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Cynthia Lord's Touch Blue has a cover that is really unique, I think. House, ocean, rocks, Monopoly? I was intrigued. Here's the back story from Cynthia:

"The first time I saw the cover for Touch Blue it was slightly different than the final cover, but the design and all the elements were there: the house, the rocks, and the Monopoly tokens. I was a little apprehensive when the preliminary cover arrived in the mail, because I had no idea what to expect. I didn't know what direction my editor and art director were thinking, but I did know they had struggled with the cover.

"Part of that struggle was due to my first novel, Rules. Rules has an amazing cover, and my audience for Rules was wide and diverse. It stretched from 3rd grade to 8th grade, and it included both boys and girls. It was important that the cover for Touch Blue didn't lose any of that audience, but that's a lot to expect from one cover....

Read the rest of Cynthia's Cover Story, and see the lengths she went to so that the details were right, at melissacwalker.com.

By Bianca Schulze, The Children’s Book Review
Published: March 25, 2010

May 2-8, 2011, is Children’s Book Week. Each year, during this week, The Children’s Book Council hosts the Children’s Choice Book Awards. These are the best awards because the children are given a voice! I highly recommend checking out the thirty books that have been nominated for the six categories: k-2nd, 3rd-4th, 5th-6th, Teens, and author of the year. Then, along with your kids or classroom, go and vote for their favorite(s)—you have until April 29. The winners will be announced on May 2 at the Children’s Choice Book Awards Gala.

This year’s Children’s Choice Book Award finalists are as follows:

Kindergarten to Second Grade Book of the Year

Shark vs. Train

by Chris Barton (Author), Tom Lichtenheld (Illustrator)

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers; 1 edition (April 1, 2010)

Publisher’s synopsis: Shark VS. Train! WHO WILL WIN?!

If you think Superman vs. Batman would be an exciting matchup, wait until you see Shark vs. Train. In this hilarious and wacky picture book, Shark and Train egg each other on for one competition after another, including burping, bowling, Ping Pong, piano playing, pie eating, and many more! Who do YOU think will win, Shark or Train?

Add this book to your collection: Shark vs. Train

How Rocket Learned to Read

by Tad Hills

Publisher: Schwartz & Wade; 1 edition (July 27, 2010)

Publisher’s synopsis: Learn to read with this New York Times-bestselling picture book, starring an irresistible dog named Rocket and his teacher, a little yellow bird. Follow along as Rocket masters the alphabet, sounds out words, and finally . . . learns to read all on his own!

With a story that makes reading fun—and wil

My daughter and I took an after-school ferry ride this afternoon to attend Cynthia Lord's TOUCH BLUE event at Flying Pig Books. We both read and loved TOUCH BLUE so hearing Cindy speak about it was a real treat. We got to see old photos of the real Maine schoolhouse that inspired the story of TOUCH BLUE, in which families take in foster children to try and save their island school.



And Cindy had great props!  She brought her marked-up manuscript with line edits, some rubber duckies from RULES, sea glass, which plays a role in the book, and lobster banding things (Banders, perhaps? Is that what they're called? Clearly I was not paying close enough attention...)



Flying Pig co-owner Elizabeth Bluemle took the lobstering practice a step further and started banding guests at the book event, including my daughter and author Linda Urban (lurban ).



I do not think poor Linda enjoyed being banded... (though she was laughing a second after I took this photo)



Yes, we had entirely too much fun.  And I have a shiny, signed copy of TOUCH BLUE to add to my classroom library tomorrow!

Thursday 3/12

—Not much reading time today. Shakespeare Club in the afternoon and somehow the morning just went to different activities. Did squeeze in time for about half a chapter of Lucky Girl. Love how she’s retelling the history of her birth parents, her adoptive parents, even the nun who facilitated the adoption.

