During my recent visit to my family in Newcastle Upon Tyne in the UK, I got in to a lengthy discussion about good literature with the young adult section book buyer at the Waterstones there. (Waterstones is kind of like Barnes and Noble but classier). Obviously Patrick Ness' name came up pretty quickly and she pointed me in the direction of his new title A Monster Calls. There is an interesting, heartbreaking, and ultimately heartwarming story behind the story. The original idea came from a children's writer Siobhan Dowd who died of breast cancer before she was able to write the book. Dowd's notes were handed to Ness to write the story. As Ness explains in his Author's Note, he never met Dowd but knew her from her books (probably best know in the US for The London Eye Mystery) "She had the characters, a premise, and a beginning. What she didn't have, unfortunately was time." (Ness, 2011).
Whoever the genius was that handed Ness those notes deserves a standing ovation. It's a haunting masterpiece of tension despite the fact the outcome is inevitable from the beginning. Ness does what he does best - lets characters be complicated, flawed, and yet still capable of great things. There is no black or white in the tales Ness weaves. Nothing is ever quite what it seems and no one can be defined as either one thing or another. As the monster explains to young Conor, who is trying to come to terms with his conflicted feelings over his mother's suffering "...human beings are complicated beasts...How can a queen be both a good witch and a bad witch? How can a prince be a murderer and a saviour?...How can a person be wrong-thinking but good hearted?" Conor feels guilty because in his heart he wants his mother to die so her suffering, and in many ways his own, can end. His guilt is tearing him apart. The monster has come to save him, and not his mother as Conor believed, by forcing him to speak the truth. "You do not write your life with words, the monster said. You write it with actions. What you think is not important. It is only important what you do."
What you need to do dear reader is get out there and read everything Patrick Ness has ever written. ASAP. Also, you will need a hanky for the last two chapters. I wept through them both.
The Guardian's Review of A Monster Calls.
Siobahn Dowd's Obituary from the Guardian

Whooaaa. I just remembered I had a blog and why I have it. Picking up from where I left off...The Ask and The Answer turned out to be as equally amazing and full of surprises as the first installment of the Chaos Walking Trilogy. Ness left me once again at the edge of a precipice and I had to wait until September of 2010 to read the final book Monsters of Men (I preordered). This final installment is breathtaking in its ability to create characters both evil yet redeemable as well as force the reader to question their trust in characters believed to be on the side of right. I don't want to give the climatic ending away, but my heart went out to Mayor Prentiss; something I never thought would happen.
A Goodread friend of mine is going to "read" the Ask and the Answer in audible form. I am a little worried about this. One of the amazing things about this book is the choice the writer and (I presume) publishers made to visually express on the page what it must be like to be able to hear the thoughts of all around you. So, if you do decide to listen to these books, at least pick them up in a library or bookstore and leaf through.
On a more aesthetic note, I much prefer the US covers to the UK ones. The US versions are more foreboding and capture more of what the books are about. Let me know what you think.
One more thing...My daughter was recently "forced" to attend summer camp for the first time and was very, very nervous driving in. She kept repeating "I am the circle and the circle is me"!

