Library/Information Science & Technology Abstracts with Full Text (EBSCOhost).

Goodstein, A. (2008). What Would Madison Avenue Do?. School Library Journal, 54(5), 40-3. Retrieved August 4, 2011, from
Library/Information Science & Technology Abstracts with Full Text (EBSCOhost).

And of course, each of these has a bibliography so you can choose your own adventure!

Shopping at Borders

2011-08-06T20:14:00.001-07:00

Too bad you can't combine the word "Borders" with "Apocalypse" or "Armageddon." That would have made a real snappy title for my post.

I went to Borders to see if the prices had gone down enough to compete with Amazon, and the answer is: nope. Most things are still 25% off, although "Literature" is 30% off. That's literature--not sci fi, graphic novels, or new fiction.

However, Borders is selling their fixtures--at least the store in North Attleboro is--for around $100 for a double sided bookstore shelf. They have end caps for $50 and tabletop displays for $25. You can only purchase the fixtures at certain times--til 5 p.m. on Sunday, and until 8 p.m. during the week, if I recall correctly.

I'm tempted by the fixtures, but all I bought today were some poster hangers. I have a vision for redecorating my library that involves hanging posters--not sticking them to the walls where they'll just look wrinkly, but hanging them a few inches away from the wall like banners.

So now I'm poster shopping, but instead of finding things I could actually use in my library, I keep focusing on things that are not actually for sale, like these mashups of movie posters and children's books ...

... or things that are not really intended for children, like these minimalist takes on classic kids titles.

Anyone have suggestions besides the ALA store?

I can read without moving my eyes!

2011-08-04T10:45:00.001-07:00

Oh man, wait til the people who hate ebooks hear about this! They're all upset that we're dispensing with physical pages, the smell of new bindings, and the varieties of type face. Wait til they hear that we're dispensing with paragraphs and page layouts!

I just finished the third article in the Boston Globe's series about reading. There were three articles--the past, present, and future of reading--and the third one was by far the most interesting. Reporting on current reading research, the author proposed a way to deliver large amounts of text through small screens: Rapid Serial Visual Presentation or RSVP.

Basically, the words appear on the screen one after another and you just read them before they disappear. Sounds stressful, right? But there are some popular RSVP apps and extensions on the web, and their creators emphasize that you can read much faster this way.

I had to try it, so I downloaded this Firefox add-on. The tutorial gives you a pretty good idea of how it works.

I have to try it more, but what I immediate notice is that I don't like seeing the first half of some punctuation, like quotation marks or parenthesis, without seeing the other half. Also, I'm so used to line breaks being meaningful, like in poetry, that when I'm reading two or three words at once, I keep looking for significance in the groupings. But I'm intrigued!

Also, I've decided that I would like the next generation of ebook readers to work like snap bracelets: I want them to be flexible, so I can roll them up, but I also want to be able to hold them above my head with one hand while reading in bed, so then they would have to be rigid.

The Boston Globe article mentions some other interesting possibilities. It's definitely worth reading in its entirety.

New Adult Lit: My Picks

2011-08-02T08:38:00.000-07:00

The Atlantic has a little article on YA lit, including its popularity with "old adults" and the possibility of an imprint for "new adults" at St. Martins [via Bookshelves of Doom]. We all know I love the idea of books for twenty-somethings, so in honor of the discussion, here's a list of the books that sort of hit me in the face in my twenties. I read them and thought: this is my life.

*The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon. In which the son of a mobster briefly--for the summer after graduating from college--considers leaving the comfortable straight and narrow path his father has put him on.

*Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl. When her father drags her to a new boarding school for her senior year, Blue van Meer is folded into a clique of cool students curated by a film teacher. But the film teacher is dead in the introduction, so obviously things go horribly wrong. Other books about academia/boarding school: The Secret History by Donna Tartt, Never Let me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, The Historian by Elizabeth Kostokova, Skippy Dies by Paul Murray, and On Beauty by Zadie Smith.

*Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. I think this happens to everyone at some point in their twenties: you become involved with someone fascinating and magical but damaged, and eventually you want to escape, but feel obligated to stay. The protagonist of Norwegian Wood, Watanabe, gets involved with no less than 3 magical but damaged people.

*Briar Rose by Jane Yolen. A young reporter with a thing for her editor researches her Grandmother's story of what happened to her during the Holocaust. Part of a whole series of retold fairy tales. I also read Tam Lin by Pamela Dean and loved it.

*I Was Told There'd be Cake by Sloane Crosley. There are so many memoirs that qualify as new adult lit. I related to Crosely's tales of longing for coolness in New York--her sad wanderings through European cities and disappointments in apartment hunting--more than I wanted to. I also loved Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, although that might only resonate with people who grew up religious ... or in a historical reenactment? Other memoirs that come to mind: Tweak by Nic Sheff, Smashed by Koren Zailckas, A Piece of Cake by Cupcake Brown, and Prozac Nation by Elizabeth Wurtzel.

*Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine. Ben is annoyed by the fortune cookie metaphor in the film that wins his girlfriend's Asian-American film festival, and she's annoyed when he hires a pert white girl who's "just his type" at the movie theater he manages. It's like he wants to ignore the fact that he's Asian--haven't we all wanted to ignore an important part of our identity? Other graphic novels: Life Sucks and La Perdida by Jessica Abel, Blankets by Craig Thompson, Scott Pilgrim books by Bryan Lee O'Malley.

*Coldest Winter Ever by Sister Souljah. Right, so this doesn't exactly reflect my life, but it's an obvious pick: Winter Santiaga takes over the family business of drugs and violence when her Dad is locked up. It's a rags-to-riches-to-rags story, part wish fulfillment and part morality play. In fact, lots of urban fiction features protagonists crossing over to adulthood: Flyy Girl by Omar Tyree, Moth to a Flame by Ashley Antoinette, B-More Careful by Shannon Holmes, Harlem Girl Lost by Treasure E. Brown, and Criminal Minded by Tracy Brown, to name a few.

*The Magicians by Lev Grossman. The sequel just came out, so I guess most people know this is a story of what it might really be like if a bunch of disaffected high school students got access to a beautiful but weirdly hollow other world like Narnia.

*Where She Went by Gayle Foreman. Follow-up to what was certainly a YA novel. Concert cellist Mia and her ex-boyfriend, indie rocker frontman Adam, spend a night walking the streets of New York and untangling what happened between them. Two other series that follow their protagonists from teenhood to adulthood: (starting with) Sloppy Firsts by Megan McCafferty and The President's Daughter by Ellen Emerson White. Arguably, also the Hunger Games?

*How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents by Julia Alvarez. Works backwards from four sisters' early twenties to their arrival in the US--from the DR--in their teens. They're Dominican, not Mexican, but I still feel like if you loved reading The House on Mango Street in 10th grade, you'll love the vignettes about the Garcia Girls. Other stories of being between cultures: Brick Lane by Monica Ali, The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, Londonstani by Gautam Malkani, and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz.

And I didn't even include historical fiction, the ouvre of the Brontes and Jane Austen, popular series like Sookie Stackhouse, Kalisha Buckhannon's books, stories by Karen Russell or Kelly Link, the Bell Jar, early Madeleine L'Engle, or Momofuku, which is a cook book but is also the story of one Dave Chang. But that's 10, which is a satisfying number.

Things I read this weekend

2011-08-01T19:27:00.000-07:00

Jessica Lawlor is looking for books about twenty-somethings (we totally need a new section in the library!), and I have a suggestion: Girls in White Dresses, reviewed at Full Stop.

Local rag the Phoenix starts a library vs. kindle cage match. (Not much new here, but three people have now mentioned the article to me. I read it so I could discuss intelligently.)

No one's particularly impressed with the iriver. Which leads me to ponder, who do I trust least? Google or Amazon?

Will Khan Academy allow me to identify the math geniuses among my third graders?

Also, I read about Africa. Specifically, I read the work of three winners of the Caine Prize:

Local writer E.C. Osondu (he teaches at PC) reviews Binyavanga Wainaina's memoir for the Boston Globe.

That led me to Wainaina's 2005 essay, "How to Write About Africa." If you want a crash course in what not to look for when evaluating children's books about Africa, read it.

Then I read the story that won this year's Caine prize, "Hitting Budapest" by NoViolet Bulawayo. Recognize these children?

Oh, Google

2011-07-31T18:38:00.000-07:00

People are always telling me that Google is going to steal my job. Like Google would want my job.

I was filling in at the reference desk of another library recently, and a patron wanted to show me a website, so she put her cursor in the Google toolbar on the browser and typed--I kid you not--"Google" and hit enter. When the list of search results appeared on the screen, framed by what was obviously the Google interface, she clicked on the first result, which was, of course, Google. Only then did she do her keyword search.

Am I even making sense? What I'm saying is, she Googled Google and then clicked on the first link in the list of results from Google, which was also Google.

Google is not going to steal my job, because my job is to teach people how to use Google. Among other things.

But that's not really what I wanted to post about: Did you know that the Google search results you get are tailored to you? I knew the ads were tailored to my searches, and to my emails when I'm logged in, but I didn't realize that when I search for "Debt Crisis," I get a different list of results from you. I thought we all got the same results--whatever pages were most popular based on that magic algorithm. But no. My preferences and past searches are also taken to account, so my list of results might include different news sources than yours.

I do think this is kind of a big deal, even though I usually yawn at people who decry Google. I guess it isn't inherently bad, but I didn't know it was happening until I read this article, so until then I treated Google results as an indicator of what The World is clicking on. Now I have to treat it as an indicator of what I am clicking on, which is less interesting to me.

There was a recent article in the New York Review of Books about how Google's product isn't really searching--it's advertising. That's what made me think about all this. And everyone knows that Google's making us stupid, too, right?

But not stealing my job. Just for the record.

Social Networking Sites for Kids

2011-07-30T08:24:00.000-07:00

Inspired by NYPL's summer reading site, I've been checking out different social networking sites for kids. I'd like to teach my students how to "social network" safely, and of course, developing my own online playground seems like the most awesome way, so I was curious about what the standards were for developing safe sites.

I like how the NYPL and Scholastic "Stacks" site have username generators that let kids pick an animal, color, or adjective, but don't let kids put any of their personal information in their username. I also appreciate that they don't require an email address, which kids are practically discouraged from having in public elementary schools (not that I agree with that).

I noticed that other sites have controlled vocabularies kids can use in their posts--and sometimes even prefab statements they can use, like those comments teachers put on report cards. So kids can't really chat freely, but they can respond to other people's, you know, stuff.

With a lot of these SVEs*, the emphasis really isn't on communicating with other kids, as far as I can tell. On sites like WebKinz and StarDoll, you're creating and maintaining an online creature--it might be an avatar, but it's not necessarily a representation of you--it's more a representation of a pet or toy you wish you had.

I haven't spent a lot of time playing around these sites yet, but I did explore StarDoll's Mortal Kiss site--apparently the publisher collaborated with an existing kids' social networking site to promote a particular title. Is this a model for libraries?

I'm cautious about partnering with commercial sites, but I wonder how many libraries have the capacity to develop and maintain their own social networking sites. On the other hand, I know very little about programming. I just know that when I tried out BuddyPress on my other site, I got malware the first week, so I just deleted the whole thing. I think it happened because I removed the email validation.

I also noticed that Follett offers something like social networking as part of its Destiny Quest--not that it's turned on for my library's catalog. This makes the most sense to me: have social networking be part of the online catalog, a database which already includes peoples' personal information as well as access to the collection. Now that RI public libraries have Encore, you can tag books and see a Google preview. Soon, can we write reviews? And will any aspect of this be designed with kids in mind?

Other sites to check out:

KidzRocket
The Doll Palace
Quizilla
Club Penguin

*Like how I threw that in there? It stands for "Shared Virtual Environments" and I got it from "Tip of the Iceberg: Meaning, Identity, and Literacy in Preteen Virtual Worlds," by Eric M. Myers. This article was published in the Journal of Education for Library and Information Science, Vol. 50, No. 4--Fall 2009. I got it through URI's access to Ebsco's Library/Information Science & Technology Abstracts.

I finally read some of that Tiger Mother book

2011-01-21T10:39:00.000-08:00

There are excerpts in lots of places, including WSJ, where I read it. What I find most interesting are other people's reactions, especially an African-American perspective on NPR.

I'm trying to figure out if any of my students have tiger mothers, or if there's any part of being a tiger mother I could (or should) apply in the classroom/library. Obviously not the part where Amy Chau calls her kids garbage! Nor can I spend hours one-on-one with a child, badgering her into achieving perfection. But maybe the idea of never giving up?

I let my students slide out of finishing work pretty frequently. I give them a mediocre grade because their work is incomplete, but then I move on, because I don't want to keep the class waiting. Would it be better to make that child keep working on step one until she gets it right? It's hard to imagine making one child sit at her desk working on the same thing until it was perfect while other students raced ahead. But I want to be brave enough to do whatever it takes to really teach kids. Not just coach my kids into doing enough work to get them an S on their report card.

Actually, we should make it harder for kids to read

2011-01-21T10:00:00.001-08:00

I read this article on Salon.com about how using hideous typeface in your presentations actually helps people retain the information you're sharing. Since this was a Salon.com article, it was more about typography than learner outcomes, but the article is based on an education study [pdf] that definitely messes with some of my assumptions.

If you're like me, you dream of super slick lesson plans that allow information to flow effortlessly through your students' brains. This study suggests that when we make it easy for students to take in information, we also make it easy for them to forget the information--in 15 minutes or 15 days or after they take the test. If we make it a little harder--by, say, writing the information in a jazzy font--we engage their brains better and help the info stick.

I still think the typeface thing seems kind of gimmicky. Although the article points out that it's cheap and easy to implement! And I'd like to tell the guy in the Salon.com article who worries that the Kindle makes it "too easy to read" that I can give him more serious things to worry about if he's interested. But I like the idea of "desireable difficulties." In what ways do I want my students to struggle, grapple, and wrestle with information?

Sorry--I've been transitioning

2011-01-21T09:53:00.000-08:00

I have a new job! Which is why I've been useless at posting to this blog. I'm now an elementary school librarian, which means I have a captive audience of over 500 kids a week! It also means I have to be more of a censor and rule-enforcer and teacher. Also I no longer work with teens. But I have snow days! Like today! So here I am again, with a whole new set of challenges and hopefully a more focused range of topics to explore on this blog.

Defending First Person Shooters

2010-09-16T12:04:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking about buying an Xbox Kinect for the library. That has nothing to do with first person shooters. But I've been trying to decide exactly what I think about gaming in libraries. I'm, like, vaguely in favor of it. But I don't know enough.

So my boyfriend sent me this article about a recent study suggesting that playing first-person shooter games makes you a better decision-maker. He says there have been a number of studies suggesting that playing video games makes you smarter. But he thinks it's the other way around: smart kids are attracted to video games. I think that video games just develop different parts of your brain. It makes you smarter at some things, but not at others.

Still, the article is interesting, because it highlights the benefits of playing first-person shooters, probably the most notorious kind of video games. In similar news, Stan Lee recently wrote an open letter to the Video Game Voters Network encouraging them to resist censorship and regulation. He compares the way people are vilifying video games now to the way they vilified comic books back in the day.

Just the fact that people are vilifying something always makes me want to buy it for the library, but I obviously have a lot more thinking and research to do. I like the idea of video game tournaments at the library, a model for incorporating gaming that has been championed by Eli Neiburger (who I saw present at ALA--he was awesome). But I don't know that I have the resources.

Review: Half World by Hiromi Goto

2010-09-14T08:23:00.000-07:00

There are zillions of books with vaguely medieval fantasy settings, but I love a fantasy world with rough edges and a very specific purpose. Half World is just such a place. It's one of three realms, which were once connected. People passed from the realm of the living to the realm of half-life to the realm of the spirit life and then back to living in a constant cycle.

But somehow the realms were severed, so that living people were reincarnated without passing through the other worlds. Anyone stuck in Half World had to reenact their greatest traumas over and over again without every getting over them. And no one's heard from the Spirit Realm.

Enter a melancholy girl named Melanie Tamaki (Canadian-Chinese, I think?), whose mother is a vague, lifeless woman who lives like a fugitive. One day, Melanie comes home to find the phone lines cut and her mother missing. While she's wondering what to do, she gets an impossible phone call from a man with an icky sticky voice who commands her to go to a highway overpass and look for an emergency door. I bet you can guess what's on the other side.

I loved the ideas behind this book, and I loved the illustrations by Jillian Tamaki: the bridge of crows, the disintegrating magic eight ball. With references to Escher and Bosch, Half World really lent itself to artwork, much the way The Phantom Tollbooth, Un Lun Dun, and Coraline did.

But I also feel like there was a missed opportunity here. Once Melanie crossed over into Half World, she spent all of her time at a seedy hotel where her nemesis was having a party. I wanted her to meet some of the tortured creatures of half world and hear their stories! I wanted her to have daring escapes and Herculean tasks! I wanted a picaresque journey through a fully developed world! OK, I wanted a lot. But still, I feel like confining our character to a hotel limited the possibilities too quickly.

The other problem was that the explanations were not always clear. For example, Melanie received an amulet that sometimes turned into a living rat and helped her. This is the amulet maker's explanation for how this works:

I wanted to see if I could leave a little Spirit inside stone. Because stone is inert. It did not breach the laws of the cycles. Jade Rat the animal was very old. I extended her mortal life but even I could not more than double her life span. I turned her into stone from which the amulet was carved. And when my death came upon me, sudden and terrible, I left a little of my Spirit inside the properties of stone (99).

So she extended the animal's life but turned the animal into stone and then put some of her life in the stone, so the stone could turn into the animal at certain times?

Anyway, this is still a fantasy novel I would recommend to many readers, especially those who like to read gruesome stories and then tell me: "This book is messed up! Listen to this!" I would say that the book is creepy enough that it's a teen pick, as opposed to children's (people reenacting the moment of their worst trauma over and over again, monstrous creatures with gaping holes in their faces or bodies made of glue, you get the picture). And I think I would buy anything with Jillian Tamaki's artwork on the cover.

"Yeah, I'm an EA Librarian."

2010-09-10T09:24:00.000-07:00

I'm imagining saying that to people in 20 years. EA stands for Emerging Adult, because according to a recent NYT article, what used to be "your 20s" is now a discrete neurological stage in the development of human life! Check it out:

"JEFFREY JENSEN ARNETT, a psychology professor at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., is leading the movement to view the 20s as a distinct life stage, which he calls “emerging adulthood.” He says what is happening now is analogous to what happened a century ago, when social and economic changes helped create adolescence — a stage we take for granted but one that had to be recognized by psychologists, accepted by society and accommodated by institutions that served the young."

