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Even on a day off, there’s no getting away from books. Yesterday I volunteered at one of Minneapolis’s inner-city schools. A teacher I know there needed help moving into a new classroom – just across the hall from his old classroom. He taught 4th grade this past year, and next year he’ll be teaching 3rd graders, so he asked me to help him weed his book collection, pulling out anything that might not be appropriate for his younger readers. Weeding is such an intense, personal chore. You’re confronted with dozens of difficult choices with each book you pick up. And just because I love a particular book – for example, he had a copy of Rumer Godden’s exquisite The Mousewife – doesn’t mean 3rd graders will share my enthusiasm. Now I know what librarians have to go through. My friend had bought most of those books himself over the years. Many of the books were tattered, had ripped covers, or had handwriting scrawled on them. They had been touched and opened and read by hundreds of little hands. These were books that had become part of children’s lives, at least during those hours they spent in my friend’s classroom. These books meant something to all of us – to the students, to my generous friend, and finally to me, who had to choose what to keep and what to discard. The Mousewife is now sitting on a shelf in my bedroom.

Are laptops a distraction in college classrooms? You bet. But are institutionalized restrictions the answer? After recent reports sparked a backlash against students plugging in (and tuning out) during class, Ars Technica asked readers what could be... Read the rest of this post

Bruno, in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, is one of the more problematic fictional characters whom I’ve found within the pages of a book. While Corinne said in her comments that she thinks his character is realistic, since he is a nine-year-old boy who has led a sheltered life, has an overbearing older sister, and lives in a time when there was no television or internet, I found his inability to understand his own language, as shown by his persistent usage of The Fury for the Fuhrer and Outwith for Auschwitz, to be unconvincing, contrived, and essentially unnecessary. However, it’s certainly true that without television and other mass media we could all be as uninformed and as naive as Bruno and that sometimes a character is more an instrument to advance a story’s plot than a breathing, convincing entity.

And Bruno certainly does advance the plot of this story. It’s a page-turner. As Corinne says, ” Once I started it, there was no way I could put it down until I had finished it.” I gulped it down as well and was relieved to know that this is the way the author intends for the book to be read.

Bruno’s simplified way of looking at the world around him makes this a good introduction to the Holocaust for children who know little about this time in history, and could work well in a classroom setting where there would be immediate answers to the questions that arise.

As an adult, I was annoyed by “red herring” portions of the book that were brought up and then never fully explored. Lieutenant Kotler is grilled by Bruno’s father over dinner one evening about the reason for Kotler’s father leaving Germany in 1938. Is Kotler’s father a Jew? A dissident? Who knows? It is never explained and left me wondering why the scene took place. It doesn’t seem to play a part in Kotler’s subsequent disappearance, which Corinne attributes to Kotler’s closeness to Bruno’s mother.

The shocking ending of this book comes so closely after Bruno’s betrayal of Shmuel and Shmuel’s subsequent punishment for stealing food that it could be wondered if Shmuel had intended for Bruno to stay behind the fence forever. Although Bruno is sheltered and naive, Shmuel understands the differences between the two boys, especially after living in the camp for a year. Corinne, on the other hand, says “Yes - I think Shmuel intended for Bruno to return home. I don’t think either boy had any idea what would happen or the risks they were taking when Bruno crawled under the fence.”

This is a book that bears discussion and I hope that it will be chosen for book groups, classrooms, and family read-alouds for years to come.
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Last week, the St. Paul Pioneer Press reported on a new graphic novel course offered at Hazel Park Middle School in St. Paul, Minnesota. Not surprisingly, at least to Stone Arch staffers, the instructor, Linda Morrison, raved about her students’ interest in the course and their reading progress. All was good in the world . . .

The real story, however, came the day after the article’s publication. In several follow-up responses, a number of people voiced strong opposition to the course, stating, “Comic books have no place in a curriculum.” This type of public feedback shocked us, to say the least. Hadn’t graphic novels secured their place as a respected literary genre? Didn’t the New York Times, the National Book Foundation, and even the Pulitzer Prize Board embrace the format long ago? Wasn’t the Maryland State Department of Education Comic Book Initiative enough to prove the benefits of graphic novels for reluctant readers? Maybe we’ve read too many comic books, but it sure felt like we’d slipped into the Bizarro world.

Have no fear! We were rescued from the depths of disillusionment by the most likely of heroes—the students themselves. In the original article, one of Morrison’s students, Noushoua, exclaimed, “Reading graphic novels makes you want to read more.” Can entertaining, inspiring, and educating students really be that simple? Well, at Stone Arch Books, we believe it can!

Check out our website for tons of graphic novels your readers will want to read. And while you’re there, browse our Educator Resources, sure to help calm any, um, unearthly fears.