I have been avoiding the frightening reality of public education by wallowing in a warm pool of fantasy. Under the guise of buying books for my ten-year-old book worm, I finally got around to The Hunger Games immediately followed by Catching Fire. Buying the books is easy, but getting them out of my daughters room is not so simple. She has a passionate desire to keep all the 'good books" in her room in case any one "messes them up". My friend Phyllis has not yet been forgiven for returning Fire Bringer with a scotch-taped cover. I am no longer allowed to lend books to Phyllis, but where there's a will there's a way.
I am sure that most of you have read these by now, or read another review, so I shall spare you the details. I have to wait until the summer of 2010 to find out if Katniss goes for Peeta or Gayle. My friend Phyllis and I are whole heartedly on the Peeta side of the fence.
Luckily, Phyllis and I will be able to remain friends. There are, believe it or not, and I do, chat rooms dedicated to the Peeta/Gayle debate. The rights for the movie has been picked up by Lionsgate. If one is so inclined, and one was, you can go on Youtube and see fantasy cast lists for the movie. Brendan Gleeson would make a great Haymitch. Anyhoo, Suzanne Collins also wrote the The Underland Chronicles, which my daughter adored and Phyllis has read them, too (from the library).
I moved on to Graceling by Kristen Cashore. I read it in a couple of days and will be reading the sequel Fire the minute I can pry it out of my daughter's iron grip. I smuggled Graceling out to Phyllis before winter break, so the jury is still out on her response. Thank goodness that the heroine Katsa didn't end up in a love triangle like Katniss. That would be too much to bare. Katsa falls for and sticks with the lovely Prince Po. Thank you Ms Cashore.

I first read about this on the School Library Journal blog by the prolific Elizabeth Bird. It seems that I am not imagining things when I notice that it is very hard to find books for my African American students with covers they can relate to. This is particularly true for the middle grades. This issue has come to light with Justine Larbalesiter's recent book, Liar. The US edition has a white girl on the cover of novel that is about a girl "who is black with nappy hair which she wears natural and short" despite Larbalesiter's objections. You can read all about it here.
So which books can African American students pick up and see a person of color on the cover? Pretty much anything by Walter Dean Myers, Sharon Draper, Jacqueline Woodson and Sharon Flake. Christopher Paul Curtis of course, although his characters are most often set in the past. There are more out there I know, and there are some great resources for finding books about students of color, but as The Brown Bookshelf put it "You can’t buy a book you don’t see on the shelf. And it’s awfully hard to buy a book you’re not even aware is available". The Brown Bookshelf spearheaded a campaign called 28 Days Later that showcased African American authors. There are lots of great suggestions from The Brown Bookshelf linked directly to Amazon.com. Click here for the middle readers page although I know most of my 5th and 6th graders would probably be more interested in the titles on the Poppin' Black Teen Books. Oh, dear. No classroom budget this year, but as a teacher I feel it is my duty to get as many of these books in my classroom as possible. There's always the tax rebate!

This book is like a chameleon. Just when you think it's about one thing, it changes its colors and becomes another beast altogether. The narrator is Marcelo, a seventeen-year-old who is on the high functioning end of an autism-like spectrum. He has spent his school years in the safe environment of Paterson, a school for students like him. He is comfortable there, working with in the stable there during his summers. Marcelo's father, a high-powered lawyer, has decided that it is time Marcelo experience "the real world" and puts him to work in his law firm's mail room. The mail room is run by Jasmine, who is non too pleased to be landed with the job of babysitting the bosses son. Jasmine turns out to be like Marcelo in many ways and their friendship quietly grows. Marcelo, Jasmine and I could quite happily have spent the rest of the summer there, but Stork has other plans for Marcelo that challenge his sense of duty to his father, his need for friendship, and his relationship with Jasmine. Just like the "real world", the decisions Marcelo must make are clouded in shades of gray. In the end, things work out for Marcelo - almost too neatly. Stork's real world is a forgiving one, and all loose ends are tied in neat bows by the end of the last chapter. As a human I am glad because I love Marcelo and want only happiness for him. However, as a reader, I expected a little more ambiguity. Great books leave you with a sense of longing - with nagging questions and doubts. Without this Marcelo and the Real World stops just short of being great.

More information about Fransisco X. Stork and his other titles can be found here.