If "Emerging Adulthood" is a stage with its own psychological profile, it follows that it must have it's own literature. At least, I think. And I can even think of a few examples:

The most obvious example of literature for disaffected 20-somethings (or, you know, "Emerging Adults") is probably Scott Pilgrim. Isn't the first line something about how he's dating a high schooler? Or is that just in the movie? Anyway, that's one of many graphic novels that focus on the culture of people who are delaying the traditional progress to adulthood (careers, marriage, children). Personally, I adore the work of Adrian Tomine, particularly Shortcomings, which looks at one guy's inability to have a functional, adult relationship with his Asian girlfriend, because he's fascinated by white women and what they represent.

There are also a few series that follow characters through their adolescence into some semblance of adulthood. Like the Alice books, which follow a character from childhood to her teens, these books are difficult to categorize. Do I put the first few in the teen section and the last one in adult? Obviously, I never do that, so I'm not actually sure why I posed the question. But. Theoretically. Anyway, I'm thinking of Megan McCafferty's series, which begins with Sloppy Firsts, and Ellen Emerson White's series about the daughter of a woman who runs for President.

In Sloppy Firsts, Jessica Darling feels attracted to a boy who might have contributed to her brother's deadly drug habit and writes long letters about her doubts to her best friend who moved away. I was completely attracted to the bad boy romance, especially when the novel ended without resolving Jessica's feelings for the boy. And I kept right on reading til I finished Perfect Fifths, in which Jessica is a 25-year-old, well-traveled professional who misses a plane to a friend's wedding and has an unexpected 24 hours in which to reflect on her past relationship choices.

I haven't read every book in Ellen Emerson White's series, because I got a review copy of Long May She Reign at a conference and just started there. Long May She Reign focuses on Meg Powers' first year of college, which is complicated by the fact that A) her mother is the President of the United States, and B) last fall, Megan was kidnapped by terrorists. It's a fascinating profile of a survivor. I've always meant to go back and read the other books in the series, particularly the one in which she's kidnapped, and I hope that White writes another one about Meg's 20s.

I'm sure there are many more books for post-YA readers. Can you imagine a section of them in your library some day?

Bookmobiles will save us!

2010-08-06T19:55:00.000-07:00

The media has picked up the results of the University of Knoxville study on summer reading and learning loss. From the New York Times:

One of the most notable findings was that children improved their reading scores even though they typically weren’t selecting the curriculum books or classics that teachers normally assigned for summer reading. That conclusion confirms other studies suggesting that children learn best when they are allowed to select their own books.

I prefer the NPR take, which highlights people's love of bookmobiles. It has always been my dream to drive a bookmobile! There was a bookmobile that stopped at the retirement home across the street from me when I lived in Portland, ME, and although it was there to serve less mobile people than myself, I happily took advantage of it. In fact, I remember checking out a number of books about the Bermuda Triangle. So cool.

Story Maps

2010-08-05T06:29:00.000-07:00

Although I learned about developmental levels in school, what I really needed to know was the exact age when a child can use scissors without cutting herself. This summer, I feel like I finally got a handle on the different age ranges for which I should be offering programming. There are some natural divisions in kids' abilities and interests, and by getting tough about the age ranges for my programs, I figured out what some of those divisions are.

For example, the age when kids can string beads and noodles on a piece of yarn that is taped at one end: 7. The age at which children become embarrassed to do finger rhymes and songs: 9. And the age when they can operate the bathroom key and therefore do not need parents in the vicinity to accompany them: 10.

Obviously, some of these only apply to my library, but this is invaluable data for me. Part of the reason I've been so focused on ages and skill levels is that I've been trying to do more effective programming for my older kids. And by older, I mean older than 5, so actually, I'm talking about everything besides my preschool programming. One of my goals has been to introduce longer, more complex picture books, and I would like to announce my first successful approach to this end: story maps!

The one above is for the book Sindbad : from the tales of The thousand and one nights, retold and illustrated by Ludmila Zeman. We've been doing a lot of stories about sea voyages this summer, and I wanted to include this one, because I think the 1,001 nights is a classic and kids these days don't know their classics. Also, the illustrations are riveting--almost baroque in their detail. (Although the cover is not nearly as neon as that pic would lead you to believe.) But the text is longish, and the vocabulary is challenging, so I wasn't sure the tale alone would hold the kids' attention. Hence the story map!

Basically, I just drew a number of important objects from the story and had the kids color in the objects when they were mentioned. Worked like a charm! It was a different kind of listening than that rapt silence kind of listening, but they were definitely paying attention and they did a good job of telling the story back to me with the images as prompts. And the fact that it was difficult to identify some of the objects, since my drawing leaves something to be desired, only added to the puzzle-like challenge. This is definitely a repeater--and another step toward my beginning reader story time.

I knew I could predict the future!

2010-08-03T20:26:00.000-07:00

Perfect Chemistry won the RITA in the YA category, just as I predicted! I still haven't read it, because it's chronically on hold. So technically, the prediction was based on nothing. Well, it was based on the book's popularity. (Memo to RI librarians: there are 12 holds on only 10 copies!) But I'm still taking credit.

I did read three of the other nominations and ended up buying all of them for the library, despite their boring, grown-up covers. Seriously, do these look like teen books?

No. OK, maybe the middle one does. But the one on the left screams "Where's my poodle skirt? I want to go to the sock hop!"

Anyway, short reviews after the jump.

The ABCs of Kissing Boys by Tina Ferraro. What makes this book so fun is, surprisingly, not the romance: it's the girl politics. When junior Parker Stanhope doesn't make the varsity soccer team, her so-called friends cut her loose. She devises a crazy plan to get back on the team which involves a kissing booth ... now all she needs are kissing lessons. You can see where this is going.

This book had some crazy, cringe-inducing make-out scenes, but I kept reading because Parker and her ex-friends turned out to be a bunch of scheming, jealous queen bees, and I loved it. I didn't really buy Parker's reformation, but whatever. So it's far-fetched.

The book has a lot of plot--family feuds, cradle-robing crushes-- and made-up kisses like the caterpillar kiss and the steam kiss (those are made up, right?). And I like that our heroine, although she has never been kissed, isn't a bookish prude. She's just a normal junior who hasn't had a proper boyfriend. That single bit of realism was refreshing.

Going Too Far by Jennifer Echols. Although the romantic heroine in this novel is a blue-haired teen wild child with debilitating claustrophobia who is forced to accompany a hot cop on his beat for a week (What? It's a community service project. It's totally plausible), the novel avoids always having the man in the dominant position by making the girl the emotionally distant one. I guess.

Our girl is arrested by a cop who she thinks is like, 40, but turns out to have graduated from high school only one year ahead of her. After her arrest, she has to ride around with him for a week instead of going on spring break, so she can witness where her reckless behavior will lead. The novel consists mostly of heated conversations between our girl and the cop.

The good stuff: I was truly surprised by one of the characters' revelations (partly because it was soooooooo melodramatic), and the sexual tension is written in such a way that I could enjoy it without feeling embarrassed for the writer. And, finally, the narrator doesn't lie about the fact that she's attracted to the male lead. Thank you for not forcing me to roll my eyes until I was in danger of falling over backwards.

Nothing Like You by Lauren Strasnick. And this one was heart-breaking. Sometimes you hear about the stupid things people do, and you think: how could you screw up your life like that? And then you read a book like this, and the screwing up seems totally inevitable.

OK, so your first clue that this is all going to end in a awful train wreck is the awkward sex scene it starts with. Holly's mourning her mother's death in strange ways, apparently, like losing her virginity in a car at the beach with a guy she barely knows. But then the guy keeps coming back for more, and Holly starts to think that what they have is more real than what he has with his girlfriend.

Then Holly becomes friends with his girlfriend. Holly experiments with different roles: scorned woman, empowered mistress, disinterested friend-with-benefits, home wrecker, true love. The writing so clearly communicates her isolation and distress--the strange glassy wall that separates her from everyone--that we never stop sympathizing with her, even as she hurts everyone around her. Because she does it without malice or even forethought. It's so sad.

So, to sum up, the RITA nominations seem like a pretty good selection tool, and they defy what I usually think of as romance, so ... interesting.

"Librarians get in fights"

2010-07-31T08:52:00.001-07:00

Love this story from NPR (via my sister)! It's all about why libraries are capturing the imaginations of the cool kids. Let's carpe diem before we're perceived as charmingly old fashioned again. Although I like being charmingly old fashioned, too.

Memories of Ramona

2010-07-29T17:50:00.000-07:00

I read all the Ramona books, but the only specific scene I remember from any of them is when Ramona upchucked out the car window. I specifically remember this because I was often carsick, and because I preferred the word upchuck to vomit or throw up.

As a child, I actually found the Ramona books a little stressful, because something was always about to go wrong. You know that feeling? So I blocked a lot of the books out. Other people have rosier memories of Ramona, but I like this article from WSJ, which (naturally) looks at the economics of the Quimby family and confirms that there was a bit of doom to the books.

Hearsay evidence re: digital comics

2010-07-28T19:49:00.000-07:00

Have you tried reading comics on an ebook reader yet? I would like to, but alas, my ebook reader is giving me an error message. This may or may not be related to my forays into downloading illegal copies of ebooks for research purposes.

So although ebook comics are now available on Overdrive, I cannot partake of them. But here's what I'm hearing from other people:

The iPad is the best device for reading digital comics,* because backlighting is actually better than e-ink screens when you're dealing with the color and lettering styles of GN. The Entourage Edge is the only ebook reader that incorporates both kinds of screens, but it's clunky, so no one loves it.

Comixology is the dominant platform for reading digital comics. The company created DC and Marvel's CBR apps and they have an impressive website. However, there is competition: iVerse, Longbox and Graphic.Ly, Panelfly, to name a few.

What's the best store? Probably not the iBook store, since they're so often accused of censorship. I don't have the answer to that one. People seem to buy from the store associated with the platform they prefer. Of course, I just wish everyone would use the same format, the way the pirates do.

*Including the PSP? I have not been able to confirm this. I like the way you can zoom around on the PSP. It's been around for a while as a digital comics reader, and the shop is impressive.

The most helpful thing on the internet this month

2010-07-28T06:56:00.000-07:00

has got to be the Good Comics for Kids blog's core title list. I, for one, plan to buy everything on the list. Seriously. Maybe not all at once. But I just ran the numbers, and in the past 5 months, graphic novels have gone from 4% of our circulation to 8%. That's significant considering the tiny-ness of the GN collections.

And while we're on the subject of lists, I just found a new graphic novel list through a very long chain of emails on the GN listserv: Texas Maverick Graphic Novels. Add that to the Cybils and my beloved GGNFT, and I don't understand why some librarians still lament the lack of tools for GN collection development.

Finding Local Authors and Illustrators

2010-07-16T09:03:00.000-07:00

The Friends of the Library received a grant a while back to bring some authors and illustrators to the library, so I have been on a quest to find authors who live close enough that I don't have to pay for their hotel rooms. That sounds cheap, which I don't mean to be, so maybe I should just say something about supporting local authors.

Anyway, how do you search for authors and illustrators by geographic location? I thought I'd share some of the most helpful strategies:

The Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators. That's a link to the New England chapter. This was probably the most helpful for finding up-and-coming authors as opposed to the "big names." I've always thought going to their conference would be helpful, too. Online, they have a speaker directory.
Past Speakers for local festivals. If you don't know of any local festivals, check out the literature departments at nearby colleges and universities. For example, I found this list from the Keene State College Festival of Children's Literature to be wonderful.
Statewide literature organizations. As in, whoever does reading-across-the-state programs or what-have-you. In my case, the Rhode Island Center for the book had a list of "booklinks," with everything from binderies to storytellers.
The American Literature Map. I love this, although its usefulness is questionable. It includes--nay, focuses on--historical authors, so you have to trawl through a lot of names looking for people who aren't dead.
LibraryThing. The key here is to find a list or group that's relevant to what you're looking for. For example, a thread about New England authors. What's nice about using LibraryThing is that it has pages for authors, so you can easily click between lists and biographical information.
GoodReads makes it even easier to find relevant groups, because if you go to the groups page, there's a link to "geographic" groups. Unfortunately, I found fewer active groups on GoodReads, so it didn't really help me.
Listservs for professional organizations. Use your colleagues' brains!

I've sent off a few emails, so hopefully some authors and illustrators are ready to wheel and deal!

"Librarians are looking forward to spending less time with books and more time with people."

2010-07-15T21:15:00.000-07:00

Isn't that a beautiful quote? It's from an article about how Stanford's engineering library went digital. They built a new library building and reduced the size of the physical collection by 85%. That's huge, right? Downloadable content is the future, people.

The article also pointed me toward this interesting story about how Arizona State University tried to use the Kindle DX instead of text books. The program never got past the pilot because the National Federation of the Blind (NFB) and the American Council of the Blind (ACB) pointed out that Kindles are not accessible to blind students.

And just today, an article I wrote about ebooks appeared in the RILA bulletin! I was predicting that ebooks would be come viable in public libraries sooner than some people thought. (Notice how I don't give an actual timeline. Clever, no?) I mentioned DRM as an obstacle to providing ebooks to patrons, but the ASU story also raises the issue of the accessibility for people with disabilities. Guess we better put on our thinking caps!

Air conditioning, anarchy, and makeshift summer camps

2010-07-14T08:07:00.000-07:00

Two interesting news articles have been sent to me by other librarians this past week. Some context for the first one: the Smith Hill and Knight Memorial Libraries have been closed more than they've been open the last two weeks, because they're not air conditioned. When it gets too hot inside, union rules dictate that the building must be closed. Meanwhile, ABC6 is telling people to got to their public libraries to cool down, so the libraries that are open are overflowing (and so are my programs). Is this what it means to be a third space?*

Let me be clear: I'm very grateful for the AC in my building. Not only does it make me comfortable, but it allows us to be consistently accessible to patrons. However, I did enjoy this anti-air conditioning article from the Washington Post.

I did not enjoy this article, which has been circulating among librarians as well: Public Libraries Serving as Makeshift Summer Camps for Some Children in Chicagoland.

Let's just start with the word "makeshift." Do we want to be makeshift anything? Is that the best we can do? Why not be excellent libraries? We'll never be excellent daycares or summer camps. We don't have the staff or the training or the space. Besides the fact that the librarians in this article about are totally off mission, I think what they're doing is dangerous. We can't take responsibility for the well-being of children for hours at a time.

I realize that "unattended" kids are going to come into the library, looking to get out of the heat, use the computer, etc. That's cool. But I don't want parents to think that they're dropping their kids off for some kind of safe, structured program. I tell parents everyday, don't leave your kids unless you think they can be responsible for themselves. There is only one children's librarian here, and I have lots of responsibilities. I will not be watching your child.

And I'm not just saying that because I'm trying to be tough about job descriptions and boundaries! I really am busy ordering books, and planning programs, and contacting authors to fulfill this grant we got, and interfiling the paperback and hardcover fiction, and managing teen volunteers. Because that's what it takes to truly meet the service goals we have.

It's never been my goal to be a summer camp. I know that in these tough economic times, not everyone can afford summer camp, but they can't afford to lose their library, either. And they are losing library services when their librarians are trying to be day care providers.

*Sincerely, I'm asking. I'm not being sarcastic.

On turning people away

2010-07-08T12:20:00.001-07:00

I always knew dealing with rejection was hard, but I never realized how difficult it could be to reject people. This is the second week of the summer reading program, and for the first time, my colleague and I have had to turn people away from programs. Well, maybe we didn't have to, but we decided our programs would run better if we were more strict about the age ranges.

Just last year, we would have been thrilled to have too many people for a program. Last year, there was no such thing as too many people! People were the measure of our program's excellence! But this year, we have enough people coming that we're getting picky. We're also running out of supplies, so we're requiring sign ups. But we've always been so loosey-goosey that a lot of our regulars are coming without signing up, because there's no precedent for it.

So. Rejecting people. It's hardest when the parent doesn't speak English, because A) I want to be extra welcoming to people who might be outside their comfort zone, and B) I have no idea what their children are actually translating to them. I try to smile a lot. And then there are the people who kindly explain to me how they should be allowed to bring their child because they didn't know we had sign-ups, therefore the sign-ups do not exist in their reality. That's not exactly what they say, but that's what it sounds like to me.

And I just feel so bad. But here's the big revelation (yes, there is a point to all this agonizing!): turning people away has helped me understand the community's needs better. Suddenly, I'm aware of gaps in our services. For example, we don't have any programs that really target kids between 9 and 12. We have kid programs, but they tend to attract 4- to 7-year olds, so the 10-year-olds are way too sophisticated. And then we have teen programs, at which we talk about sex a lot. So that's not right either. I need tween programming!

And it's true that the programs run better when we have enough materials for everyone and when the kids are within the same age range. Then they require less help and are less likely to get bored. So it's good, but it's hard. We've entered a new stage with our programming, and I should be proud. At the moment, I still feel kind of crappy, but I'm going to reread this post a few times until I believe everything I'm saying.

Trends in teen lit: Swindlers are the new vampires

2010-07-06T17:51:00.000-07:00

So obviously, the beginning of summer reading has completely bowled me over. But I'm back on my feet and in a fighting stance, so hello again! I'm here to announce a new trend: classy, old fashioned criminality. Actually, I'm not sure "young criminals" is as popular a theme as I would like it to be, but just today Cat Burglar Black, White Cat, and Heist Society all passed across my desk, putting me in mind of the ragtimey soundtrack to The Sting with Robert Redford.

Cat Burglar Black, by Richard Sala, is arguably part of a genre-within-a-genre: the education of young criminals. It's a graphic novel in which a sticky-fingered, white-blond orphan is rescued from a Dickensian orphanage by a strange relative. Then she's promptly deposited in a mysterious school for girls that only has 4 pupils, where it seems she is expected to play an important role using the extralegal skills she developed at the orphanage.

It has an odd sense of humor to it. It's sort of a parody of all those novels about con artist orphans (Do those novels really exist, or am I just thinking of the movie Candleshoe?), but it's more awkward than funny. I had to keep checking to make sure it wasn't by Joann Sfar. It also reminded me of the movie St. Trinians, which is also about an English girls school where the girls learn the criminal arts. Sidenote: St. Trinians is based on a series of drawings by cartoonist Robert Searle. Obviously, Robert Searle isn't part of the current trend in YA books that I am attempting to posit, but the movie based on his work is evidence. So is Catherine Jink's Evil Genius.