—Beanie was glued to Usborne’s Living Long Ago all morning long. Wants to make fish pasties (the name made me LOL) and meat pie. Explained to me how to make a fake beauty mark. Showed me pictures of hoopskirts and farthingales, right before the Shakespeare kids arrived & “farthingale” was a word in one of our scenes.

Friday 3/13

—Baby had his two-month appointment today. Weighed in at 14 lbs! This has nothing to do with reading, of course, but it’s the reason I didn’t read much to speak of today. Schedule upturned. Guess I did read the med journal article refuting the notion of spacing out vaccinations.

Saturday 3/14

—A gardening day. Sorry, books. I’m a foul-weather friend.

Sunday 3/15

—Finished Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom. Doctorow spins an entertaining yarn. And makes me want to run and hide in the nearest neo-Luddite cave. And also, simultaneously and contradictorily, kind of makes me want to go to Disneyland. He paints a future in which scarcity is a thing of the past: scarcity of food, energy, shelter, access to transport, almost everything. The only kind of scarcity left is esteem-based: a good table in a restaurant, primo seats at a Disney attraction. What serves as currency in this kind of society is: esteem. The respect and good opinions of others. Fascinating concept. Doctorow calls it “Whuffie.” When others think well of you, your Whuffie goes up. Poverty amounts to ostracism, worse than ostracism actually, because it isn’t that people are choosing to look past you; they simply don’t notice you at all. Their mental internet uplinks tell them you have no Whuffie and their gazes just slide past you as if you aren’t their, which in a way you aren’t.

The more I think about Whuffie, and esteem as the measure of wealth, the more I wish we could apply a Whuffie system to, say, the AIG execs with their gigantic bonuses they’re sucking out of our bailout money. I have this gleefully nasty image of these people sitting on their millions but unable to find anyone willing to work for them or serve them in any capacity. No drivers, housekeepers, gardeners, nannies, accountants; all the dry cleaners, barristas, and restaurant staff in the country exercising a right to refuse service. Let them do their own taxes and plumb their own toilets. Ha.

Doctorow explores some of the complications and disadvantages of his Whuffie system: a kind of saccharineness overtakes public discourse, because in order for people to think well of you (increasing your Whuffie), they usually need to like you, which means people are careful to speak very pleasantly to each other all the time. Which sounds like a good thing, but if it’s not sincere it would be cloying. And even in a Whuffie economy, the rich tend to get richer and the poor poorer, because the more liked and respected you are, the better positioned you are to influence people and do things that make them admire you all the more. As I said, a really fascinating concept.

(Fair warning to my gentle readers—quite a bit of rough language and promiscuity in the book.)

Wednesday 3/18

Finished Rules by Cynthia Lord, a recent Newbery Honor book. 12-year-old Catherine has a brother, David, age 8, with autism. Catherine has great affection for her little brother and is quite protective of him, sensitive to the reactions of others around him, but she is frustrated, too, tired of the embarrassing situations David is constantly, unwittingly creating. At her friends’ houses, he’ll run through the house counting doors and slamming the cellar door if it’s open; a drop of water on his pants will cause him to undress right then and there. Catherine has created a whole set of rules to help David (who loves rules) learn accepted social behaviors; she is constantly adding to the list and reminding David of his rules.

My heart went out to Catherine. My Wonderboy is not on the autism spectrum, but he has some specific behaviors that are quite common in spectrum kids, and I could envision exactly the kind of situation Catherine kept encountering. That wet-clothes thing, Wonderboy totally does that. One drop of water is all it takes. And the fixating on an expected event, the difficulty in dealing with a wrinkle in the plans: oh yes, we’ve been there. But I’m the mom and helping ease my son through these challenges is part of my vocation. Watching Catherine battle frustration at David’s rigidity, seeing how helpless she sometimes felt, I felt some pangs over my older children, who, like Catherine, are extremely patient and loving with their brother, and who, like Catherine, probably feel in over their heads sometimes. Catherine’s parents are wincingly oblivious to her frustration. She longs for time alone with them, and seldom gets it. She longs for time alone with friends, without the complications that David’s presence can entail (as when, during the new girl next door’s first visit to Catherine’s house, David is bothered by the squeaking of Catherine’s guinea pigs and tries to drown them out by shouting), and seldom gets it. And even then, David seems to occupy most of her thoughts.