There's nothing better than a bit of juicy gossip about royals. It's what makes history interesting and probably why I find most American history pretty boring. Never mind the fact that they slaughtered hundreds of thousands of people, spent money lavishly while their subjects starved, and went around taking over other people's countries. The point is royals of yore dressed fabulously while doing it. Those good old days are gone, though. I haven't seen an outfit yet on Elizabeth II that doesn't make her look frumpy (though I will admit, she knows a good hat when she sees one).
Beccia brings those jaw-dropping royals back to life in her deliciously illustrated new book. The rich colors echo the ostentatious luxury of royalty and her portraits seem as though they came off the gallery of some 16th Century castle with a dubious past.
Beccia chose a true or false approach to her subject and it serves her purpose well. Readers get a lesson in detective work and untrustworthy sources as well as tasty tidbits of information. My 5th and 6th graders nearly threw up after reading a typical menu served to Henry VIII - mind you, I did add the part about people making themselves sick at banquets just so they could cram more grilled beaver tail or roasted peacock down their throats. This led to an interesting discussion that I shall not elaborate on here. Suffice it to say that every page of Beccia's marvelous book sparks a myriad of topics for conversation - not many of them suitable for the dinner table, which of course kids love!
The Raucous Royals is Carlyn Beccia's second book. The first is Who Put the B in Ballyhoo.

Ok, so this one is going to join my very hard to get on to "Absolute Favorites" tag. I only have one other book there, so, yeah. I know Terry Pratchett is a hugely successful author, but his more fantasy oriented books have left me cold., and I like fantasy. This, however, I read in one day and mourned when it was over.

My nine-year-old who reads everything couldn't get in to Nation and so that tells me what I already knew - this is more of a cross-over novel and you have to be willing to go a few chapters before you're hooked. You have to understand (or at least be aware of) the history of colonialism, and you have to have the vision to see that this is about so much more than boy meets girl on a post-tsunami deserted island. And yet...it is still a wonderful story of (unconsummated) love and a story of hope for mankind that leaves you mad at the author for not making it all OK. It's kind of like Titanic the movie - but really much better- except the boat doesn't sink- it lands on a forest.

'Nuff said. You really have to read it.

I have been inspired by Joyce Sidman to get back to what I love doing best - reading brilliant children's literature and raving about it to any unfortunate who happens to become snared in the dense thicket of the kid-lit blogging bush.
There are a lot of poems about color out there and I am sure that practically any elementary-aged child in the English-speaking world has had to write one. It's pretty easy and has a low-risk level (unlike my cat - long story). However, like most things that are pretty easy to do, they are really hard to do well.
I have spent many an early morning and late evening in my yard trying to think of an opening line for a poem about a cardinal. When you live in the northern regions of this fair land, the sight of a cardinal's scarlet plumage against eye-searing-white snow is sometimes the only hope you have that the world is still turning and you're not stuck in this frozen wasteland forever. Don't get me wrong, winter is beautiful when it first comes and everything is clean white,
"White dazzles day
and turns night
inside out."
But, at a certain point, you need to see green.
Luckily for me, Sidman knows this, too and she's got a magical touch with words. It's like she got inside my heart - because, truly, that's where poetry germinates - and translated it in to these beautiful poems - because, truly, that's what the poets you love do.
"And Red?
Red beats inside me:
thump-thump-thump."
Sidman is frugal but never meagre with her words. They take on the exact shape, smell, and feel of the season's passing colors. The verses are short but complete and leave pleanty of room for the stunning art work of Zagarenski. Verse and picture blend seemlessly together. Zagarenski never tries to "outcolor" the poems, and her palate is rich and delicious just when it needs to be. Zagarenski also illustrated Sidman's This is Just to Say: Poems of Apology and Forgiveness and the same crowned and whimsically dressed figures run through these pages. The cardinal is ever present with his own crimson crown and a dog follows along, too. Each page tells a story and I discover something new every time I read the book.
Luckily for us, Sidman and Zagarenski know how to make a simple thing look and sound stunningly difficult.