White Cat, but Holly Black, imagines a world like ours, except with "curse workers," or people who can have a magical affect on you by touching you with their hands. In this world, everyone wears gloves and those with magical abilities are called "curse workers." Because curse work--all kinds, even nice kinds, like luck work--are illegal, most curse workers are associated with organized crime. Cassel's family is no exception, although he's an exception in the sense that, unlike the rest of his kin, he has no magical abilities. What he does have is a crush on the heiress to a crime family throne, a guilty conscience, and a sleep disorder that might just get him killed--or at least kicked out of boarding school. Cassel is also a bit of a con artist, and the book teaches you a few tricks of the trade. At the end, Black references books like Games Criminals Play and The Big Con, which was also reviewed on Guys Lit Wire, and which is cataloged under the subject heading "Swindlers and Swindling," which is adorable.

While Cat Burglar Black was a bit odd, White Cat was brilliant. It was an unusually dark portrayal of toxic family relationships that I believe will resonate with teens who have had to distance themselves from family members. It also confused me in a good way by not immediately explaining the setting--so like the world I live in, but just a bit quirky. Of course I'd be remiss if I didn't at least point out the whitewashed cover. Grrrrrrrr. But that's not the author's fault. My only possible complaint is that I didn't love the heiress the way Cassel did. I love it when authors make me love the bad girls, like in The She, in which I fall in love with a girl who actually mocks people with disabilities. Are you shocked? I know! But it's that compelling of a narrative!

Now you may wonder why I haven't reviewed Heist Society, by Ally Carter. That's because there are so many holds on it that I felt bad reading it before the teens got their hands on it, so I sent it out into the world. I'll let the holds speak for themselves.

Now I'm trying to figure out why I'm such a fan of these books about organized crime. I suppose I'm a librarian and I like things to be organized--even crime. I like clever criminals and anyone who is calculating and hip to human nature. And I like anything that celebrates brains over brawn. I fear I may be having a bit of a reaction to all the stories about mindless teenage crime: See here! Teens can commit mindful crimes! Anyway, I think teens love organized crime, from the Yakuza to the Pirates of the Caribbean, and books like this encourage them to sharpen their wits. So one question: would it be a bad idea to do a program about cons?

My summer reading problem

2010-06-24T11:59:00.000-07:00

Every year, the week before the summer reading program starts, I am a terrible person. Mostly to family members and my boyfriend. And close friends. I like to think I'm still civil, if not charming, to library patrons, wait staff, and other acquaintances. But the stress of planning events at the library makes me remarkably like a bad TV mom.

And this year, I made things worse by spending way too much time on the Martha Stewart website. I never thought it would come to that. But she has so many ideas for kids crafts! I must have printed out 20 pages! But everyone knows what too much Martha Stewart can do to a person. Fortunately, while looking for cupcake cookbooks in the adult section (it's for a teen program--really*), I found I Like You by Amy Sedaris.

Of course, I'd seen the book before, but I never really understood if it was a humor book or a guide to entertaining. And after reading some of it, I still don't understand. But it is so funny that I think it's the cure for too much Martha Stewart. So, if you're like me and you're planning a summer reading program and feeling stressed a la "what if no one comes?" then I highly recommend I Like You.

How can you resist advice like this: "Once they've been assessed, it's important to magnify your strengths and ignore your weaknesses. If you have thick ankles, wear pants. If you're boring, pick exciting music. If you are a lousy cook, order out. Never overreach to mask your weaknesses. There is nothing cute or adorable about noticeably reaching beyond your capabilities. Remember, the goal is to entertain, not overtain."

Doesn't that make you feel better?

*That was like me at K-mart yesterday, where I was buying those gosh darn silly bands** as prizes. The guy at the register was like, "We have these? Seriously? Where did you find them? Are you getting them for you or your kids?" I was like, "um, my kids?"

**Oh, excuse me, silly bandz.

Rape Scenes

2010-06-19T08:20:00.000-07:00

I was talking with my sister on the phone last night about rape scenes in books and whether or not they're exploitative. I had a friend in grad school who actually shut the book every time she came across a rape scene. I'm not that hard core, but I definitely sympathize with her stance. For one thing, I read for pleasure, mostly, so why read something to unsettling? Of course, we can't always look away from unsettling things. But there has to be a good reason to look, like a lesson learned or a better understanding of other people, or ourselves.

And then there's the more disturbing issue of rape scenes that aren't unsettling enough. I was reading a graphic novel yesterday that included two rape scenes. While they weren't graphic, something about the art was so pulpy--the woman's clothing clinging to her breasts in artistic shreds, her mouth a perfect "o"--that I couldn't get the images out of my head. They were sexy rape scenes. The more I thought about it, the more angry I was.

I had been considering the graphic novel for my YA section. I do include some books with sex and violence, as long as they are generally worthy and pass the no-false-advertising test. In other words, I'll put books with "graphic" material on the shelves as long as the description and packaging of the book warn readers that it's going to be that kind of book. And frankly, the book I was considering focused on a historical figure who was known for violence, so no false advertising, but ... still. No way can I do it. I didn't know I had this particular criteria for evaluating books, but there it is: no glorification of sexual violence.

So, is that too subjective? Am I being too harsh on the artist? I wanted him to make more of a distinction between the artistic style of the rape scenes and the sex scenes. I don't know how he could have done that, but if he couldn't have figured something out ... couldn't he have just left it off camera?

Contrast that with the rape scene in the Girl with a Dragon Tattoo. Admittedly, it's not a teen novel. But that's what my sister and I talked about on the phone last night. I don't think I've ever experienced a more horrifying rape scene. That's what rape is. Horrifying. Don't think I could ever sit through that scene again, but no complaints about the way it depicted sex crimes.

Or here's a more apt contrast: Living Dead Girl. Another confession: I never actually bought that one for my teen section. But the sexual abuse scenes in that book are not remotely erotic.

While thinking about this, I also realized that I think of sex and violence as two categories, but sexual violence is really a third category. And graphic novels are a new format. And I'm not sure I'm going to put any visual depictions of sexual violence in the teen section. Certainly not sexy ones. I don't mean that I won't include graphic novels with themes of sexual violence: consider Bryan Talbot's The Tale of One Bad Rat. That's exactly the kind of graphic novel you need in your collection: a good story that also shows a path to healing for victims of sexual abuse. But I think I'm going to exclude graphic novels that have the sex abuse "on camera."

But you never know. I try to make rules, but then it seems like there's always a book that confounds me.

Boys Detective Fiction

2010-06-15T07:04:00.000-07:00

Do kids still read the Hardy Boys? I'm never sure about these genre things. Bizarrely, the Seventh Heaven paperbacks in my teen section still circulate, so I have a lot of faith in the staying power of series. I just read two mystery novels that feature tween detectives, both of which rely heavily on genre tropes, and one of which is a pastiche of boy detective series like the Hardy Boys.* What I'm wondering is whether kids will get the references, and whether they need to get them anyway.

The Brixton Brothers and the Case of the Case of Mistaken Identity, by Mac Barnett and illustrated by the fantastic Adam Rex, is not about two brothers. It's about Steve Brixton and his best "chum" Dana, who really prefers not to get dragged into Steve's amateur detecting schemes. But Steve is obsessed with the Bailey Brothers' mystery series, so by the end of this action packed book (it includes a car chase and an escape from a sinking fishing vessel), Steve tells Dana they're going to have to call themselves "the Brixton Brothers" because it sounds better.

The best running joke in the book is that everyone believes Steve Brixton is a private detective hired by the evil "Mr. E" to help steal a national treasure--all because he follows the advice in his Bailey Brothers' Detective Handbook. Of course, the advice is ridiculous. Or at least written to help children "play" detective: "Shawn and Kevin love a good booby trap. Trapping a crook gives their knuckles a break. You can trap baddies just like the Bailey Brothers! Just make like Tarzan and dig a hole in the ground, then cover it with sticks and leaves. Crash! Your unsuspecting suspect will fall right in!"

The humor in the book is consistently on point. My favorite scene is when Steve dresses up as a sailor--including a striped shirt, fake mustache, and eye patch--to infiltrate a tough fisherman's bar. When he gets in the door, he notices everyone is wearing jeans and flannel shirts. But is he daunted? No. "Yes, Steve thought, catching his reflection in a gaudy mirror. He looked more like a sailor than anyone in the place!"

So my conclusion about whether or not kids'll get it? I give the book a thumbs-up, and I think the excerpts from the Bailey Brothers' handbook are clutch. Not only do they amuse--they inform. Even if you've never read a Hardy Boys mystery, you know what kind of stuff the author is referencing, because he transcribes it for you. Plus, thanks to The Dangerous Book for Boys, plenty of kids have been exposed to an old-fashioned how-to book, whether or not they've been exposed to an old-fashioned mystery novel. Don't know if there's enough material in the Bailey Brother's handbook to sustain an entire series, but we'll see when the next Brixton Bros book comes out in Oct.

The other tween detective book I read was Griff Carver: Hallway Patrol, by Jim Krieg. This one is a riff on a film noir kind of tough-talking private eye, and I found it un-put-downable.** However, when I read part of it aloud to two kids, their eyes glazed. Could it be my attempt to impersonate a seventh-grade boy impersonating a hard-boiled PI? See what you think--from the scene when Griff signs up for safety patrol at a new school:

"Name and grade?" "Carver," I said. "Seventh." "Experience?" "Six Years," I told him, "four on the street, two inside." ... "Where?" he asked, still not impressed. "Saint Finbar's," I told him. I saw the wheels turning behind his eyes. He looked up at me again, scrutinizing my face like I was a cousin he hadn't seen in a long time or maybe I had chicken pox scars. "Carver. Griffin Carver?" he asked, suddenly interested. "The Griffin Carver?" "Heard of me?" I said. It wasn't really a question. But I'd been hoping my rep was a little more local. ... "Griffin Carver is famous." He said ... "The only Safety Patrol officer in history to get kicked out of school."

Great, right? Maybe it's just that kids prefer straight up humor to any kind of literary style. This book is very stylish, and in my experience, most kids don't care. They care about a good story, a funny line, an action-packed plot. The writing style is just packaging that they rip off on their way to understanding what's happening. By the time they're teens, narrative voice starts to matter a lot more, because they develop that radar for authenticity. But that's another post.

So I loved this book because it was stylish and I was looking for people to read it out loud to. However, it has lots more going for it, so I still think kids will adore it if they give it a chance--even if it takes itself more seriously and doesn't contain the key to its own puzzle the way the Brixton Bros does.

For one thing, the book is actually told from a variety of perspectives--Griff narrates some of it as part of an interview with the school counselor. His partner, a rookie hallway patrol office and "camp scout" who always plays by the rules (and loves gimmicky detective gear, like listening devices--perhaps he also reads the Bailey Bros?), narrates some of it via reports he files with the hallway patrol captain. And a few scenes are straight out of the diary of the school newspaper editor, Violet.

The characters are all stock, and I admit the conclusion is somewhat predictable by the time we arrive at it--I was hoping for a really shocking twist, but that's OK. The approach to the conclusion has so many switch-backs and changes in perspective, that I kept reading and reading, because I felt like the plot was spinning around me, and I couldn't focus on anything long enough to figure it all out. Griff has to use all his maverick, rule-breaking techniques to uncover the clues one by one, and his relationship with the "camp scout" has a believable evolution from disgust and distrust to blood brotherhood.

So I give this a thumbs-up, too. Ultimately, I liked Griff Carver better, but I think the Bailey Bros is more accessible. Did I mention it's heavily illustrated? I think you could hand the Bailey Bros to some fans of Diary of a Wimpy Kid, although it's a different flavor of humor. Griff Carver is definitely a book for those kids who are too smart for their own good. I love those kids, don't you? Although they're also awfully picky about books sometimes. Both of these are good choices if you're trying to beef up your selection of boy-friendly books, and they both appear to be the beginning of series.***

*Aside: Before Chelsea Caine wrote the series about the female serial killer, she wrote a send-up of Nancy Drew novels that was hilarious and slightly disturbing. Apparently, Nancy was banging everyone. I kept thinking of that as I read this.

**Anyone seen the movie Brick? Cuz it's awesome.

***The Griff Carver book says nothing about being a series, but we're totally left hanging about Griff's relationship with his older brother: why does Griff call him "the creature" when they obviously used to be tight? And it's not over between Griff and the too-slick school politician Marcus Volger. Surely there will be another book about Griff's solitary quest to bring down the most popular boy in school?

Picture books that aren't meant to be read aloud

2010-06-10T07:03:00.000-07:00

In the past, my friends and I have bemoaned summer reading lists, because they bring out the rigid, insistent side of so many parents. But this year, for the first time, I was in the position of helping create a summer reading list. And it was intoxicating. You start with a jumble of books you love, and then you start asking yourself: Do I have a few nonfiction titles for this age group? Are all these authors white (Ooops)? What about something in verse? How many copies of that book are in the system? And before you know it your list is twice as long as it should be. So then you start crossing things off, and then you start hating all the books on the list, and then you start adding things again. And it's fantastic.

The list is going home with the report cards of all the students at the 3 elementary schools closest to me. So the titles on the list will be popstars of my collection this summer. They will be coveted, anticipated, and considered "above" the rest of the collection. And while that means some other really wonderful books will be overlooked, it also means that some of my favorites will see super high circulation.

But you know which age group was the toughest one to pick books for? Second and third grade. They're all over the map! Some 2nd and even 3rd graders are still working on books with big font and giant leading, while others are tearing through tomes like Harry Potter. Often lists for this age include a lot of picture books and transitional chapter books.

At first, I was against giving this age group picture books, because picture books are meant to be read aloud. They aren't tools for teaching reading skills. However, I'm starting to come around, because I see how many kids enjoy the illustrations and the greater sophistication of picture book plots. Plus, have you noticed the rise of picture books that are hard to read aloud?

I'm thinking of the ones that are strongly influenced by graphic novels, like Captain Raptor, Bandit, and Traction Man. These books are hard to read to a group, because you have to point to all the different word bubbles or be an excellent voice actor to convey who is saying what. Then there are books like Follow the Line and Who's Hiding, whose pages demand to be touched and are therefore best enjoyed one-on-one ... or maybe just solo? And what about the picture books with tables of contents? Old ones like Anita Lobel's One Lighthouse One Moon, and newer ones like the Dog and Bear series.

I've been to a number of workshops on picture books for older readers, but I've been overlooking picture books for in-between readers, kids who are in between early readers and chapter books. I still argue that most picture books are meant to be read to a child, and you shouldn't stop reading to kids just because they start reading to themselves. But I'm starting to realize that there are kids out there who are going to want more interesting stories before they have the attention span for chapter books--like those 10-year-olds who can read teen books. These in-between kids are the kind that drive parents to ask librarians for help.

So now that I'm in list-making mode, I'm working on a list of picture books for children to read to themselves. And I'm already wondering what would happen if I shelved some of them with the beginning readers ...

In Which I check my Google Reader

2010-06-05T12:42:00.000-07:00

And discover some wonderful things!

I'd like to say "Amen!" to this Huffington Post article about the myth of men not reading. I don't think you have to be a man to publish and select books that men will like. But if the population you serve includes, for example, Asian men in their early 20s living in urban areas, then you have to figure out what Asian men in their early 20s living in urban areas want to read. Probably not Anne Tyler, much as I love her. Sometimes you have to read stuff you're not interested in. That's why it's called your job and not something you do for fun. (via Guys Lit Wire)

And where was this list last year when I was seeking out books about the different ethnic populations in my neighborhood? It's wonderful! At this point, I actually have all the books on the Cambodian list, which makes me feel good about myself, but also sort of sad. But it's not cake to find children's books that represent South East Asian experiences, and then when you find them, you think, who wrote this? Is it accurate? So I'm very grateful for this list from the talkstory website, and I'm totally going to use the Hawaii part as a resource for one of my summer reading program activities. (via the YA YA YAs)

Finally, I was interested in the Chasing Ray review of Sources of Light, because although she doesn't take about white privilege specifically, I feel like she's alluding to it. So now I have to read this novel-about-Mississippi-during-the-civil-rights-movement and compare it to My Mother the Cheerleader, which has actually grown on me since I read it a year ago. And Summer of Kings, which I need to re-read after reading The Rock and the River, because they both have scenes in which characters discover radical Black Panther newspapers. I feel like there's an article in here somewhere.

Children's Librarian's Professional Development Calendar for June

2010-06-03T07:06:00.000-07:00

A little late with this! This month it's all about starting the summer reading program with a bang. I can only think of two big library events this month, but they're big:

June 12: Youth Reading Across Rhode Island Kick-Off. 12-3 p.m. @ the Statehouse. Sponsored by OLIS, Rhode Island Center for the Book, and others. This year's book is Regarding the Fountain by Kate Klise, which is an epistolary novel, so at my table I'll be doing a recycled stationary craft. Come visit me! Of course, there's also going to be a book giveaway, author talk, and live music.

June 25-29: ALA Annual Conference in D.C. I'm on the Great Graphic Novels for Teens committee. Although we don't vote at the meeting, we discuss all the titles that have been nominated so far, which means what I should really be doing right now is reading the stack of GN behind me ...

And other than that, it's all summer reading all the time.

RILA Conference reflections: Fat Lit

2010-06-02T06:50:00.000-07:00

I didn't get to attend as much of the RILA conference as I wanted to, because my car got sick. But I did get to attend the Fat Lit workshop Thursday AM, and I've been thinking about it ever since. Lisa Pazer is going to present a complete version of her "Fat Lit" research at the Young Adult Literature Symposium, so I'm not going to steal her thunder (or her intellectual property). However, I do have some thoughts of my own.

Pazer, co-author of forthcoming Teenage Waistland, analyzed the plots of a number of books with overweight protagonists, from Precious to The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, and measured how "fat-accepting" the narratives were. But then she took it in a direction I hadn't expected. She asked whether librarians had an obligation to seek out books that model healthy habits, as well as books that encourage a positive body image no matter what your weight. This is in light of the disturbing trend in obesity.

It was obvious she'd hit on a hot topic, and the discussion following her powerpoint ranged from rewarding children with cookies to hiding a body-image obsession behind a commitment to whole foods. Which brings me to revisit a book I reviewed on Good Reads a little while ago: Fat Cat by Robin Brande.

In Fat Cat, protagonist Cat decides to do her senior year science project on herself. She's going to swap her typical teenage diet of sugar and artificial hormones for "hominid food." She's loosely studying the role of diet in evolution, and she wonders if giving up fake food for veggies and whole grains will make her body run more efficiently. This also leads to weight loss and getting the guy, so you can see why I was conflicted about the novel. I feel like healthy eating is always linked to weight loss, and I think it's important in its own right.