--Donnie Lemke
Senior Editor, Stone Arch Books

A big part of my job at Stone Arch Books is to get reviews and awards for our books. We get excited about reviews that are in magazines, but we REALLY like hearing directly from kids. That’s why we need your help.

Have your students read any books from Stone Arch Books? We would love it if they would write about the books they’ve read. What was their favorite part of the story? Did they like the illustrations? Would they recommend this book to a friend? Why?

After they have written the reviews, they can either email them to me at [email protected] or they can mail them to:

Krista Monyhan
Stone Arch Books
7825 Telegraph Rd.
Bloomington, MN 55438.

Once I get the reviews, I will post them on our website. (We won’t use the students’ names, but will identify their grade and city with their review.)

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions. I hope this will be a good way to get your students writing after they read books!


--Krista Monyhan
Sales and Marketing Coordinator, Stone Arch Books

We know it’s hard to gauge a student’s reaction and comprehension after reading a book. And book reports, while useful for you, can be boring and frustrating for the student. That’s why we created our handy book report form (opens PDF). It’s a simple handout, with areas for students to fill in the information they need to show that they understood a book. But with its fun design and clear areas for information, it doesn’t feel like an assignment.

Try it out in your classroom, library, or home, and let us know what you think! If the student agrees, send us a copy of any book report on one of our books—we love to hear what kids think, too.

For a great final project, you can combine the book report form and the blank graphic novel page we’ve created. Ask the student to read a graphic novel, write a book report on it, and then draw a graphic novel page of their own, using our create-your-own-graphic-novel page (opens PDF).

If you don’t work in publishing, there are many mysteries about how books are made. Who picks the cover? Who decides on chapter titles? Who writes the stuff on the back of the book?

Here at Stone Arch Books, and at most publishing companies, the editor of each book writes its cover copy (the words on the back). It seems like a pretty easy job, but it’s actually harder than it sounds. It’s difficult to condense an entire book down to 50 – 100 words (that’s how long our back cover copy is here). The cover copy can’t give away what happens in a book, but it has to be exciting enough to make readers want to pick it up. It can’t tell too much, but it can’t tell too little, either! We are working on the cover copy for our Fall 2008 list now.

You can use cover copy for a fun project for a classroom, library, or book group. Ask each student to read a book (or even a chapter of a book). Then, without reading the book’s cover copy, ask them to write their own. Compare the student’s cover copy to the book’s. What are their differences? What are their similarities? Which one most makes the student want to read the book?

Not such a crazy idea anymore!

In an editorial today, the New York Times championed something that’s very near and dear to our hearts: Comic books in the classroom. Buoyed by a recent article about the Comic Book Project and the Maryland Comics in the Classroom initiative, the editorial posits that comic books (and by extension, graphic novels) have an important place in education. In fact, the editorial states, “The pairing of visual and written plotlines that [comic books] rely on appear to be especially helpful to struggling readers.” We’ve been saying this since our first graphic novels hit shelves in Spring 2006, so it’s nice of the Times to catch up! We’ve got a make-your-own-graphic-novel page (opens PDF) that students love, which is a great supplement to any of our graphic novels and a fabulous learning tool for the classroom.

There are sure to be many more articles like the two in the Times--here's to getting kids to read with the kinds of books they love.

I just finished "Grief Girl", by my fantabulous Aussie friend Erin Vincent. It's a must read and I'm not just saying that because I love the girl. It's a searing, honest, beautifully written account of overwhelming grief after parents were killed by a speeding tow truck while crossing a road - when Erin was all of 14.

It's a brave book, written by a funny, brave and wonderful woman. If you're in the NYC area, Erin is going to be signing books at Barnes and Noble in Greenwich Village (Ave of the Americas at 8th Street) at 7:30 on Wednesday March 21st (that's this Wednesday). I'm going, so hope to see you NYC peeps there!

Another fab book I read was Tamar by Mal Peet, who is becoming one of my new favorite YA authors. It's about two British operatives who parachute into Holland to help the Dutch resistance during the "Hunger Winter" in 1944. Highly recommended.

Oh! And I'm so excited...my daughter was complaining about how she didn't have any good books to read so I went to my bookshelves and pulled out my 1937 original printing copy of "Ballet Shoes" by Noel Streitfield. The book originally belonged to my aunts Barbara (Garrison, a children's book writer and illustrator) and Marilyn, (one of the first female photographers at Magnum, with photos on the cover of Newsweek, who then decided to become a Buddhist nun later in life) and read it multiple times as a kid. I read her the first chapter and now she's engrossed in it. Don't you just love when your kids find joy in books you adored as a child?