At the age of 83, Gerda Rovetch has published her first book in collaboration with her daughter. The poems are a short four lines each and resemble a limerick with their jaunty rhyme and humorous subject matters. Limericks were made popular by Edward Lear in the 19th Century and in later years were often associated with bawdy humor. Rovetch stays true to the spirit of Lear’s nonsense poems. Her characters find abandoned kidneys, stuff sardines down their pants, and attack people with lobsters. The illustrator’s art work complements the poems beautifully and is reminiscent of some of Edward Gorey’s illustrations. Gorey also illustrated for Lear and another great nonsense master, Hilaire Belloc. The original art was done on paper plates and the poems and illustrations are “served” opposite each other on round white circles with colorful backgrounds. I can imagine everyone from kindergarteners up enjoying these silly verses. Older students – and their teachers—might have fun trying to write them.

I love it when I find a new poet. I invariably do so through the New Yorker, Garrison Keillor or Poetry Friday! I found Matthew Dickman in the Aug. 11 New Yorker (the other poem, by John Ashbury, that week was incomprehensible to me). I was stunned after I read it. I love the way he mixes the cataclysmic with the mundane in the poem and the ending lines...You can read another of his poems Grief here. He's a relatively newcomer to the published poets field and his first full-length collection, All American Poem, won the 2008 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry.

Dickman hails from a white working class suburb of Portland, Oregon. An area he has written about in some of his poems. In November 2007 Major Jackson for the Boston Review described these poems as "melancholic portraits of impoverished white teenagers that dazzle me into the always painful, yet easily forgettable, awareness that many people suffer psychically under the knife of American prosperity. Outside the frame of these poems lurk the children of female-headed homes; parents who work two or more jobs; teenage moms who live in “Drug-Free Zones” and “Urban Renewal Zones,” unkempt neighborhoods whose parks are normally full of drugs; teen addicts slumping toward oblivion; and fathers for whom the closest thing to therapy is domestic abuse."

Dickman has an interesting story. He was a manny for a young boy whose father was dying of brain cancer, a story you can read about here at American Public Media: The Story. I found more of his poems (and advice to writers) on the website From the Fishouse: an audio archive of emerging poets.

Trouble by Matthew Dickman
Marilyn Monroe took all her sleeping pills
to bed when she was thirty-six, and Marlon Brando’s daughter
hung in the Tahitian bedroom
of her mother’s house,
while Stanley Adams shot himself in the head. Sometimes
you can look at the clouds or the trees
and they look nothing like clouds or trees or the sky or the ground.
The performance artist Kathy Change
set herself on fire while Bing Crosby’s sons shot themselves
out of the music industry forever.
I sometimes wonder about the inner lives of polar bears. The French
philosopher Gilles Deleuze jumped
from an apartment window into the world
and then out of it. Peg Entwistle, an actress with no lead
roles, leaped off the “H” in the HOLLYWOOD sign
when everything looked black and white
and David O. Selznick was king, circa 1932. Ernest Hemingway
put a shotgun to his head in Ketchum, Idaho
while his granddaughter, a model and actress, climbed the family tree
and overdosed on phenobarbital. My brother opened
thirteen fentanyl patches and stuck them on his body
until it wasn’t his body anymore. I like
the way geese sound above the river. I like
the little soaps you find in hotel bathrooms because they’re beautiful.
Sarah Kane hanged herself, Harold Pinter
brought her roses when she was still alive,
and Louis Lingg, the German anarchist, lit a cap of dynamite
in his own mouth
though it took six hours for him
to die, 1887. Ludwig II of Bavaria drowned
and so did Hart Crane, John Berryman, and Virginia Woolf. If you are
travelling, you should always bring a book to read, especially
on a train. Andrew Martinez, the nude activist, died
in prison, naked, a bag
around his head, while in 1815 the Polish aristocrat and writer
Jan Potocki shot himself with a silver bullet.
Sara Teasdale swallowed a bottle of blues
after drawing a hot bath,
in which dozens of Roman senators opened their veins beneath the water.
Larry Walters became famous
for flying in a Sears patio chair and forty-five helium-filled
weather balloons. He reached an altitude of 16,000 feet
and then he landed. He was a man who flew.
He shot himself in the heart. In the morning I get out of bed, I brush
my teeth, I wash my face, I get dressed in the clothes I like best.
I want to be good to myself.