The author does briefly talk about, first of all, Cat's sugar withdrawal, and then has her meet with a nutritionist, giving her opportunities to discuss the effects of dairy on her digestive tract, etc. And actually, the narrative spirals out into such diverse topics as first dates, swim team, and saving a local restaurant. So it's not like it's only about weight-loss. But I still think that girls will read it and think, if I lose weight, I can change my life. But after the workshop, I think: is that such a bad thing?

I guess Fat Cat was confusing to me, because it went back and forth between being an issue book and a literary novel. The research notes at the heading of each chapter and the resources in the back gave it the feel of a "how to" book on eating healthfully. But the divergent plot points and the protagonist's own reflection on her weight loss made the conclusion seem very personal, and not something you could "apply" to your own life. And further, the author seemed to want to make it about healthy eating rather than weight-loss, but then why call it "Fat Cat"?

Obviously, I have two sets of standards in my head: one for issue books and one for literary novels. And the names I'm giving those two categories come with value judgments that I'm not unaware of. But can a novel about weight-loss be anything but an issue book in a society that is totally obsessed with body-image? In this case, maybe I as the reader have the "issue." I want books about healthy eating that aren't also about weight-loss. But who would read a book about a thin person eating healthy and then feeling better? I admit that not even I would read that book.

But I did read Fat Cat, and I bet the teens will go for it, too--if the condition of Life in the Fat Lane is any indicator of their interest in "Fat Lit." And if the numbers of overweight and obese adolescents are as high as some say, then a collection that reflects the population we serve should have many more titles about teens who aren't size 2.

Review: This Means War! by Ellen Wittlinger

2010-05-26T19:37:00.000-07:00

I've read a number of books by Ellen Wittlinger, and I acknowledge that they are good books, but I can't honestly say I liked them. I found her writing harsh, like she was trying to be mean to her characters. But I did like This Means War! I think Wittlinger really connected with her setting and time period, so everything that happened to the characters and all the things they worried about seemed to arise naturally from the comic books, news casts, and town gossip that swirled around them.

The story is set during the Cuban Missile Crisis, in a small town near an Air Force Base. The main character, Juliet, lives above her family's grocery store, which is threatened by the arrival of a local supermarket. But Juliet's primary concern at the beginning of the novel is that her best friend, Lowell, no longer wants to hang out with her, because she's a girl. Soon Lowell and Juliet are both entangled in a competition between the boys and girls in their neighborhood: ten tests of skills and bravery to prove once and for all whether boys or girls are the best.

It's the kind of kids game that parents never approve of. Each test is a little more dangerous than the last, and although most of the characters are aware that the challenges don't really prove anything, they all have their reasons for participating. I related most to Patsy, an Air Force brat who wants to be a pilot when she grows up and has no romantic interest in the boys. She just wants to beat them. I think this is one way girls cope when they hit adolescence and realize that people expect them to do certain things, but not others, and gender and sex become the most salient aspects of their identity. It can be a shock for a daddy's girl and a tom boy.

Lowell, on the other hand, doesn't really want to participate, because he's more of a brain than a physically dominant boy. But he suddenly feels like he has to prove his manhood. And that's part of the initial reason he rejects Juliet. The other characters have just as interesting stories, and together they reflect the myriad responses you get from kids when adult gender roles are suddenly imposed on them.

Juliet's narrative voice is wonderful. She's not a precious, off-beat character, she's a regular everygirl with a little bit of attitude, some big worries, and a deep longing for friendship. Her monologues to god are especially awesome:

"Dear God, I'd like to know if there's really a heaven, and if so, is it big enough for all the people who'd get killed by atomic bombs? Or would some of them have to go some place else? If you die when you're still a kid, do you get to grow up in heaven or do you stay a kid forever? Being a kid is okay, but I don't want to be one for eternity. If heaven is such a great place, I think we should be able to grow up if we want to. I would at least like to be a teenager."

The conclusion of the novel isn't perfect, but it is dramatic, which is important in a novel that escalates like this one. I think the author is occasionally preachy with the anti-war message, but **Spoiler Alert** she does bring Lowell and Juliet back together, which I'm grateful for. I'm conflicted, however, about Patsy's fate. It seems appropriate given her behavior, but it also reminds me of all the feminist literary criticism I read in college. I feel like Patsy is punished for being a wild, outspoken girl who doesn't obey the rules of feminine decorum, just like a character in an 18th century English novel. Maybe it was the burning barn--it reminded me of the mad woman in the attic in Jane Eyre. On the other hand, it might be more appropriate to compare This Means War! to other children's books as opposed to 18th century novels. So I'm not sure that point it entirely fair. **End spoiler**

As you can see, the book is meaty. There are lots of issues to discuss--I didn't even talk about peer pressure--but it doesn't feel like an issue book, because the competition is so gripping. And if I can say one last thing, the scene when Juliet visits the supermarket is brilliant. I often wonder how well kids can picture the setting in historical fiction, but I believe this scene does the trick. The author asks kids to imagine being shocked by rows and rows of canned goods, 10 different kinds of cereal, products they've never heard of (what's yogurt?), and 3 choices of toilet paper. I think that's something kids will understand, and it says so much about the scariness of prosperity and the ever expanding, interconnected world.

Review: Big Red Lollipop by Rukhsana Khan

2010-05-25T13:05:00.000-07:00

Recently, a reading specialist and I were lamenting the difficulty of finding picture books for older readers that aren't re-e-e-e-e-e-ally long (no disrespect, Patricia Polacco). And then along comes Big Red Lollipop. Although it will play well with little girls, the book focuses on a kind of frustration and embarrassment familiar to upper elementary and middle school girls. This is more than a sibling rivalry story.

First of all, Rubina's family comes from Pakistan. So when Rubina rushes home, waving a birthday party invitation, her mother (referred to as "Ami") wonders what a birthday party is. And then she insists that Rubina take her little sister, Sana, to be fair. Rubina knows that none of the other girls will bring their younger siblings, but her mother insists.

So where do you think this is going? In so many books, the child is horrified to be different, but it all works out when, after a little prodding by an understanding adult, the other children are delighted by the difference. Not so here. Sama ruins the party. And then she eats the big red lollipop Rubina saves from the party, planning to savor it after the sting of embarrassment has worn off.

The adults in this book--Ami in particular--just do not get it. Ami scolds Rubina for chasing her sister around the room in a rage. And then ... time passes. And Sama gets invited to a birthday party. And Ami insists that Sama take her next younger sister, Maryam. Will it ever end? Read to find out!

Perhaps I adore this storyline because I was an eldest child and I know what it's like to break parents in! I do think it will especially resonate with the children of immigrants. At the same time, some children will be surprised to learn that other cultures do not celebrate birthdays. And those little jolts are good for kids.

Besides a storyline that is sure to appeal to a child's finely honed sense of injustice, this book has fantastic illustrations. The expressions on the characters' faces speak volumes. I especially like their eyebrows. I'm not kidding. Sophie Blackall draws each individual eyebrow hair, and then makes the eyebrows display everything from shame to skepticism to sudden delight.

The textiles in the illustrations are also notable: clothing, rugs and quilts on every page feature repeat-patterns of swirls, pokadots, and what I'm guessing are variations on Pakistani borders and designs. The book is delicious, and I would love to wear clothing designed by the illustrator, who, incidentally, does the covers for the Ivy and Bean books. The character's outfits are part of what extends the audience of this book into middle school: it's all leggings and cute skirts and ballerina flats.

And one more thing: there's a spread in which Rubina chases her little sister around the living room, and we get a bird's eye view of the chase. No words on earth could do a better job of telling that story.

A list for Percy Jackson Fans

2010-05-22T09:13:00.000-07:00

I continue to be behind the times with my booklists, but soon I will do something relevant, like "un-whitewashed books for fans of the Airbender series." This week, I made a list of books with mythological themes. Skulduggery Pleasant, the Thief, and the Alchemyst reference mythologies that are sort of vaguely related to the Greek and Roman canon, while the others are based on the same pantheon as Percy Jackson.

And look, I'm slowly remembering what I learned about design in college!

Blurbs after the jump.

The Game by Diana Wynne Jones. When Hayley’s grandparents kick her out, she moves into an old castle with her rowdy cousins and learns to play a dangerous game based on Greek mythology.

The Alchemist by Michael Scott. An explosion in a used book store catapults two twins on a mission to protect an alchemist’s notebook.

Jason and the Gorgon’s Blood by Jane Yolen. When a jar of Medusa’s blood falls into the wrong hands, it’s up to a group of heroes-in-training to save the day.

The Great God Pan by Donna Jo Napoli. Pan was happy running wild with the animals until he met a pretty human who said all the wrong things.

Quicksilver by Stephanie Spinner. Hermes tells of life in and around Olympus, beginning with this line: “It’s dark and gloomy and it smells like dead sheep, but when Zeus says go to Hell, I go.”

Skulduggery Pleasant by Derek Landy. When a Bentley-driving, fire-throwing skeleton saves her from a stranger on a rainy night, Stephanie Edgley is surprisingly calm. Which makes her the perfect sidekick.

The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner. Gen is rotting in prison when a scholar of the enemy kingdom releases him for a special mission. Can he outwit his escort?

Jason and the Quest for the Golden Fleece by Jeff Limke, art by Tim Seeley. A graphic retelling of the mythical adventure.

The Night Tourist by Katherine Marsh. Is Jack’s mother truly gone, or just waiting for him to rescue her from the underworld?

Hercules retold by Geraldine McCaughrean. This serious retelling of the Hercules story begins when snakes attack his cradle.

You may also enjoy these three nonfiction titles:
D’aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths
The Adventures of Odysseus
The McElderry Book of Greek Myths

These two titles are for older teens:
Goddess of Yesterday by Caroline B. Cooney
Goddess of the Night by Lynne Ewing

I played with the Nook

2010-05-21T13:17:00.000-07:00

I went to Barnes and Noble today to look at the Nook, and I was a bit enchanted. It looks a lot like an Apple device: thin, white, minimally labeled. It does say "Barnes and Noble" on it. It makes sense that it was B&N rather than Borders* that dove into the eReader field, because they were the store that crossed over into publishing with their line of classics. I believed they've also been at the forefront of in-store print-on-demand technology.

Anyway, the Nook has a mini full-color touch screen on the bottom, separate from the screen that displays the text of the book. This is best-of-both-worlds in that it you have a quick-responding touch screen menu, but the beauty of the E Ink display up top, unmarred by the extra layer required for touch screen capability. The touch screen definitely makes navigation faster than on my Sony eReader pocket edition, although the page-turn delay is about the same. There are forward and back buttons on both the right and left sides of screen, which give you more flexibility in how you hold it, too.

However, there is also just a little bit of a disconnect: for example, if you're looking at a list of the books in your library, you will want to touch the list on the main display, but instead, you must use the arrow and select buttons on the touch screen to open a book. You might stare at it stupidly for a second before you get it. But I think the pros of the mini touch screen outweigh the cons.

There are two other very interesting perks to the Nook which I would like to know more about:

Through the wonders of science, you can lend your ebooks to other Nook readers. Of course, if you only buy DRM-free ebooks, you can always lend your ebooks to your friends, but with the Nook, you can share DRM-ful ebooks from the B&N store with other Nook or Apple-product users for a certain number of days, sort of the way you can check out an ebook from the library. Not bad. You're locked into proprietary software, but it gives you a little more flexibility.
You can read whole ebooks while you are physically in the B&N store and hooked up to their wifi.

What I want to know in both cases: all books? or just some books? I feel there might be hidden limitations. But I still find it quite cool. And did I mention that the Nook supports epub and pdf files? So you can use it to read DRM-free stuff.

The Nook is noticeably heavier than my eReader, but that seems reasonable, since it has a lot more going on. (Of course, it's also heavier than the Kindle, so the clunkiness is an issue.) It has wifi, although you can't surf the web as easily as you would with a touchscreen display up top. The internet access is mostly helpful for downloading books directly and reading stuff from feeds--text-based applications. I'm wondering if it will work well with Google Editions. You can download updates to the software (Does Sony ever do updates? Yo no se.**) from the website, which suggests the device will be relevant longer. There's a headphone jack and you can play audio, so I guess this also doubles as a gigantic mp3 player for "talking books." (Isn't that a lovely old fashioned term?) So it's one-stop shopping for all your reading related needs.

You have more control over the display than with other eReaders--you can change the wall paper, screen brightness, etc. However, I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to expand the size of the text.*** It must be possible, but it's not as easy as hitting the magnifying glass button on my Sony eReader, and I think that's an important accessibility feature--the ability to instantly make everything large print.

Another useful feature is that it comes with an AC power adapter, so you can charge it by plugging it into an electrical outlet as well as plugging it in to your computer. You can get an AC adapter for the Sony reader, but it'll cost ya $29.99 additional. And with the Nook you can expand your memory by sliding in an SD card. And it's $256, like the Kindle, while the Sony eReader retails for $200--of course, even the Sony website is selling it for $169.99.

So basically, if you want a lean, mean machine, I stand by my love of the Sony eReader pocket edition. But if you want something fancier, this is a lovely device, and B&N is doing much more than Amazon to give you the same flexibility you have with a physical book.

*But Borders is not so far behind! The Kobo ships in June.
**Yep. Just looked it up.
***OK, the website makes it obvious that it's possible, so it must be something so obvious that I missed it.

Beginning Readers Storytime

2010-05-18T08:19:00.000-07:00

This is a program I've thought about doing a lot. Have you ever noticed how as kids get older, they never want you to do a program for them? Instead they want to help you do a program. But there are only certain kinds of helping that actually interest them.

The way this applies to story time is that once the kids hit a certain reading level, they want to read the words off the page before I say them. Which kind of drives me crazy. Which shows what a narcissist I am. But I've been thinking for a while about how to turn that into a program.

So far, I've imagined:

handing each kid a copy of the book I'm reading and having everyone read along. Maybe having something that makes a "bing" sound when they're supposed to turn the page. But that might not mean anything to them.
having the kids help me make giant versions of popular books so we can all read them together. That was sort of inspired by the Angry Chicken blog post on book copying, although I think that requires a certain kind of child.
giving the kids parts to read. Lots of books lend themselves to this, although I've been thinking about doing it with Melinda Long's How I Became A Pirate, because there are parts where the pirates repeat things after their captain. The only question is how to get the words in front of the kids and tell them when to read their parts.
having the kids write their own "magnet poetry" type stories with words cut from magazines (or that look like they were cut from magazines, using the magic of my color printer) at the end of each storytime and reading each other's stories.
having the kids draw while I read the stories. The idea is that they do little symbolic/comic-type drawings that will help them retell the story after I close the book. This is based on an activity I did when I was student-teaching that was surprisingly popular. It was inspired by the Inuit girls' game of telling stories while drawing symbols in the ground with a knife.
ending the program with computer time, but limiting kids to Starfall or the literacy programs that are installed on the computer.

But I have yet to form this into a coherent program. Anyway, the reason I'm documenting this idea today is that there's a TOON books blog, and I think it might be an important piece of the program puzzle. How many ways could you use this at your library?

Books for Breakups

2010-05-17T10:44:00.001-07:00

I have created another book list! This one is just a, um, what does wikipedia call it? A stub? A schlub? A stem? It's just a beginning. It has only 8 titles, and I'm sure there are more, but here's the "disclaimer" at the top:

WARNING: The endings of these books are unpredictable!!! If I made a list of books in which everyone ended up as miserable as you are right now (sorry), then you’d know how all the books ended, and you wouldn’t be motivated to finish them, right? So instead, I’m offering you a mix of happy and sad endings, books about people who move on, people who get back together with their ex’s, people who break up with the love-of-their-lives because they just can’t get their crap together (I’m still bitter about that one), people who learn to love being single, and people who never, ever, ever give up hope. So I hope these books make you feel better, but it’s possible they will make you feel a lot worse. However, I promise they will make you feel something. And that’s better than listening to people tell you there are plenty of fish in the sea, whatever that means.

Teasers after the jump.

1. Who Am I Without Him? by Sharon Flake. This is like a field guide to relationships. Each short story describes a different situation, some of them dreamy-romantic and some toxic. See if you can spot the bad and good relationships and predict what will happen to these girls—before you turn into one of them.

2. The Realm of Possibility by David Levithan. Imagine a high school where it doesn’t matter any more whether you’re straight, queer, bi, or so inexperienced you have no idea what you are. Everything’s normal. This novel reads like song lyrics from a concept album about a high school like that. Each section is narrated by a different character and everyone’s in love with someone else.

3. Destroy All Cars by Blake Nelson. One of the best ways to get over your ex is to channel your energy into something productive. Like saving the planet from carbon emissions. James Hoff is on a mission, and he’s seriously pissed that no one is as militant as him, especially not his ex-girlfriend Sadie, who he’s obviously totally over, because he keeps writing English essays about how lame she is.

4. The Spectacular Now by Tom Tharp. For Sutter Keely, high school is a parade of parties, girls, joyrides, and practical jokes. But when his “beautiful, fat girlfriend” kicks him to the curb, he gets serious for the first time—about a sweet, geeky girl. But it’s not like in the movies when the nerd gets a make-over and it’s all good. In this story, Sutter comes dangerously close to ruining the girl’s life.

5. An Abundance of Katherines by John Greene. After being dumped by 19 girls named Katherine, Colin is working on a math formula that can predict when relationships will end. But before he turns into a socially crippled math genius, his foul-mouthed best friend drags him on a road trip that promises to be as wild as anything on MTV.

6. 30 Days to Getting Over the Dork You Used to Call Your Boyfriend by Clea Hantman. This is exactly what it sounds like: specific instructions for what to do every day for a month to help you put that boy out of your head and your heart. It also includes movie recommendations and a list of girls who have been dumped more famously than you (and lived to tell the tale).

7. Dairy Queen by Catherine Gilbert Murdock. So do those Romeo-and-Juliet relationships ever work? Find out in this story about a girl from a family of football players who secretly coaches the rival town’s quarterback in between trying to keep her family’s dairy farm running while her dad recovers from an injury.

8. Fourth Comings by Megan McCafferty. This book asks you : Do you really want to be with him/her forever? Are you sure? Jessica Darling just graduated from college, but her charming former-addict boyfriend is just starting school. When he pops the question, she has to decide if her sweet, love-hate high school crush is really The One.

Roadtrip to Queens, anyone?