Catherine’s plight is handled with great sensitivity. Always, her deep love for David is apparent—and is, indeed, the cause of some of her hardest moments. It bothers her when people stare at him, but it bothers her even more when a stranger’s gaze slides past him, deliberately not seeing him. (Hmm, Whuffie again.) But Catherine’s unhappiness runs deep as well, and this is portrayed in an honest and utterly realistic manner.

The best parts of the book are the scenes in which an awkward friendship develops between Catherine and an older boy, wheelchair-bound, unable to speak, whom she sees every week in the waiting room of David’s OT clinic. Jason communicates by pointing at words written on index cards in a binder that is always with him. He’s rather a cantankerous person, clearly depressed, possibly suicidal. Catherine is shy and fumbling around him, not wanting to offend him but often doing so. And yet they become friends. Jason likes her a great deal. Unimpressed by the limited vocabulary his communication book affords him, she offers to make more word cards for him—and this is the heart of the book, because as Catherine searches for words that are important, vivid, useful, meaningful, to include in Jason’s book, she is also searching for words that communicate her own feelings. Her additions to the book range from the comical (”Whatever”—good for annoying your mother with, she tells Jason) to the poignant (”complicated,” “hidden,” “murky”). She’s groping for an understanding of who she is besides “David’s sister,” and she’s searching—though she doesn’t know it—for the courage to not care what people think, because what makes her unhappiest is her anxiety over the opinions of strangers, neighbors, the kids at school, the girl next door. Her friendship with Jason stretches her (and him too, it seems) in ways that are uncomfortable and good.

Students at my middle school spent an amazing Thursday with Cynthia Lord, the author of the Newbery Honor Book RULES.  I met Cindy at the New England SCBWI Conference a couple years ago and had so hoped that I'd be able to have her visit with my kids someday.  She gave three presentations, sharing with kids the time line for the publication of RULES as well as the inspirations for some of the characters and settings. 



The kids loved seeing the Chinese, Korean, and Braille versions of RULES, but they were especially excited to see her Newbery Honor Plaque. One of my very favorite things from the presentation (and there were many) was what Cindy said about how plaque reminds her of "the powerful combination of wishing and work."  What a powerful message for our kids, too! 

Cindy passed her Newbery Plaque right around the auditorium and invited students to put their hand over the Newbery seal and make a wish for their own dreams to come true.  You might think 7th and 8th graders would consider themselves too cool for something like that, but they weren't.



I watched as just about every student held his or her hand over the seal before handing the plaque to the next person.  I smiled even wider when the math teachers in the audience got a turn to see the plaque -- they all held their hands over the seal for a moment, too, before passing it on.

After school, Cindy signed books for students in the library.


         There's an author at the end of that long line of RULES fans!

Thanks so much, cynthialord , for a day our students will never forget.  Cindy also took some great photos Thursday, so please stop by her LiveJournal to see them if you'd like!

The other day Kathleen Bolton at Writer Unboxed, one of my favorite blogs on writing, described the difficulty of drafting the final chapter in her current work-in-progress. She had reached the end... but wasn't sure exactly how the story should come to its conclusion: I mean, I have a vague idea of how it should end (hopefully leaving the reader slavering for more), but I’m waffling between an

Pottsville, Pennsylvania

Coordinates: 40 41 N 76 12 W

Population: 15,549 (2000 est.)

Responsible for the dismissal of a Harvard University president, enjoyed by the Founding Fathers (in all of their wisdom), and commercially available since 1612, beer has been an ever-present commodity in United States history. (more…)

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