Roundup is at Big A little a this week.

Benjamin Dove is described as a "canonical treasure" in the author's native Iceland. It won the International Board on Books for Young People Award and has been made in to a feature length film available in the UK. It doesn't seem to have made much of a stir since its journey over the Atlantic last year.

It's an old fashioned story of friendship, jealousy, bullying and betrayal. There is pointless violence and ultimately a tragedy, but the story is human and so there is also forgiveness, understanding, and redemption. Benjamin, Jeff and Manny are three friends who play together on "the Ground", a sacred space protected from the town bullies by its unofficial yet unopposed guard Grandma Dell. Jeff is the kind of boy who sees everything as a competition and a chance to prove himself the fastest, strongest, or most skillful of the three. His inability to accept defeat often leads to violent outbursts that begin to wear on his two friends, particularly Manny, who is the youngest, and often bears the brunt of Jeff's frustration.
Enter Roland, a new boy in the neighborhood whose bedroom resembles a scene out of King Arthur's legend. Roland believes he is descended from Scottish kings and stands up to the two town bullies, putting himself in physical danger. However, it is Grandma Dell, not Roland's new friends, who comes to his rescue and she ends up paying a terrible price for her intervention.
The boys, led by Roland, create knightly personas for themselves and vow to avenge the wrong done to Grandma Dell. With the creation of The Order of the Red Dragon the stage is set for a battle of good against evil. Unfortunately, as in real life, the line between the two is not always easily discernible and seemingly righteous decisions or careless choices can have unexpected consequences.

Roundup is at The Well-Read Child today.

British writer Deary is well know for his irreverent take on history in his Horrible Histories books - "history with all the "nasty" bits left in". He doesn't think much of the formal education system, "I wouldn't have schools at all," says the Sunderland author. "Nowadays people assume schools are essential, but they're finished; they cannot cope with the demands of the modern world, but they spend £50 billion a year failing." He describes his writing for page and stage as "educainment". "Whether it's writing books or theatre shows, that sums up what I've been doing, because first you have to engage people and a good way to educate them is to entertain them," he reasons.
Deary's approach to "educainment" is popular with the kids. He has sold over 20 million copies worldwide and completes a book, on average, every six weeks. He has even turned several of his Horrible Histories in to plays and is working on a TV series for the BBC.
I did enjoy the first in his trilogy The Fire Thief but I had to get past the irritating footnotes and addresses to the reader at the beginning of each chapter. Deary's cynicism starts to drag you down after a while too, but luckily it is a fast paced story with believable elements of danger and surprise as well as a good dose of humor. The story is based on the Greek myths centering around Prometheus, half god/half Titan, who has been chained to a rock for 200 years as punishment for giving fire to the human race. Each day he is devoured by a ferocious raptor,the Fury, and left for dead only to come alive again the next morning. Aided by his friend Hercules, Prometheus escapes his bonds but is immediately caught by Zeus. Zeus offers him a chance at salvation if he can find a human hero. So Prometheus' quest begins.
A faster and less dense read than the Lightning Thief I think this series would be good for reluctant readers who need to be plunged immediately in to the action of the plot. I believe it may have been the one book one of my reluctant readers actually read the whole way through last year.

Titles in the series: The Fire Thief, Flight of the Fire Thief, and The Fire Thief Fights Back

If you like the humorous style of Deary, you may want to check out Terry Pratchett's books.

The question about limiting access or somehow flagging books in our classrooms that may not be appropriate for certain children often comes up in discussions between teachers and bloggers. Here is an article from the British newspaper The Guardian about the proposal to rate children's books by age appropriateness. This has already begun to happen in the UK but there is much opposition from children's authors.
http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/childrenandteens/story/0,,2290537,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=10

I'm back with an original inspired by my recent travels in South Carolina. I have missed Poetry Friday tremendously.