2010-05-17T10:29:00.000-07:00

I really need to visit the libraries in Queens. They're always making news--especially for their teen services. And now, Christian Zabriskie, who is on the Great Graphic Novels for Teens committee with me, has made it into the New York Times as part of an article on love for manga among urban youth. I particularly like this point:

"Mr. Zabriskie, 39, now assistant coordinator for youth services at Queens Library, says manga is for these teenagers what punk rock, New Wave, and Dungeons and Dragons were for his generation: a world of specialized knowledge that excludes adults and opens a private creative space for young people.
“This kind of secret, hidden knowledge gives them a power and an empowerment,” he said. “It’s this generation’s esoterica.”
But, he said, unlike other teenage rituals like graffiti or, at the extremes, gang membership, manga fandom increasingly happens at one of the safest places around — the library."

I love the word "esoterica."

Review: You Don't Even Know Me: Stories and Poems About Boys by Sharon Flake

2010-05-14T11:27:00.000-07:00

This is one of those books that I wasn't even planning on reading because I knew it would be good. I try to spend my time reading the books I'm not sure about or that I think I'll have to sell to kids. But I figured Sharon Flake didn't need my help getting kids to read her book, so I just put it on the shelf.

But I'm visiting a high school on Monday and I was thinking of reading a few excerpts from new books, so I took You Don't Even Know Me back off the shelf and proceeded to read it cover to cover. I figured I might as well write about it, too.

Now, Sharon Flake has great narrative voice. No question. But what makes her books so significant is the subject matter. She's just plain writing about stuff no one else is writing about. Like wanting to hook up with an older woman or trying to help out a 9-year-old who knows more about the streets than you do.

Sharon Flake definitely writes about issues--AIDS, suicide, sex abuse, and gangs in this volume alone. But she's never preachy, and I'm trying to figure out how she does it. But there's no one way. For example, in one story, she shows us what it's like to have a caretaker who's obese. It takes an hour and a half to walk a few blocks to the shoe store. You live on disability checks. You think everyone's staring even when they're not. I'm thinking the story is about how hard it is to live in a situation like that, but it turns out the story is about how good the boy has it--and he knows it.

Flake always keeps you guessing. Some stories end well and other's don't, so you genuinely wonder if the main character is going to do the right thing, and that keeps the tension high. Sometimes, like in the first story, you wonder what the "right thing" is. Should Tow-Kaye marry his girl? She's pregnant. He loves her. He loves her family. But he's 16. So's she. In other stories, Flake makes the "wrong thing" seem inevitable, like in "Girls Make You Weak," where the narrator begins with: "It was passed down to me. Just like my uncles' blue eyes, my grandfather's flat feet, and my dad's big nose ... The men call it the cheating gene."

And often, she keeps the tension high by threatening some kind of violence: "Gettin' Even" starts with a guy chasing the narrator with a knife. "Fakin' It" starts with crazy, 63-year-old Aunt Philomena trying to wrestle her nephew out of bed ... and just about getting punched in the face for it. Maybe that's all it is: Flake makes it real. She writes about issues, but the stories don't seem fake, like vehicles for the issues, because they're so immediate and full of detail. I guess any story could be an issue story. We just notice it when someone writes a story about an issue that doesn't often appear in YA literature.

Now, here's a good book discussion question: Why does the author pay so much attention to the setting in these stories? They're mostly pretty short, and you know she isn't wasting words, but in at least half the stories, you get a sense of the kind of neighborhood the main character lives in, and that's obviously important in a way that it wasn't in Who Am I Without Him?

And I haven't even talked about the poems. Actually, not all of them sent me. I'm still puzzling over "So She's White." The first three lines are: "Alright/So she's white/That's what I like." Then he goes on to describe the pride and respect she has for him ... or is it the pride and respect he thinks he gets from walking next to her? Should we take his line about being "king over me/Ignoring what you see" seriously when the only thing he tells us about his girl is that she's white? I guess the ambiguity could be intentional. It definitely makes me uncomfortable, as good poems often do.

The poems I like better are the ones jam packed with detail, like the title poem, and "Apology," in which a suburban black boy addresses his urban counterpart, apologizing for having it easy at the same time as he rips off urban style and acts hard when it suits him.

Basically, this is a compulsively readable collection of well crafted stories and poems. I do think that the urban location is important to many of the stories, and that it would be a really interesting writing prompt to have kids write the same story in another setting. Particularly if you were teaching this book in a suburban high school or in a community with lots of immigrant families. What would happen in your community if your grandfather was killed? Would people talk to the police? Would you get involved in avenging his death? What about if you got your girlfriend pregnant? Who would be around to give you advice? What kind of advice would they give?

Anyway, I could write about this book forever. I think it's a truly important title that's also a model for excellent short-story writing and a spring-board for discussion. I'm hoping someone I know reads it soon so I can discuss a few things with them.

Oh, look! Youth RARI has a website

2010-05-13T12:05:00.001-07:00

And I'm on it! I interviewed Kate Klise for the summer reading program newsletter, and now that interview is also available on the Youth Reading Across Rhode Island blog.

And just to refresh, the Youth RARI kick-off is at the State House at noon on Saturday, June 12th. To quote from the blog: "There will be information and activities for kids grades 3 - 6 beginning at noon. Kate Klise, author of Regarding the Fountain will speak at 1:00 and Joe's Backyard Band will perform at 1:45. The first 250 families will receive a free copy of Regarding the Fountain."

Review: 8th Grade Superzero by Olugbemisola Rhuday Perkovich

2010-05-13T06:22:00.001-07:00

Ah, the 8th grade book. Where to shelve it? Kids? Young adult? I think once kids are in 8th grade, they want to read about high school, so a book like this really has more appeal to 6th graders. But this is a looooooooong one.

The force driving the plot is Reggie McKnight's campaign for president at a progressive school in New York city. To win, he has to overcome the mental image everyone has of him throwing up on stage on the first day of school.

However, Reggie doesn't declare his campaign until page 178 of 324.

That's because the author also wanted to cover Reggie's "big brother" relationship with a troubled kindergarten kid, his community service project at a homeless shelter, his worries about his dad's unemployment, the rift between him and his sometimes-clueless white friend, the spiritual questions his youth pastor raises, and his sister's attempted transformation from basketball queen to cheerleader.

I was genuinely interested in how these issues would work out, but I tended to lose one thread as another one was woven in. And a lot of the issues never got worked out. But I think that was intentional. The author is showing us real life: a messy tapestry full of loose ends. The feeling of completeness at the end of the novel comes from Reggie finding peace with himself--not from him fixing anything. That, I like. But I did feel like the author could have left a few threads out, and the story would have had more shape. It started to feel really spread out.

Now, as soon as I wrote "community service project at a homeless shelter," I felt like I was doing the novel a disservice. I'm going to go back to the weaving metaphor, because Reggie tries really hard to weave the shelter into his everyday life. He treats the people there like family, not just a project or a campaign slogan. And he acknowledges that he's getting something out of it as well as putting something in.

Reggie tries hard throughout the novel to do the right thing, when the "right thing" isn't a single bold act but a way of approaching things. I'll be honest: I did get a little tired of the discussion of what-exactly-is-the-right-thing and how-can-I-integrate-these-part-of-my-life. I think 8th graders do worry about these things, but I think Reggie had, like, 15 personal revelations in this novel, while 3 might have been more realistic and more interesting.

That's my inner-eighth-grader talking. She's a punk, I know.

Things I liked: I like how the story is told in short bursts with time stamps at the top of each section. I like how the bad guy stays the bad guy. I like how the references to poets and political leaders aren't over-explained, so kids will be inspired to look them up. I like the one moment when Joe C. asks Reggie to go on a hip-hop tour of NYC, and how that spotlights the difference between how white kids experience hip-hop and how black kids do. I like the shout-outs to geek culture, like comics and LARPing.

So I just wish it was a little bit more condensed. I've gone back and forth but decided to buy it, because it's a great suggestion for teachers looking for books that relate to civics education. On the other hand, it has a strong Christian message, so I don't know if it should be required reading. But it's a strong book list choice. And there are definitely kids out there who could relate to Reggie's struggles, so I hope they find this book at the right time.

Rhode Island Children's Book Award 2011

2010-05-10T17:11:00.000-07:00

Wow, that's the first time I wrote 2011 on anything.

Also at RIEMA, I attended the Rhode Island Children's Book Award workshop. The RICBA is going paperless this year, so I thought I would link to the list of nominations. I'm thinking about participating for the first time--I don't think there are a lot of public libraries that do. It's more of a school library thing. But I'm interested in tapping into the power of statewide programs.

So I'm thinking of creating a "Backwards Book Award Book Club" for 3rd-6th graders in the fall. I know--why "backwards"? Well, rather than requiring them to read the books before they come to the meetings, I want to use the meetings to promote the books. I'm thinking of reading parts aloud, having snacks that are featured in the stories, doing related activities, and making predictions about what will happen in the books. And maybe if your prediction is correct you get a prize?

Have any other public libraries participated in RICBA?

The New Children's Reference

2010-05-09T09:22:00.000-07:00

Caption: So, do you have this at your library?

I always enjoy the RIEMA conference: it's small enough that you can actually catch up with people, but big enough to give you a nice selection of workshops. And there's free coffee all day. I attended Bonnie Lilienthal's reference workshop, and had some interesting conversation with her before and during. She said that many librarians tell her they're ordering fewer reference sets (which didn't surprise me) and fewer nonfiction titles in general (which did surprise me). They claim they're simply getting fewer reference questions, because kids use online resources to complete their homework.

I don't have that problem. I do have kids coming in with different kinds of information needs, so I am switching up the selection on my reference shelves. But I'm not eliminating that part of my collection. Frankly, I wish I knew one of the librarians who is buying less nonfiction so I could say: "That's so interesting! Tell me more!" when really I mean: "That's wack. Don't the kids in your school district still do reports on Native American Tribes, Countries, States, specific species of animals and ancient cultures? Don't the kids want world record, poetry, joke, and drawing books? Don't you have those ambitious early literacy teachers who want science books appropriate for 3-year-olds?" But every community's different, so I shouldn't judge.

So instead I'll focus on the new demands for reference. In some cases, I haven't found a good reference set to meet these demands, but here are the kinds of questions I'm getting:

Images. Kids want maps of the regions where animals live or migrate through. They want pictures of the different stages in the life cycle and habitats. They need diagrams of animal and plant cells, skeletons, and photographs of famous people. Including people who existed before cameras. They need pictures of the foods Native Americans ate and examples of bronze art work from Ancient Chinese dynasties.

I have a number of Facts-on-File Atlases that are particularly helpful for this, and I also tend to borrow the oft-maligned Time Life books from the adult section. For the animal stuff, I like the DK books, like this one Bonnie mentioned, although the maps are kind of teeny. But I need to think more about what sort of photography books might be helpful resources.

Primary Sources. This one can be tough, because lots of times kids don't know what they mean by primary sources, particularly in literature classes. I keep having these kids ask me for primary sources related to, say, the work of Henry David Thoreau, and I don't know if they want contemporary newspaper accounts or letters by Thoreau or pictures of the original manuscript or a map of Walden pond or whether their teacher just meant for them to quote from the text they're studying.

UXL has a great series of primary sources that I am slowly amassing. And a number of my Gale reference sets (often called "reference libraries") have volumes of primary sources, as well as almanacs, whatever those are. And there are more and more nonfiction titles on particularly famous documents: the Mayflower Contract, the Bill of Rights, etc. But nothing on the Articles of Confederation or the treaties with Native Americans. Hopefully those will come soon. Once, I almost bought this, but eventually thought better of it. I just have to find an annotated Emma Goldman for kids, and then I can add them both to the collection and call it balanced.

Science Fair Questions. This is another one where kids are often confused about what they need. They want a source on exactly what will happen if you water plants with colored water. I try to explain that I may not have a text which discusses their specific project. This disappoints them, and I hate disappointing children. Some questions are more answerable, like the physics behind skateboards, or how to build a waterwheel. But they're always a challenge.

If only someone would put out a reference book on what would happen if you did all of these different horrible things to a plant. I do find Science Experiment Central helpful. I also like the "Handy ... Answer Book" series from Visible Ink, which is intended for a general audience if not for children, and I'm very pleased that a new Physics one is coming out! I'm also interested to get a look at this new series from Facts on File.

As a final note, I admit that I'm not planning on buying World Book in print anymore, since everyone has online access, and I've been wondering if I should stop buying the biography and country reference sets for the same reason. However, I still get tons of kids coming in because they are required to have a book source for their homework projects. So even if the reference process is sort of symbolic in that case, I still need to have an encyclopedia of countries so I can give them a darn book source. (And curse you teachers who insist that an encyclopedia doesn't count! I have to tell children, it's a reference book, but it's not a general encyclopedia, so it's OK. Promise). I also need an encyclopedia of countries because there is not a single children's book on Cape Verde in the last 10 years. If you can find one, I'll dye my hair blue.

Do you have a parenting collection?

2010-05-06T08:35:00.000-07:00

I do. It's very utilitarian, and lately I've been trying to jazz it up. Especially because if you looked at the shelves now, you would think that parenting was composed of potty training your children, taking them to the doctor and dentists, helping them understand death and divorce, disciplining them, and then teaching them to read at a 6th grade level and appreciate Classical music before entering school. Chilling, isn't it?

So I've found a number of jazzy titles, and I'm now putting them on the shelf like bait to see which ones get snapped up.

Mad Hungry. Lucinda Scala Quinn. The design on this one grabbed me, plus I've been reading a lot of books on boys' and girls' learning differences, so why not investigate their eating differences? However, I found the writing so annoying that I had to take it home and complain about it to my boyfriend. The author is constantly singing her own praises, how her home is always full of the scent of fresh baked bread and her boys are always thanking her for raising them to be healthy and strong men, and Quinn is only cooking for the stereotypical constantly hungry, bacon-loving, salad-hating man child. Thanks for reinforcing the stereotype.

But! I do like how she encourages people to add interesting ingredients without harping on "authenticity" in various cuisines. Sort of like my mom, who liked to put grated carrots in everything. I remember my brother stirring his chili and inquiring, "Are these Mexican carrots?" So the book annoys me, but it's so attractive, and it is still at my house because there are a few more recipes I have to try ...

Hungry Monkey: A Food-lover's Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater. Matthew Amstur-Burton. Bizarrely, I read an excerpt of this on NPR and was so taken in by the humor and wise thoughts on balancing family life and personal pursuits that I checked it out so I could continue reading! This is weird, because I don't have children, so I don't have the problem of catering to their limited palates, nor am I a foodie. But something about the writing just got me. And it's such a relief to read about someone striking a happy medium between giving children injections of red dye number whatever and only feeding them vegetables you have personally pulled from the Earth.

Bad Mother. Ayelet Waldman. I expected this book to be snarky, or for the author to be a wild child turned domestic goddess. It was so much gentler and more grounded than I expected, but still funny. And it's not advice. It's what's called "narrative nonfiction" in writing classes.

OMG--stop right there! If all those books were actually checked in right now, I could make the best spine poem ever!

Moving on.

The Creative Family. Amanda Blake Soule. This book won me over when I got to the section on homemade toys and it offered 6 questions you could ask about the toys your children play with: is it beautiful? is it simple? what is it made of? what senses does it use? how is it organized? is there too much?

I thought these questions were to-the-point and could be applied to many things (like a library space!). So although some the projects in this book might only appeal to sewers or home-schooling parents (because of the level of involvement), I liked the philosophy. And the projects did seem like things the author had actually done with her children--not just things she made up for the book or found in other books. A sampling: henna tattoos, nature tables, sewing cards, freezer paper stencils (for decorating t-shirts).

Mixed: Portraits of Multi-Racial Kids. Kip Fulbeck and Cher. This one hasn't come in yet--I just ordered it. It appears to be sort of a small coffee table book. Arty. It's photography of multi-racial kids with little bits of text from the kids or their parents. Possibly, it will seem cheesy when I hold it in my hands, but it might be an interesting book to share with your kids when you talk about race?

Salad People and More Real Recipes. Mollie Katzen. I know there are a lot of food books on this list, but this one is a standout and a favorite of mine. It's a cookbook for pre-readers with adorable visual instructions for making simple foods. The foods often have a sculpture aspect, and include a mix of familiar and unusual foods. Mollie Katzen is from the famous Moosewood vegan restaurant in Ithaca, NY, where I went to college, and she never fails me.

So are there other general interest books out there that could be re-purposed for my parenting collection?

Behold the beauty of my Twilight Readalike Booklist!

2010-05-05T11:11:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to make a booklist like this for ages. In fact, I meant to make it, and then I figured the Twilight thing was over, so I gave up the idea, and then people kept asking for vampire books, so then I went back to meaning to make it.

But now I have a color printer! I am unstoppable! And the blurbs are on the back! My dream is to print it on an 11x17 paper and make it foldable. But perhaps I should actually make it smaller? Anyway, blurbs after the jump.

PEEPS by Scott Westerfeld
Now that Cal’s infected with vampirism, he has to track down his ex-girlfiends before they turn into blood fiends.

PRETTY DEAD by Francesca Lia Block
After hundreds of years of looking like a china doll and dining on human blood, could Charlotte be turning back into a human?

DEMON IN MY VIEW by Amelia Atwater Rhodes
Imagine if a character from a novel you were writing suddenly showed up at your school. Now imagine you were writing a vampire novel.

MARKED by P.C. Cast
Zoey has been chosen for the House of Night, where she will either learn to be a vampire or die in the process.

THIRSTY by M.T. Anderson
In a town were vampires are lynched, Chris strikes a deal with a shady angel in hopes of reversing the change that’s coming over him.

VAMPIRE KISSES by Ellen Shcrieber
When a darkly handsome boy moves into the mansion in Raven’s small town, she hopes he’s a vampire … or at least a kindred spirit.

THE REFORMED VAMPIRE SUPPORT GROUP by Catherine Jinks
You think vampirism is sexy? It's an addiction! Fortunately, there's help. And with vampire killers on the prowl, you’re gonna need it.

BLUEBLOODS by Melissa De La Cruz
Among the rich Vampire families of New York, future mates are determined by past lives. But not everyone is playing by the old rules.

CIRQUE DU FREAK by Darren Shan
When two friends visit a freak show, their fascination with the dangerous spectacles turns them against each other.

LOUPS-GAROUS by Natsukiko Kyogoku
COMING SOON!

SILVER KISS by Annette Curtis Klause
Only Simon understands Zoe’s grief over her mother’s illness. But Simon has is own needs: Revenge. Blood. Help.

BLOOD AND CHOCOLATE by Annette Curtis Klause
Teenage werewolf Vivianne is developing a sweet romance with a human boy, but the hot, motorcycle-riding Alpha male of the pack wants her, too.

THIRSTY No. 1 by Christopher Pike
Alisa is a responsible vampire who feeds but doesn’t kill, but when her maker starts stalking her, she starts to lose control.

SHIVER by Maggie Stiefvater
COMING SOON!

SWEET BLOOD by Pete Hautman
Lucy, a diabetic, is fascinated by vampire myths, but she’s suspicious of a stranger who contacts her online and claims to truly drink blood.

PRETTY MONSTERS by Kelly Link
A collection of stories in which dead girls crawl out of their graves, handbags are passages to other worlds, and werewolves beg you to save them from the moonlight.

LONELY WEREWOLF GIRL by Martin Miller
Here’s a tip: never cross the Scottish werewolf clan. Outcast Kalix is living on the streets, when her own mother sends bounty hunters to cut out her heart.

Library, meet your new best friend

2010-05-03T20:43:00.000-07:00

According to the articles I read last week, one of two things is going to save the publishing industry: the ipad* or erotica. I'm sort of hoping it's erotica. But seriously, what does this mean for libraries? Since the ipad came out, there's been a lot of talk about ebook pricing, and the different players in the industry: authors, publishing companies, bookstores. But libraries are never part of the discussion, which I assume means that the number of books publishers sell to libraries is too small to be important.

Actually, I bet libraries are big buyers of some of the niche nonfiction titles, but publishers never rely on niche nonfiction to bring home the bacon. We all know now that publishers rely on a few bestselling titles to subsidize the rest of their publications. Which is either ridiculously inefficient or sort of encouraging, if you're an aspiring writer.

So the only thing I can figure this means for libraries is that we better get on the ebook and erotica trains, because those seem to be what people want. Interestingly, both ebooks and erotica in the library evoke questions about what a library is "supposed to be." I've talked before about the question of library as physical space versus online presence. Having erotica in the library challenges some people's time-honored belief that the library has an obligation to elevate the masses and protect small children.

So maybe we should go in the opposite direction and specialize in high quality, small run self-published books. I read an article about that, too.

What I'm really saying is that the publishing industry is in flux, so we better be ready to change, too. And here's how we can be ready: by knowing our mission. So that any change we make is consistent with the impact we want to have on the community. So we don't get caught up in competing with profit-seeking companies. And so we don't resist change because we fail to see how new formats and genres might support our mission.

Yay, mission statements.

*Annoying thing about this article: no mention of DRM. And the author even interviews someone from O'Reilly, a publishing company that's famous for removing DRM from its titles! So you'll just have to read this post from Smart Bitches, even though it's from a year ago, because, sadly, it's still totally relevant.

A study of the optimum distance between a library and a school

2010-04-30T09:57:00.000-07:00

They're closing a number of schools in Providence, and I've been discussing with people how this might affect the libraries near the schools. Mount Pleasant, my humble library, is walking distance from two public elementary schools, two Catholic schools, one public high school, and one private high school. Of course, "walking distance" depends on the length of your legs and your walking tolerance, which depends on how often you are transported by minivan.

I once had a volunteer (pity her) take the NCES list of schools in Providence and map them, along with the public libraries, so I could figure out what schools were my responsibility.

[View Providence Schools in a larger map]

So when I look at this map, I see that the kids who walk to my library are all coming from schools within .5 miles of the library. And this made me think, what else is within a half-mile of the library? What other places might people walk from or to? When I do a "community scan" for the library, I typically look at the Mount Pleasant and Elmhurst neighborhoods as defined by ProvPlan. And certainly we serve that wide of an area. But I bet we get the most contact with people in that half-mile circle.

And having a few schools in that half-mile circle can have a big impact on the makeup of people in the library between 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. On the positive side, you get first generation library users, kids whose parents don't use the library, coming in regularly and potentially doing outreach to their own parents. This helps us expand our pool of users and is especially effective in bringing in more people from immigrant populations.

On the flip side, you have kids using the library as a cover--telling their parents that's where they're going, when really, although they might pop in, they're using the library as a base from which to carry out other operations. That gets dicey. Especially when their parents are under the impression that the library is supervised and their children are being closely watched, entertained, and protected.

Still, I love having schools nearby, because for me, the benefits in terms of potential outreach opportunities outweigh the behavior problems that necessarily follow when kids bring their drama with them after school. So I feel for the libraries who have schools nearby closing, and I wonder where those school populations will end up, and if that will also increase the number of kids at other libraries.

So would you rather be a "destination library," or one that was walking distance from schools, community centers, half-way houses, homeless shelters ... if you were going to pick up your library and move it, or build a new one, where would it go?

Teen Urban Drama Preview!

2010-04-29T06:42:00.001-07:00

I just got a batch of books from tech services that I'm excited to read and report on. Since their covers are so beautiful, I thought I'd share them with you, my darlings! All of these titles are street/urban/hip-hop/lit/books/drama. In other words, I don't know what to call them, but they meet the criteria that one woman asked for on the phone last week: "Something for my 14-year-old daughter with black people and drama."

Labels are tricky--when I first started working at this library, I was mortified by the yellow "African-American" stickers on some of the books, because whenever a black person asked me for book recommendations, I didn't know if I should go for the stickers or avoid them. Now I don't even blink at them. I guess I know a lot more black authors than I used to, so I no longer feel like I'm relying on the stickers to call my attention to authors I hadn't read.

I also used to be embarrassed by the circ shelf, which is a shelf behind the circ desk where we keep books that are "very popular." In other words, stolen a lot. And it's all urban fiction or whateveryacallit. But people are so happy to browse books in that category that now I think of it as a jackpot for readers rather than a jail for books. All of this is to say that the labels for categories of books are slippery, and even though the industry seems to use "street lit," and we call the location "circ shelf," and the stickers say "African-American,"* and all anyone asks me for these days is "urban drama."

*We put "African-American" stickers on all genres of books by African-American writers, not just urban titles, so not all stickered books are urban, but most urban books are stickered. Although there's some Latino street lit out there, and I'm keeping a lookout for Asian.

Celebrate my Swedish heritage this week!

2010-04-27T19:29:00.001-07:00

I guess you don't have to celebrate my Swedish heritage. You could celebrate yours (if you're lucky enough) or you could celebrate Astrid Lindgren's. I usually get worked up about my Swedishness around Santa Lucia day, but delightfully, the Tor blog is celebrating the 65th anniversary of the Moomins. What are the Moomins? I quote (from Tor):

"Well, they’re like white hippos. And they’re Finnish. They’re sort of like the Finnish version of Winnie the Pooh and all his friends. They sprung from the imagination of artist and writer Tove Jansson 65 years ago, and over time became a European phenomenon!"

Now, this is surely delightful, but the above does fail to mention that Tove Jansson was Swedish-Finnish. And that the Moomins look a bit like Jeff Smith's Bone. Other than that, yes. Go to Tor for re-reads and a chance to win the first four books in the series.

And that is not the only way you can celebrate Swedish children's literature. Oh no. You can get your hands on a copy of Kitty Crowther's Jack and Jim.

Not long ago, I found out via Bookshelves of Doom that Swedish illustrator Kitty Crowther won the 2010 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. Hurrah! Now, I realize that Kitty Crowther is technically Belgian, but her mother is Swedish, so I will refer to her as Swedish. And the Guardian refers to the award as "the richest award in children's literature." So why have I never heard of it? Probably because it's international, and I'm a typical American.

So just this week, a copy of Crowther's book Jack and Jim arrived at my library. I am happy to report that besides having the best sort of anthropormorphic animals (the grown-up kind, like in Wind and the Willows and Frog and Toad), the book tells a tale of literacy triumphing over prejudice. No, really!

It's the story of a blackbird who befriends (or possibly falls in love with?) a seagull and leaves the forest to visit the seagull's coastal town. The other seagulls make it clear that they don't welcome this strange, dark-feathered bird. But they are won over when they overhear the blackbird reading aloud! Apparently, the seagulls can't read, while the forest creatures can. So the blackbird wins everyone over by sharing literature with them.

The blackbird is black and the seagulls are white, and we have a situation with two males living together, but the seagulls never get specific about what they dislike about the blackbird. There's no beating-you-ever-the-head-with-it here. The text is longish, so you'd need a thoughtful few moments to read it aloud. I also thought it was unusual (perhaps quaint?) the way the text was sometimes broken up by miniature illustrations--the kind that float on the page without any background. So you have a few pages in which there are four little pictures of Jack and Jim talking, and each picture is only slightly different from the one before--the characters cock their heads or fold their arms.

The copy on the ALMA page includes this passage, which I think describes the impression her art leaves with you: "She addresses readers personally using a limited repertoire of tools, principal among them pencil, ink and coloured pencils. Facial expressions, posture and atmosphere are captured with unfailing precision."

A lot of her work hasn't been translated into English, but you can see more of it on the Guardian slide show from when she received her award. Enjoy!

Singing your way through storytime

2010-04-26T09:00:00.000-07:00

Have you ever sung a story to children? I have a 0-to-3-year-old story time with lots of pep, and it's hard to read a story to them without having at least a few of them run around making truck noises. There's also one who yells the last word I read on each page after I read it. But I kind of enjoy that. So one trick that I'm trying not to overuse is singing a story. I have a few books that are actually illustrations of songs, and whenever I read them, I sing each line. And it is pin drop silent.

It's really magic, and I'm a little afraid I just jinxed it by writing about it. But it has yet not to work, and it's a chance to showcase some books that are really the illustrator's show. And I don't think you need much musical ability to do it. I do a sort of whispery singing with long pauses between lines. It's a lullaby thing.

The books, after the jump.

What a Wonderful World. ill. Ashley Bryan. I did this for Earth Day, too. This song is so cinematic, but it works surprisingly well with children because of the simple language. And the illustrations on this one are so bright and beautiful that I often recommend it when teachers and others are looking for "multicultural titles." The illustrations also make me want to do puppet theater.

Hush Little Baby. ill. Brian Pinkney. Yay for daddy books! The mom's out running errands in this one, and that's not the only twist: the whole thing is set in the dusty rural 1900s, big brother strums the guitar, and daddy offers to give his baby a fire truck! Of course, you could also go with Marla Frazee's version of this song--or contrast the two!

The Wheels on the Bus. ill. Paul O'Zelinsky. This is kind of silly for the lullaby treatment, but somehow on a rainy day in the city, it works. This version has pop-ups, too, so actually, I find it a little hard to operate them at the same time as I am singing, but the shiny moving parts are sure to fascinate even the most restless little ones.

All the Pretty Little Horses. Ill. Linda Saport. Sad songs are the most beautiful, don't you think? I always wondered why this song sounded so sad, and I always imagined it was Irish. But when I discovered this version in my collection, I learned that the song is from the American south. I wish the illustrations had as beautiful of horses as the ones in Fritz and the Beautiful Horses, which I adored as a child, but I still love this book.

Inch by Inch. ill. Ora Eitan. I just realized that I should absolutely re-watch Hans Christian Anderson with Danny Kaye. Probably children today would scoff, but I adored that movie! You should go watch the trailer right now. This song is works so well with the classic storytime themes of counting and springtime.

There was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly. There are so many versions of this one. I just ordered a wacky version that I saw in the issue of GOOP that Elizabeth Bird and Julia Rothman contributed to. This is too silly to do as a lullaby, so it usually turns into more of a sing-a-long, and I wonder if some of the parents are uncomfortable with their children singing, "perhaps she'll die," but it's awfully funny.

Oh, and there's a video related to the aforementioned wacky version:

And, honestly, I don't do He's Got the Whole World in His Hands, ill. Kadir Nelson, or This Little Light of Mine, ill. E.B. Lewis, because they reflect a particular religious background, but I think they're gorgeous. I would like to do them in a story time where I read books that reflect a couple different religious experiences. Possibly. Are there others?

Children's Librarian's Professional Development Calendar for May

2010-04-23T08:01:00.001-07:00

It's conference month! Both RIEMA and RILA have conferences in May. Also, May 10-14 is Children's Book Week, which means we will learn what the Children's Choice winners are, and meanwhile you can check out the nominations.

There isn't too too much else going on, because the summer is fast approaching. And this summer, we'll have the first ever Youth RARI, so that's something to look forward to.

Mostly, I will spend the coming month planning the nitty gritty of summer reading and trying to wrap up the library floorplan redesign, because that was my big project for the winter. And it's no longer winter.

So here are the children's librarian professional development highlights for May (after the jump):

May 1: Reading Across Rhode Island Breakfast. 9-11 a.m. @Rhodes on the Pawtuxet. Sponsored by the Rhode Island Center for the book and a billion other organizations. Not for children, technically, but I'm going, and it's a good reminder that Youth RARI swiftly approaches (June 12 @the statehouse)! This year's book (for adults) is the Geurnsey Literary and Potato Peel Society, which I loved because it was epistolary!

May 3: A Closer Look at Picture Book Illustration at RISD. 9:30 a.m.- 12 p.m. @the RISD library. Sponsored by OLIS. I'm interested in having more author and illustrator visits at my library, so I'm definitely going to this. It starts with a tour of the RISD library and ends with a panel of "up and coming" illustrators who will describe the process of (obviously) illustrating a children's book. When I have authors and illustrators visit, I'm going to want to design some art programs to create *buzz* before the visit, so I'm hoping for some inspiration.

May 8: RIEMA Conference and YART. Conference starts at 7:30 a.m., YART is 11:10-12 p.m. @the Crown Plaza Hotel, Warwick. Sponsored by RIEMA and OLIS, respectively. This year, RIEMA has been focused on advocacy with RIDE, the new Information Literacy standards from AASL, and the changes to PD schedules. So the conference reflects that, but it also offers some collection development workshops (RICBA, RITBA, current reference), plus YART will be embedded in the conference, and the topic for this YART is service to GLBTQ teens, with a GLSEN speaker. Oh, and the keynote speaker is Steve Kluger, whose book I will review asap.

May 18: Booklist "Trends in Teen Lit: the Independent View" Webinar. 2 p.m. @the internets. Sponsored by Booklist and some publishers. I have not 100% committed to this. I have never done a webinar, but I'm always interested in offering my teens out-of-the-ordinary choices. Also, I really like Orca books. So I'm toying with the idea of registering for this, and if I don't, I'll definitely watch it online after the fact.

May 27 and 28: RILA Conference. @the Bryant Center. Sponsored by RILA. This is embarrassing: I just joined RILA. I guess since I belonged to RIEMA, I never bothered, but it's seriously weird because I love professional organizations. So now I belong. Anyway, I'm going on Thursday, because I'm interested in the Sex in Teen Literature and the Fat Lit workshops, and I'm interested in the San Jose Way thing they're doing in East Providence, even though the workshop is probably aimed at library managers.

However, it's hard not to go on Friday, too, because there are workshops on art and serving people with autism, and more important, the PCL board plus the PCL director are presenting on the transition! What will they say? Will I agree? Will I learn things I never knew about my own library? Wait, I'm not actually going. Which is probably for the best. I am not good at just observing things.

Jamie Greene Answers the Call

2010-04-23T06:59:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, Jamie Greene, the president of RIEMA, spoke before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee in Washington, D.C. about the importance of school libraries. I get shivers just thinking about it! I think most of us are comfortable speaking for ourselves--telling people what we do and why our libraries deserve support--but Jamie was willing to speak for all of us. It's a big responsibility, and she put so much work into preparing her message--as anyone who received her email dispatches knows.

So without further ado, here's what she said (skip to the 35:50 mark if you want to just hear her).

My favorite things:

When she say she's received her layoff notice. That brings the gravity.
When she says, "I asked my students to be the voice of students across the country." That's what makes Jamie such a great leader--she always includes people, seeks input, gathers people, data. She's a gatherer.
The battery image. That student is a genius! It's so sci-fi.
The way she finishes with specific steps. No wishy-washy suggestions. She has a plan.

Don't you feel like there should be clapping after she's done? If you feel like clapping, actually, contact Senator Reed and thank him for suggesting Jamie for the committee. And if you want more background for the thank you note, visit the ALA dispatch about Jamie's testimony.

Earth Day!

2010-04-22T06:26:00.000-07:00

Three books the didn't exist last Earth Day! Three books I will be reading to kiddies large and small today:

OK Go by Carin Berger. This is the kind of picture book I like to give my very-very-very beginning readers who can't even read "beginning readers" except for possibly Pip and Otto. If you can read the words "stop," "go," and "OK," you can read most of this book, and you can have an adult look over your shoulder and read all the little fine print. The illustrations are intricately detailed and just weird enough that you can't figure them out at first glance, so the little ones like to sit and pour (pore?) over it. Which kind of pour? Anyway. What the illustrations actually contain: funny little creatures puffing around in contraptions that pollute. Then half way through, they switch to bikes and feet and other environmentally friendly forms of transportation. Sweet!

Dinotrux by Chris Gall. This book was one of the biggest disappointments to me! I though, it has dinosaurs crossed with trucks, how can it go wrong? Well. It also has no plot. The dinotrux tromp about the Earth leaking and dumping and grinding ... the first part is like a field guide of dinotrux, detailing their bad behavior ... and then the book ends! It gives us some line about how in the following millennia the dinotrux have evolved into the helpful vehicles of today. Huh. I guess it's a nice foil to all of the books that emphasize how vehicles help people. But did we need a foil to that? And why couldn't there be some kind of explanation for why the dinotrux changed? I would have accepted some deus ex machina. I just wanted a story! However, I will be reading the book anyway, because it is in my collection, and the illustrations are transfixing and we can discuss.

Curious Garden by Peter Brown. Thank you, Peter Brown, for writing a wonderful garden story for children who live in the city! I am always on the lookout for books that might help city kids become botanists and naturalists (like this one!), and I am also always on the lookout for Peter Brown books, because they are wonderful. I mentioned this book in my personification post, because clearly I am obsessed. The garden in this book has a mind of its own, friends, and when it creeps all over the slightly fantastic urban landscape of this book, you get a setting where magic could take place, and you will probably find yourself on your knees next to the Fs looking for Weslandia.

Can white people be multicultural, too?

2010-04-22T06:00:00.000-07:00

Talking about the Fuse #8 poll* this week got me clicking links and thinking about a project I started and abandoned--as I do many things. I was trying to compile a list of books in which white characters thought or talked or learned about their white identity. Although "multicultural" is often shorthand for "nonwhite," I think a truly multicultural collection also offers books which help white kids figure out how their skin color has affected their lives. Especially since studies show that white parents are the least likely to talk to their kids about race.