Spanish Moss
by Nicola Turner

There is no meaning
in the coming
and the going
of waves on the shore, they are automatic
But, the tern dives
with such precision
And the pelicans perform
breathtaking summeraults
My thoughts are weighed down by you
lightly
like lace curtains, or Spanish moss on live oaks
Beautiful in their mourning veils
filtering the sunlight


Round up is at http://insearchofgiants.blogspot.com

Writer2b featured a poem a few weeks ago that several of us puzzled over. This made me think about the importance of "interpretation" in poetry, and the reason for reading a poem. Last week she posted a poem about poetry, The Secret by Denise Levertov, which got me thinking even more. This week I am offering up a poem by Don Paterson, a Scottish poet. He seems to be speaking directly to my thoughts.

"I would say that the poem exists in a space somewhere between the reader and the author, and in a sense belongs to neither, and both." -Don Paterson

Yeah! We have started poetry in 4th grade. We started with an "author study' of Douglas Florian, poet and illustrator. This proved to be a great hit. Florian doesn't use a lot of metaphor and simile; his poems are down to earth and short. As my students noted, some make you laugh, some make you sad, and some make you go "hmmm".


We turned to Joyce Sidman to go a little deeper. The class loved her mystery poems in Butterfly Eyes and Other Secrets of the Meadow. I registered their enthusiasm for the guessing game (and the fact it really makes them pay attention to the words) and put up a poem each day without the title and asked "Who am I?"

For fun I've been reading Scranimals by Jack Prelutsky. They love it so much they almost stormed the classroom of another teacher on learning that it was locked in their classroom. No self-respecting teacher should be without this book. You don't need sub plans if you have Scranimals.

Today, we tackled Basho. My collaborating ELL teacher has a thing about haiku and brought this wonderful picture book to share with the class Grass Sandals : The Travels of Basho by Dawine Spivak and illustrated by Demi. This is a great introduction to the ultimate master of haiku. It tells of his travel by foot across Japan and how he was inspired to write his poems. It includes haikus by Basho and his successor Issa.

hibiscus flowers

I was looking for a poem about sunflowers because it is April 11, and we have a Winter Storm Warning in Minnesota (six months of winter and counting), and spring break is gone, and testing begins next week. Yesterday, as the sleet shot at my windscreen, and the windshield wipers worked overtime, I tried to describe a field of sunflowers in France to my daughter.
Anyway, as you will see, I did not find that poem this time (though some of you may be able to point me in the right direction). I was intrigued by this title. Mostly because doing laundry reminds me of my mother, who loves nothing better than to hang white cotton sheets out to dry on the line on a windy day. This may be a well known poem but it is my first encounter and I am warmed by it. So many beautiful images. But best of all, the last two lines describes what I would like to be able to do.
Roundup is at A Wrung Sponge


Doing Laundry on Sunday
by Brigit Pegeen Kelly

So this is the Sabbath, the stillness
in the garden, magnolia
bells drying damp petticoats

over the porch rail, while bicycle
wheels thrum and the full-breasted tulips
open their pink blouses

for the hands that pressed them first
as bulbs into the earth.
Bread, too, cools on the sill,

and finches scatter bees
by the Shell Station where a boy
in blue denim watches oil

spread in phosphorescent scarves
over the cement. He dips
his brush into a bucket and begins

to scrub, making slow circles
and stopping to splash water on the children
who, hours before it opens,

juggle bean bags outside Gantsy’s
Ice Cream Parlor,
while they wait for color to drench their tongues,

as I wait for water to bloom
behind me—white foam, as of magnolias,
as of green and yellow

birds bathing in leaves—wait,
as always, for the day, like bread, to rise
and, with movement

imperceptible, accomplish everything.