I think I got started on this project when I heard some kids in the library talking about so and so being "B" or "W," meaning white or black. The kids were shortening the words the way you do swear words, because they had got the message that they weren't supposed to talk about race. Don't get me wrong: most of the kids in my library don't mind labeling people, and the labels are usually black, white, Spanish or Chinese. Never mind that most of the Asians in this neighborhood are Cambodian or Laotian. But there are some white kids who treat race like a taboo subject. And I think they could use some books that talk about the entitlement and the guilt that can go along with being white.

For me, the blog Stuff White People Like came along at the perfect time. It showed how whiteness--a particular kind of upper middle class, college educated, self-conscious whiteness--was its own culture, and it made me laugh at myself. Reading White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack [pdf] and Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria had already revealed to me how white people get away with not thinking race doesn't have anything to do with them. And recently, the Newsweek excerpt from Nurtureshock backed up my observation that white people don't like to talk about race.

So I started making mental notes of literature that could be helpful to kids the way the resources above were helpful to me. When I put this project aside, here's what was on my list (they're all YA): Dramarama by E. Lockhart; My Mother the Cheerleader, by Rob Sharenow; Ethan, Suspended, by Pamela Ehrenberg; and How Ya Like Me Now, by Brendan Halpin.

I'm thinking about revisiting them and evaluating them using the criteria in the Higgins article on the CCBC website and Mitali Perkin's landmark Straight Talk on Race article for SLJ. Meanwhile, does anyone else know other titles that really talk about whiteness?

*Oh my goodness! Elizabeth Bird linked to my grading post! How thrilling!

Hot Girl Review

2010-04-21T10:55:00.001-07:00

Meet Kate, a girl who's a lot harder than her super vanilla name suggests. She's already been in and out of a gang, plus a couple foster homes, by the time the story starts. But she's trying to stay on track. The problem is, her brainy best friend is in South Africa for the summer, so she doesn't have any trustworthy people to hang with.

So she ends up hanging with Naleejah. Naleejah has Gucci bags, great hair, and lots of guys. Interestingly, Kate's not impressed by that. She spends most of the story being disgusted with Naleejah, but she can't quite extricate herself from the "friendship," because she keeps accepting Naleejah's offers to do her hair and let her borrow better clothes. Especially on days when she expects to see a certain guy.

So here's my question. I found the story to be a little didactic, but do I just need to get over that? I love YA books that are ambivalent about truth, that don't honor the authority of adults, and that raise more questions than they answer. But lots of tales of urban, African-American teens eschew ambivalence--this is something discussed in the Hornbook article, "And Stay Out of Trouble." So if an author sets out to write something between a cautionary tale and an inspirational story, should I evaluate the book on the basis of how well the author succeeds?

If I were to do that, I would still say that Sharon Flake does it better. But Dream Jordan does it well. And I think her next book might be even better, because this one got better as it went along.

The only thing I didn't buy was the turnaround in Kate's relationship with her foster parent, Lynn. For most of the novel, Lynn came off as short-tempered, unreasonable, and moody, to the point where I suspected her of taking on a foster child for the extra cash. But then at the end of the novel, Lynn gets all sympathetic. I guess the author wants us to think it's a case of unreliable narrator syndrome. In one of the closing scenes, Lynn braids Kate's hair:

I ran to the bathroom, eyed myself in the mirror, and my face broke out into a smile. I was so happy with what I saw. Lynn came up behind me and asked, "You like?"

"I love!" I exclaimed. "I didn't know you could get down like this."

"Yeah, I could've been doing your hair all along ... as a matter of fact, when you first came to the house, I asked if I could do your hair and you practically barked, No!"

"I did?"

"Yes, you did ... You're good at blocking stuff out, huh?"

Apart from the abrupt entente between Kate and Lynn, I liked the ending. I liked the drama of the girl fight and the way Naleejah sold Kate out. I was genuinely surprised to learn where the clothes Naleejah gave to Kate really came from. And that certain guy I mentioned? His sweet-talk was so sweet I was getting hot. My teenage self was sure Kate was going to give in at the same time as my adult self was thinking, Come on, Dream Jordan, you're not really going to do your character like this, are you?

So here's what I hope for Dream Jordan's next book: a little less internal monologue. I feel like the author isn't so much creating a character as writing a script for her readers: this is how you can respond positively to all the pressures around you. For example, when Naleejah says her parents don't care what she does, here's what Kate says and thinks in response:

"Mm, lucky you."

"Yeah, I know," said Naleejah. "And I hit the jackpot right before summer vacation. Met this dude named Chase who was dealing out of Breevport. As soon as I gave homeboy some booty, he started lacing me up like crazy ... and I'd still be getting money if he didn't get locked up." Naleejah shook her head and added, "Ever since I got a taste of that cream, I can't ever go back to being thirsty. It's so messed up Chase let himself get locked up."

"True, that's messed up," I said. But in my head I was thinking, Whoa, that's messed up to be sleeping with dudes for money. But nowadays, I try hard to keep my opinions to myself. I get tired of being called 'old lady' whenever I say something moral-like to chicks my age. So let me shut up. Let Naleejah do her thing."

So sometimes the internal and external monologue are both necessary to show readers how Kate avoids confrontation but thinks independently. But the reader doesn't need to know every thought that flits through Kate's head.

One other thing about this book: it's pretty safe considering the tough subjects it tackles. The author uses initials instead of curse words and avoids explicit descriptions of sex. And instead of having something really terrible happen to any of the characters, she fires a few warning shots: an STD scare, a fight that's broken up. Which expands the number of readers it will reach. Smart. I hope Dream Jordan writes a fresh one soon.

Grading Yourself with the Fuse #8 Poll

2010-04-20T12:55:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth Bird has been laboring over the results of the 100 Best Children's Novels Poll and has finally put a nice bow on it. But the discussion continues. Lots of bloggers, starting I think with Teacherninja, have been reporting on the number of books on the list that they've read and giving themselves a grade. Meanwhile, Debbie Reese has begun the project of pointing out all the problematic portrayals of Native Americans in the novels.

This relates to a larger issue: the list has very few examples of books by or about people of color. This isn't really surprising, because lo these many years, books by and about white people have been getting published and winning Newbery awards and getting assigned by classroom teachers much more often than books (imagine all the unpublished--even unwritten ones!) by people of color. In fact, in the last issue of Hornbook, there was a wonderful article about being black and growing up reading books like The Secret Garden.

Also, the CCBC has been collecting data on the number of books by and about people of color that are published in the US, and it's distressing. Here's just a sample:

Year	Total Number of Books Published (Est.)	Number of Books Received at CCBC	African / African Americans		American Indians		Asian Pacifics/ Asian Pacific Americans		Latinos
			By	About	By	About	By	About	By	About
2007	5,000	3,000	77	150	6	44	56	68	42	59

So it's not surprising, to me, to find that most of the people who participated in Elizabeth Bird's poll have read and liked more books by and about white people. So--how helpful!--the Fuse #8 poll reveals the bias in our field. But it also reinforces it. At least it does if our response is to use it as an assessment tool rather than looking at it as an interesting snapshot.

Naturally, I have a solution. After the jump are all of the chapter books on the CCBC's 50 Multicultural Books Every Child Should Know. There are ten. (How perfect!) So give yourself 10 points for each of the following that you have read. Now average that with your Fuse #8 grade. Now you have a grade which is adjusted for white bias. This is obviously mathematically suspect, but entertaining, no?

From the CCBC's 50 Multicultural Books Every Child Should Know:

Look, Lenore. Ruby Lu, Brave and True. Illustrated by Anne Wilsdorf. An Anne Schwartz Book / Atheneum, 2004. 105 pages. Ages 5 - 9

Perkins, Mitali. Rickshaw Girl. Illustrated by Jamie Hogan. Charlesbridge, 2007. 91 pages. Ages 8-10

Walter, Mildred Pitts. Justin and the Best Biscuits in the World. Lothrop, 1988. Ages 7-9

Curtis, Christopher Paul. Bud, Not Buddy. Delacorte, 1999. Ages 8 - 13

Erdrich, Louise. The Birchbark House. Hyperion, 1999. Ages 8 - 12

Park, Linda Sue. A Single Shard. Clarion, 2001. Ages 9 - 12

Lin, Grace. Where the Mountain Meets the Moon. Little, Brown, 2009. 278 pages. Ages 8 - 11

Ryan, Pam Munoz. Esperanza Rising. Scholastic, 2000. Ages 10 - 14

Sheth, Kashmira. Boys without Names. Balzer & Bray, 2010. 320 pages. Ages 9-13

Taylor, Mildred D.. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.. Dial, 1976.

I'd get about a 39%. Yeesh.

Hello, Marvelous World!

2010-04-20T08:16:00.001-07:00

I've been reading a pretty sweet blog: White Readers Meet Black Authors. I mean, if you're white and you know that you usually read white authors, how can you resist a blog with this address: http://welcomewhitefolks.blogspot.com/?

That's how I found Wench, which I'm in the middle of. It focuses on the lives of four women, living in slavery in the South, who are forced to play the role of mistress with the white men who own them. The setting glistens hot on the page, and the characters have to make impossible choices: attempt to run away, abandoning their children and possibly endangering the lives of the slaves who remain behind? or stay in slavery, subjecting themselves to the abuse of the men and the venom of the women, hoping to convince the white men to set their children free?

Well. There's absolutely no possible transition after that. But more relevant-to-children's literature, White Readers Meet Black Authors today had a reminder about Marvelous World by Troy CLE. I ordered the first book back when Vibe magazine was calling it the black Harry Potter, and the author was already imagining the films. And then I thought it fizzled. Not so!

The series has continued, the new covers look great, and there's a book trailer!

Now, when I read Marvelous World ages ago, I thought the sciency stuff with various dimensions didn't hold up well compared to the world building of, say, the DC Universe or the Matrix. Which I think it's trying to emulate. But I did like the way the characters talked, the and the sweep of the story. We're talking epic, interdimensional intrigue. And I thought some of the tricks the characters pulled, like sneaking into an amusement-park-cum-training-ground and channeling their powers to create a pimped-out flying car, would fulfill the wishes of thousands of kids.

I still say that what the series needs is a good editor, but if your kids are looking for more action sci-fi, then this is for them.

Usurper of the Sun (Sort of) Book Review

2010-04-18T13:08:00.001-07:00

I think I'm kind of not exactly going to finish Usurper of the Sun. Not because it's not good! And not because it's hard sci-fi!

OK, probably sort of because it's hard sci-fi. But I don't have a tiny brain, really. I think the questions the novel raises are interesting. For example: If you were going to try to communicate to aliens the concept of friendship, how would you do it? Forget about the technical aspects of sending out messages into the unknown. What images would you use? What if the aliens don't eat together? What if they don't communicate verbally? What if they don't use physical touch to show affection? What if they're like ants or microorganisms and their relationships aren't based on feelings? Tricky, huh?

So I learned a new word: Xenopsychology. Alien psychology.

But the book disappointed me in a way that has nothing to do with the genre or the quality of the writing. This was the first Haikasoru book that arrived, fully cataloged, at my library, and I was hoping it would appeal to teens. The blurb goes thus:

Aki Shiraishi is a high school student working in the astronomy club and one of the few witnesses to an amazing event—someone is building a tower on the planet Mercury. Soon, the Builders have constructed a ring around the sun, threatening the ecology of Earth with an immense shadow. Aki is inspired to pursue a career in science, and the truth. She must determine the purpose of the ring and the plans of its creators, as the survival of both species—humanity and the alien Builders—hangs in the balance.

You can understand why I thought it was going to focus on a teenager, right? But by chapter 2 Aki is all grown up. Which makes sense, because the novel is made up of what were originally three short stories. So the author had to move fast.

I'm sure there are some teens who will adore this--the same ones who like Arthur C. Clarke. And it pairs nicely with Orbital, a graphic novel that makes peace-keeping seem more badass than battling stuff out. But I won't be nominating it for the Alex Awards (I am determined to find something to nominate for the Alex Awards), because I don't think this will appeal to teens in any special, teen-friendly way.

I am still excited to read the other Haikasoru novels, and I refer you to these reviews of Usurper of the Sun, written by people who actually read the book:

Genji Press
Omonomono
Rat's Reading
Book Stove
Bibliophile Stalker

Eisner Nominations for Kids and Teens

2010-04-17T13:55:00.000-07:00

First of all, read this book, I beg you:
Second, the Eisner noms were announced--I'm a little late with this, but the winners won't be announced until July. Here are the kids and teens nominations (Bold titles are also on the 2010 GGNFT list):

Best Publication for Kids

Lunch Lady and the Cyborg Substitute, by Jarrett J. Krosoczeka (Knopf)
The Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook, by Eleanor Davis (Bloomsbury)
Tiny Tyrant vol. 1: The Ethelbertosaurus, by Lewis Trondheim and Fabrice Parme (First Second)
The TOON Treasury of Classic Children's Comics, edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly (Abrams ComicArts/Toon)
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz hc, by L. Frank Baum, Eric Shanower, and Skottie Young (Marvel)

Best Publication for Teens

Angora Napkin, by Troy Little (IDW)
Beasts of Burden, by Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson (Dark Horse)
A Family Secret, by Eric Heuvel (Farrar Straus Giroux/Anne Frank House)
Far Arden, by Kevin Cannon (Top Shelf)
I Kill Giants tpb, by Joe Kelly and JM Ken Niimura (Image)

The children's and teens noms always seem very European to me, though I would not consent to explain that if you asked me. In particular, I think the TOON collection is more an object for enthusiasts than anything intended for children. However, I don't really care about anything except that I Kill Giants is one of the best books I read last year. In fact, I talked about I Kill Giants in one of the PCL newsletters not long ago. I cried, people. Cried.

Elsewhere on the lists, BOOM! studio's The Muppets got a shout-out, as did a few others from the GGNFT list: Pluto, Bayou, the Color Trilogy. My mommy is in America and she met Buffalo Bill seemed to appear in half the categories. I know it sounds like a kid's book, but the reviews all say, "Do not be fooled by the 5-year-old narrator! This is not a child's book!"

So there are some new-to-me titles on the list that I'll be investigating, et tu? Perhaps you would like to nominate some for the 2011 GGNFT list? Pretty please?

Nice Stories

2010-04-16T08:14:00.000-07:00

I tend to whip kids into a frenzy at my storytimes. I had the same tendency as a babysitter, camp counselor, and classroom teacher, where I learned that the first step in classroom management is managing yourself. I can't figure out, actually, how other people have quiet storytimes. Quiet 4-year-olds creep me out.

And I hate it when adults shush kids over and over, because it's so normal for kids to want to respond to a story by yelling out things like, "I have a pet fish, too!" I like to remind people that Shakespearean theater was punctuated by much less adorable outbursts.

But the problem with high-energy, all-singing, all-dancing storytimes is that I don't get to read the touching, quiet stories. My philosophy has been that those stories are great for intimate reading between parents and children but can't work in a group, in the middle of a one-room library, on a Monday night.

But lately, I've been challenging myself to read those stories, because I think I have to have faith in a good story--forget the finger games and the repeated lines and the instructions to study the illustrations closely so you can hear what the words aren't saying. If librarians won't believe in the power of bare tale-telling, who will?

So I've been trying to trust a good story to hold children's attention. Of course, so far I haven't actually tried this on Monday nights, because they're zoo-y whether I'm loud and silly or not. But I did try it with a class visit this week.

I read Otis, by Loren Long, which perhaps isn't even that standout of a story. It's nostalgic, it's nice, reminiscent of Virginia Lee Burton in its personification of an old fashioned tractor. The story takes place on a farm, for goodness sakes. (Makes sense now that Loren Long re-illustrated the Little Engine that Could.) In other words, the story is exactly the kind I usually eschew, because I think city kids can't relate.

But I don't want to build a collection of snarky, arty books that appeal more to a hipster parent's sense of style than a child's unselfconscious tastes. (And I just bought a bunch of books from AMMO, so I have to do penance--jk.)

No really, I just want to give stories like Otis a chance. So I did.

And when I got to the part of the story when the calf gets stuck in the mud pond, the kids were all proud of themselves because they knew how it was going to end: the little old tractor was going to save the day. Duh.

But how is the tractor going to save the day? That's what I asked them. And unlike when I ask them to repeat this line with me or look for the owl on every page or tell me about their pets and shoes and toys and families, they were quiet. Three of them raised their hands and offered theories, but the other 25 were silent. No one was waving her hand or accidentally shouting things out. Here was a question that could only be answered one way: by turning the page.

***

For a long time, I thought a quiet storytime was one that was floundering. Now I think there's more than one kind of quiet. Sure, there's the unnatural, shell-shocked quiet of kids who just got told to shush, but that's completely different from the magical turn-the-page quiet. Maybe that kind of quiet is an award only bestowed on books with good, old-fashioned, heck I'll just say it, nice stories.

Maybe it's just a phase

2010-04-15T09:03:00.000-07:00

One of those why-boys-don't-read theories that circulates pretty widely is that boys prefer books that awards committees, librarians, and parents (possibly publishers) consider trashy. Books with less character development and more explosions and toilets.

So these books with crazy boy appeal are actually harder for boys to get their hands on, because awards committees, librarians, and parents (who shall henceforth be referred to as literary gatekeepers) are all like, "Oh no, dear, you don't want that nasty book about exploding flatulence, you want this nice book about making friends."

Boys come to the library looking for Captain Underpants and face a wall of Junie B. Jones and Judy Moody books.

But I just read an article that makes a good, related point: it's not really that girls like more sophisticated books. It's just that the literary gatekeepers of America have embraced trashy girl books while still looking down on trashy boy books.

What are trashy girl books? How about Sweet Valley High and the Babysitters Club (both of which are being reissued as we speak) and Gossip Girl (which is a household-name TV show). Oh yeah, and Twilight. Do parents just die when they see kids checking those out?

And this isn't just a literary phenomenon: can you think of a male equivalent to Hannah Montana or Taylor Swift*?

This idea is one of many raised in "Sweet Valley High: The Great Retweening and Why Boys Won't Read." The article came out at the beginning of the month, hot on the heels of that New York Times article about boys falling behind in school, but I just discovered it via Roger's blog.

It's a super sweet article about the ascendancy of adolescent girl culture, and as a bonus, it has data from the kind of study I would like to do for my phD: the researchers have Korean English-language learners read Sweet Valley High books and then test their vocabulary gain.

And there's some potential good news here: if trashy girl books have been accepted, could trashy boy books eventually weasel their way in? Could Diary of a Wimpy Kid be a sign?

*Actually, I've got one: wrestling. That's what tween boys talk to me about. Cena, Edge, Triple H. It's like Hannah Montana for boys. There are overacted melodramatic plots, crazy costumes, and instead of singing, there's brawling.

Read me on YALSA

2010-04-14T10:39:00.000-07:00

I have a post about teen furniture shopping!

Why I'm no longer afraid of Naruto

2010-04-13T11:46:00.000-07:00

When it comes to buying manga, for a long time I felt like I had to follow Maria Von Trapp and "start at the very beginning--it's a very good place to start." So I'd buy volumes 1-5 of Negima, Naruto, One Piece, etc.

And then all my readers hated me.

Most of the fans had already read the first 5 volumes, and if they hadn't, it's not like it took them very long to get to volume 6. But I just couldn't bear to spend three times as much money on Naruto as I did on other series. It's that classic librarian dilemma: give the people what they want or give the people choices. You know what I mean?

Anyway, the point is that story arcs are my new thing. Instead of specializing in short series, like Yotsuba or Death Note, or only buying the first few volumes of long series, I'm now seeking out the beginning of the most recent story arc and buying that. Then I can go forward or backward from there, but I have an entry point for new readers.

I feel like this is advice I would give to someone who was just starting a Manga collection, because the most popular series are also the most daunting: 47 volumes in Naruto, 47 in One Piece (wait, that's weird ...), even Negima has 26 and Full Metal Alchemist is approaching 23.

The tricky thing is figuring out where a story arc begins, if you don't read the Manga yourself. There's usually a wiki, although sometimes they explain things in terms of chapters and you have to figure out which chapters are contained in which volume. And for smaller series, which don't merit a wiki, individual reviews are the most helpful. It's definitely a question for Google. Or you can just ask the kids in the library, which is usually more efficient.

Also interesting: VIZ seems to be hip to this challenge. This May, they're releasing the Manga in the East Blue story arc in groups of three. And when I got One Piece volume 25, it had a little Skypiea logo on the spine, identifying the book as part of the Skypiea story arc. There are also series like Higurashi When The Cry and Code Geass that have different story arcs based on different characters' perspectives on the same events.

So far, my story arc approach has worked, in the sense that the more recent volumes of One Piece and Naruto are satisfying the die-hard fans, and I have plenty of money left to buy Ooku and Pluto, even though no one's heard of them because they don't have an Anime.

Comparing Sketchup and Floorplanner

2010-04-10T10:37:00.001-07:00

Sometimes impressing people is the best approach to getting your way. You can measure, you can reason, you can provide data. But if you can show people a 3D model, they might just let you move all the furniture in the library. That's what happened to me.

(Actually, we had to move all the furniture, because G-Tech donated a block of children's computers, and they just wouldn't fit in our old space. But I still think the 3D model gave me a lot of credibility when I proposed a new layout.)

I used Floorplanner to do the 3D model, without really investigating my options. So I was wondering what else was out there, and guess what? Google has a similar program. Shocking, right? You know what's weird? That Google doesn't have a magazine. Oprah has a magazine. Mac has a magazine. Is it because Google believes all magazines will be rendered obsolete by some technology they are currently working on? Whoever they are? This worries me.

Anyway, I had to try it, and then I had to write about it, so here's my comparison:

Floorplanner

This tool is easy to use, especially if you can't draw. With Flooplanner, you draw a 2-dimensional outline. Then, to add furniture, just click in the right spot, select a piece of furniture from a menu of icons, and enter the furniture's dimensions. Then just click a button to see your design in 3D (and pan!). However, you're limited in the number of floorplans you can create, and it would be difficult to enter unusually shaped furniture.

Pros:

You don't have to download anything. Just sign up for an account online and do all your designing without leaving your browser. This also means you can access your floorplan from any computer without any extra steps.
You create your design in 2 dimensions, and as long as you enter data about the height of the walls and furniture, the program will generate a 3D simulation with a click of a button. (You can also skip adding height data and just look at everything in 2D. But that would be lame.) I found it easier to create a birds-eye view than to visualize the space in 3D the way you do in Sketchup.
There's an extensive menu of furniture icons that you can insert into your design--like inserting clipart in Word. You get to enter the dimensions, or just click and drag to make stuff bigger or smaller. You can also copy and paste to duplicate items of furniture. And you can drag them around with your mouse. If you can use MS anything, you can use this.
The program automatically creates a list of the furniture you're using. After you've entered an item of furniture on your floorplan it appears in a list underneath the design. So you are also creating an inventory of all the shelving and other furniture you have or want.

Cons:

You can only save a few floorplans. Of course, if you're just redesigning your library, that should be plenty. But if you really love the tool, you have to pay to save more designs.
It's tricky to replicate funky-shaped furniture. You can draw furniture as opposed to selecting from the menus, but it's like drawing stuff in Photoshop, which some people are good at. My mouse hand starts spasming.
It's a little slow to load sometimes, probably because it's web-based and relies on Flash. Not the most powerful combo.
You can't get a really good model of the "look and feel" you're going for. You can place furniture and change colors, but somehow it still looks like the graphics for a '90s Sim game.

Sketchup

I feel like I've only scratched the surface of this program's capabilities. I found it difficult to draw everything myself in a 3D environment rather than selecting furniture from a menu, but once I figured out some tricks unique to the program, it was actually easier and faster to draw accurately. And if I learned a few more tricks, I'd have skills I could apply to other projects and no limit to the number of floor plans I could save.

Pros:

Drawing accurately is easier in Google Sketchup. In Floorplanner, if you want to draw an object with exactly the right dimensions (which is sort of the point, right?) you have to draw it freehand (or freemouse) and then click on it once, click the "i" button for info, and then edit the dimensions. In Sketchup, you just click on your start point, drag the line a bit in the direction you want to go, then type how long you want it to be. The line will automatically click into place.
You can "fill" surfaces with digital photos of your actual wallpaper, carpet, etc. It still looks a little fake, but it allows you to better simulate your interior decorating. you can also fill with premade patterns and textures (check out the wood grain on my "shelves" below).
Everything's faster--zooming in and out, editing dimensions, dragging and dropping. Once you get the hang of things, you'll spend very little time moving the mouse incrementally in an attempt to get things just right.

Cons:

You have to download and install the program. It's not like it takes that long, but it does seem like more of a commitment.
You really need the tutorials. When I tried to learn it by monkeying around, I ended up drawing a shelf underground. The tool icons aren't familiar and you have to draw in the 3D view.
There's no menu of furniture you can insert. You have to draw it all yourself. That can be tricky when you're trying to draw a curvy office chair. This is me trying to draw some shelves. I had to draw a 3D rectangle and cut out spaces for shelves.

You have to keep changing your view. Maybe this is just me. It's pretty easy to zoom in and out if you're using a mouse with a track wheel, but it annoyed me that the screen didn't automatically move sideways when I was trying to draw a line that went beyond my current view. I kept running into the edge of the screen, switching from the draw tool to the hand tool, moving my screen over, and going back to drawing. I also feel like 3D views just takes up more space and I have a tiny computer screen. And sometimes I'm grumpy.

In conclusion, Sketchup is powerful, while Floorplanner is accessible. Of course, I'm not the first person to review these tools. I like to think I'm giving you the perspective of an enthusiastic but only medium-tech-savvy librarian, but you can read excellent reviews of these and other tools on Lifehacker.

Personification in Children's Books

2010-04-08T07:17:00.000-07:00

A teacher came in yesterday and asked me for examples of personification in picture books. The idea is to teach 5th graders about literary special effects, like onomatopoeia, personification, simile, metaphor, etc. I was like, oh great idea no problem. Then I was like, huh.

It was one of those reference questions that's harder than it sounds. I couldn't specifically remember whether certain books attributed human qualities and actions to non-humans.

What I was able to come up with was a list of things that are often personified in picture books: trains, toys, rain and wind. Animals, of course, but in children's books, toys and animals aren't just personified in the literary sense--they're given dialog. If they have faces, I think kids see them as characters rather than literary devices. Anyway, that was enough to get me started.

Here's what I gave her:

The Rainstomper by Addie Boswell, illustrated by Eric Velasquez. The rain and thunder are personified as the baton twirler's nemesis, but there are other examples as well--the flowers peek, the puddles shimmy.

The Curious Garden by Peter Brown. I'm a sucker for secret gardens and urban settings. In this book, a boy discovers a garden on an old train trestle and helps it grow until it decides to explore other parts of the city on its own, changing the gray industrial landscape to something that reminds me of the hanging gardens of Babylon.

Choo Choo by Virginia Lee Burton. Hopefully you still have an ancient copy of this one in your library. I'm not positive 5th graders are into vintage picture books, but this one is cute and spine-tingling. The destruction the runaway train causes gives me a falling feeling every time I read it. Oh, and obviously, the train is personified. You could also use The Little Engine that Could.*

Leaf Man by Lois Ehlert. I always imagine this one as a blues song. This book also suggests so many activities: leaf rubbing, nature walks, field guides, song writing. Then there are the gorgeous cutaway illustrations. Anyway, it's an example of personification that borders on transformation.

I'm sure there are others, but I think those will work with the teacher's plan of making lists of verbs and adjectives you can use to personify something. I just hope she doesn't want to do synechdoche next.

*I had no idea Loren Long did new illustrations for this in 2005! Sold!

What your shelving style says about you

2010-04-07T13:33:00.000-07:00

I've already thought a lot about how to catalog and shelve graphic novels--I even wrote a post about it for the YALSA blog. But my brother just pointed me to a series of articles on Popmatters that addresses this issue from the perspective of comics readers rather than librarians. (OK, so in the article below, the comics reader sat in on a discussion among librarians, so maybe it's more of a cross-section of perspectives.)

Peep this:

"Regardless of how to interpret different ways of categorizing comics in a library, what underlies such questions is how readers read, and what comics means to them. Do they follow writers (what one librarian at the session I was at called the “Neil Gaiman problem”)? Do they follow publishers (as above)? Do they follow pencilers (or some other artist)? Do they follow a particular character (what another librarian called the “Wolverine problem”)?

... For some, the idea that someone would read anything about one character, regardless of author or artist, suggests much about the low nature of so many comics, proving that they are more about corporate properties than artistic or literary expression. For others, such questions are reflective of the deeply fannish nature of comics reading, and the diverse nature of that fandom."

Woah, does the way I catalog my comics say something about the status I believe they deserve? Fascinating.

Another article in the series, "Creator: Various" suggests that works with single authors often receive more attention then those written "by committee," because we have this reverence for authorial vision. (And if you're not clear on exactly what pencilers vs. inkers vs. script writers vs story writers do, this article is a great introduction to how a comic is constructed.)

The article concludes thus:

In this way, film studies offers better models of authorship than does literary criticism, where the text, the author, and the reader are the primary coordinates. While the director as author still shapes college film courses, books, and reviews, within the wider field are perspectives that emphasize the contributions of others, for example, producers, stars, and the role of forces like budgets and processes like commodification in the making of movies and the history of cinema.

Which makes me wonder if we should shelve comics by title, because that's how we shelve films?

At my library, we're doing this weird hybrid (which was totally my idea, so I really shouldn't distance myself from it). We catalog single-author and stand-alone works by author. We catalog series by series title. That means all the Wolverine books are together, and so are all the books by Doug Tennapel.

Part of the appeal of this system is that it fits with what we were already doing. I'd say the main drawback is that there's a lot of room for me to be subjective. For example, do I put the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen under series title or author?

I went with author, which I guess proves the point that I revere an authorial vision.

Problem Parents in YA Books

2010-04-07T08:06:00.001-07:00

I read the New York Times article on problem parents in YA lit, plus the brouhaha on the blogosphere, and I think what we have here is a case of bad editing. The article makes many observations about how the roles of parents in YA novels has changed over time. But I have no idea what the point is.

Is the author saying that there are a disproportionate number of bad parents in YA lit? She does mention a study from the 1970s that somehow uses Census and DLT data to show that "less than 3 percent of the depictions were 'realistic': in the novels, mothers were disproportionately seen as being paralyzed at home, while in real life they were beginning to go out and get jobs."

Is she saying that it was better back in the day, when authors removed parents by killing them off? She talks about how classic YA and children's lit often focuses on orphans, and then concludes by saying: "Back then parents knew how to get out of the way and let the orphan’s rise begin."

Or is she just observing how parents in YA lit have gone from absent to abusive to busy to helpless? Her example of helplessness is Sara Zarr's Once Was Lost, which I'm in the middle of (and loving). Of course, it's easy to poke holes at an article that selects just a few novels to use as examples. However, it inspired me to point out some of my favorite parents from YA lit.

Fat Kid Rules the World by K.L. Going. Troy's Dad comes off as a drill sergeant in the beginning--after all, he is an ex-marine. But Troy ultimately brings his musical genius/drug-addict friend to Dad for that dose of love and discipline that can save a kid's life.

Boy Proof by Cecil Castellucci. Maybe the dad in this one, a sci-fi movie make-up artist and costume designer, qualifies as absent, since he's divorced from Victoria's mom. But it really stuck with me the way he had a "Victoria Tuesday" clause in his contracts, which guaranteed that he hung out with his daughter every Tuesday.

An Abundance of Katherines by John Green. I can't explain why I love Hollis, the mom, so much without committing acts of spoilage for those who haven't read it. (Why haven't you read it?) But let's just say that I love the way she cheerfully pushes a rock up the hill (metaphorically), and I love her southern accent, her curse jar, and her pink pick-up.

Flipped by Wendelin Van Draanen. I admit there's a grandfather here that kind of overshadows all the other characters in terms of awesomeness, but the father who goes cheap on his own family's home so he can pay for quality care for his brother, who has some serious disabilities, definitely made an impression on me.

Teen Furniture: Fewer Distractions

2010-04-06T12:52:00.000-07:00

Now that I've got all the children's furniture out of my system, I've found a few teen furniture sites with products that make me really happy. First of all, 2Modern has the most comprehensive teen section, and it was there that I discovered Fatboy products.

See, I had already narrowed down the kind of furniture I was looking for to benches, like in museums and shoe stores. I think I sang the praises of benches earlier. And Fatboy has these modular bench-things that I love.That really doesn't give the full effect. You can see an example of a bunch of them next to each other on 2modern. They're one of the more expensive options I'm considering, but they're modular.*Fatboy also makes round lounge cushions and bean bag chairs that some library magazine should pick up and sell as teen furniture. Seriously cool.

The next site that I recommend is Funky Lights, which has a much cheesier design, but some reasonably priced modern furniture that I haven't seen anywhere else. They have both "teen" and "dorm room" sections, but I like some of the furniture in other sections, too, like these chairs from the, er, "furniture" section. Did I mention that the site also has stupid navigation?

I think they would appeal to teens at the same time as they repelled adults, because they require a more relaxed pose than most adults feel comfortable in. And they stack!

And last but not least, Funky Sofas doesn't have a teen section, but it does have a lot of ottomans. Funky ones.

My only word of caution is that some of them are awfully velvety. And besides wanting to avoid the bordello/beaudoir look, I fear the material would soil or rip easily. But in many cases, you can select a microfiber instead for a little extra money.

I also like AllModern, but they make me sad because they don't have a teen section. Plus, they're a little pricier. But there is one thing I'm considering from their bench and ottoman section: the Heller Frank Ghery Silver Bench. It's pictured below as a coffee table (the picture is actually from Room and Board). It might be a little tall?

I'll mention three other sites I used for window shopping purposes only, because they were out of my price range, for the most part, and didn't have teen sections: Architonic, Hive, and Yliving.

Spending all of this time online shopping feels sort of wrong. I keep reminding myself that it's for work, but it feels so much like ... shopping.

*Apparently, italics are the new exclamation points.

That Blog Belongs to Emily Brown!

Review: Cinder by Marissa Meyer

Review: Everybody Sees the Ants by A. S. King

Review: Breaking Stalin's Nose by Eugene Yelchin

And now for some eco-criticism

Review: Jefferson's Sons by Kimberly Brubaker-Bradley

Youth Media Awards Yay!

My Graphic Novel Selection presentation

Richard Peck labors for 40 years and produces a mouse

In which I attack the attack on Walter Dean Meyers

“what does it profit them if they read many books and love none?”

My Summer Reading presentation

Book Review: Marvel Origin Story Picture Books

Tween: it rhymes with scene!

Shopping at Borders

I can read without moving my eyes!

New Adult Lit: My Picks

Things I read this weekend

Oh, Google

Social Networking Sites for Kids

I finally read some of that Tiger Mother book

Actually, we should make it harder for kids to read

Sorry--I've been transitioning

Defending First Person Shooters

Review: Half World by Hiromi Goto

"Yeah, I'm an EA Librarian."

Bookmobiles will save us!

Story Maps

I knew I could predict the future!

"Librarians get in fights"

Memories of Ramona

Hearsay evidence re: digital comics

The most helpful thing on the internet this month

Finding Local Authors and Illustrators

"Librarians are looking forward to spending less time with books and more time with people."

Air conditioning, anarchy, and makeshift summer camps

On turning people away

Trends in teen lit: Swindlers are the new vampires

My summer reading problem

Rape Scenes

Boys Detective Fiction

Picture books that aren't meant to be read aloud

In Which I check my Google Reader

Children's Librarian's Professional Development Calendar for June

RILA Conference reflections: Fat Lit

Review: This Means War! by Ellen Wittlinger

Review: Big Red Lollipop by Rukhsana Khan

A list for Percy Jackson Fans

I played with the Nook

Beginning Readers Storytime

Books for Breakups

Roadtrip to Queens, anyone?

Review: You Don't Even Know Me: Stories and Poems About Boys by Sharon Flake

Oh, look! Youth RARI has a website

Review: 8th Grade Superzero by Olugbemisola Rhuday Perkovich

Rhode Island Children's Book Award 2011

The New Children's Reference

Do you have a parenting collection?

Behold the beauty of my Twilight Readalike Booklist!

Library, meet your new best friend

A study of the optimum distance between a library and a school

Teen Urban Drama Preview!

Celebrate my Swedish heritage this week!

Singing your way through storytime

Children's Librarian's Professional Development Calendar for May

Jamie Greene Answers the Call

Earth Day!

Can white people be multicultural, too?

Hot Girl Review

Grading Yourself with the Fuse #8 Poll

Year

Total Numberof BooksPublished (Est.)

Number of BooksReceivedat CCBC

African /African Americans

American Indians

Asian Pacifics/ Asian Pacific Americans

Latinos

Hello, Marvelous World!

Usurper of the Sun (Sort of) Book Review

Eisner Nominations for Kids and Teens

Total Number
of Books
Published (Est.)

Number of Books
Received
at CCBC

African /
African Americans

Asian Pacifics/
Asian Pacific Americans