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I am not a fan of long running crime series. While a recurring character can be like a familiar friend sometimes the longevity of a series means it falls into the realm of incredulity. Tess Monaghan was a character I fell in love with but was also quite happy when she was put on the […]

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April is National Poetry Month, and I realize that I've almost let the month slip away without any poetry book reviews.  Just in time, I came across my Advance Reader Copy of Looking for Me, which went on sale April 17.


Rosenthal, Betsy R. 2012. Looking for Me. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Based on the real stories of her mother and many aunts and uncles, Betsy Rosenthal tells a story in verse of her mother, Edith - the fourth child in a large, Jewish, Depression-era family in Baltimore,

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This Sunday's Washington Post Magazine had a fantastic feature article about one of the best things we discovered when we moved to the DC area: Berger cookies.

On the bottom they are like black-and-whites--a mild cakey vanilla round--but on top they are piled with luscious, decadent fudgy frosting. They define the phrase "sink your teeth into it". 

While they are a Baltimore phenom, it's still a hit-or-miss proposition to find them where we live, next to DC and a half hour from Baltimore. So when the article said there was a decent copycat recipe on the King Arthur Flour website, I decided to give it a shot. 

They came out great (photo at right). I daresay the cake bottom was even a little tastier, though the real Berger frosting is still the winner. The recipe wasn't very hard or time-consuming, despite the process of frosting the cookies after they cooled. I used recipe #2, with  50/50 mix of bittersweet and semisweet chocolate chips. 

Guess what this family will be having for snacks, coffee breaks and breakfast this week? :) 

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A brief review today with lots of extras...

Snyder, Laurel. 2011. Bigger than a Bread Box. New York: Random House.

Like Wendy Mass' "birthday series" books, Bigger than a Bread Box is realistic fiction infused with an element of magic - in this case, a mysterious bread box that appears to grant whatever wishes can fit inside its limited dimensions. At first 12-year-old Rebecca is delighted,but she belatedly discovers the consequence to her wishes.

Told in the first person, Bigger than a Bread Box is a unique story in which magic doesn't necessarily makes things right - or wrong, just different. Most touching in the story is the evolving relationship between Rebecca and her brother, Lew, a toddler. With no one else to turn to after her mother spirits them away to Georgia against their father's will, Rebecca "discovers" her younger brother,

The only difference was that now, when I was alone in the afternoons, I wasn't so alone. Each day I spent a little more time with Lew, and that felt different. It was like he'd been a piece of furniture before, a big doll, and now he was a person, just because I'd noticed he was.

Worth checking out.

Read an excerpt here.
A Study Guide is available here.

Other reviews @

• 100 Scope Notes
• Pink Me
• Dog Ear

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Today we headed to Fells Point to draw. It was warm and sunny out which led to a couple of drawings I am really happy with. I am drawing with a Pentel brush pen in an Archie Grand Jumbo sketchbook which opens up to a generous spread of 16″ x 24″.

The tree is shaded with a photoshop brush. The three images to the left of the tree are done separately and dropped into photoshop.

My students take their time in getting scanned work to me, but here is a link to the Visual Journalism Blog. You can also check out the blog of Aaron Provost, who updates his location work weekly. Go Aaron!

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The United States was plagued by social unrest throughout the 1960’s. 1968 stands out as the most militant and contentious year of the decade with the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. In that same year, the Selective Service office announced that its December quota for the draft would be the highest thus far, leading countless Americans to engage in acts of civil disobedience. American Catholics, who were led to accept mainstream cultural values and unhesitatingly support foreign policy faced a changing identity brought on by a remarkable act known as the Catonsville Nine. Led by two priests, the Catonsville Nine would set off a wave of other Catholic protests against the Vietnam War. The following excerpt from Mark Massa’s The American Catholic Revolution describes this transformative moment in American Catholic history.

At 12:30 on the afternoon of May 17, 1968, an unlikely crew of seven men and two women arrived at the Knights of Columbus Hall in Catonsville, Maryland, a tidy suburb of Baltimore. Their appearance at 1010 Frederick Road, however, was only tangentially related to the Knights. The target of their pilgrimage was Selective Service Board 33, housed on the second floor of the K. of C. Hall. The nondescript parcel they carried with them contained ten pounds of homemade napalm, whipped up several evenings before by Dean Pappas, a local physics teacher who had discovered the recipe in a booklet published by the U.S. Special Forces (two parts gasoline, one part Ivory Flakes). On entering the office, one of them explained calmly to the three surprised women typing and filing what was going to happen next. But either out of shock or because they hadn’t heard the announcement clearly the women continued about their business until the strangers began snatching up 1-A files, records of young men whose draft lottery numbers made them most likely to be drafted to fight in Vietnam. At that point one of the women working in the office began to scream.

The raiders began stuffing the 1-A files (and as many 2-As and 1-Ys as they could grab) into wire trash baskets they had brought for the purpose. When one of the office workers tried dialing the police, Mary Moylan, one of the nine intruders, put her finger on the receiver button, calmly advising the distraught worker to wait until the visitors were finished. The burning of the draft records was intended to be entirely nonviolent, although one of the office workers had to be physically restrained from stopping the protesters, in the course of which she suffered some scratches on her leg. With that one exception, the raid went according to plan. Indeed, as Daniel Berrigan, S.J. one of the leaders of the event, later remembered it.

We took the A-1 [sic] files, which of course were the most endangered of those being shipped off. And we got about 150 of those in our arms and went down the staircase to the parking lot. And they burned very smartly, having been doused in this horrible material. And it was all over in 10 or 15 minutes.

Once Berrigan and the others left the office, Moylan said to the office worker with the phone, “Now you can call whoever you wish.” But instead of calling the police she hurled it through the window, hoping to get attention of workmen outside the building, which she did: one of the workmen quickly rushed up to the office to see what the ruckus was. But his arrival on the scene came too late to interrupt the protest. A small group of reporters and photographers, as well as a TV crew, had already gathered, having been tipped off by a memb

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Today I am coming to you with a request. Lately I have been writing many, many proposals for books for classroom libraries through DonorsChoose, a truly fabulous organization.

Right now, several of our proposals are up for a vote at limeadesforlearning.com. If we earn enough votes, the proposals will be fully funded through Sonic and our extremely deserving students will get dozens of brand new, fabulous books. Honestly, these books are something that could make a world of difference for them.

If you are interested in voting (I hope, I hope!), just go to limeadesforlearning.com.
Then click "Start Voting."
Next filter by location: Maryland > Baltimore > Booker T. Washington.
Finally, vote for a proposal.

I really hope you vote for "Guys Read Too!" from Ms. D's classroom (that's me!), but any vote for any proposal would be such a gift. THANK YOU!

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How to Say Goodbye in Robot by Natalie Standiford, Scholastic Press, 2009, 288 pp, Realistic Fiction, ISBN:0545107083

To: You
From: Future You
Read How to Say Goodbye in Robot. Future You thanks You. 

Do you ever read a book and then put off writing the review for a long, long time because you know that nothing you write will really do it justice? How to Say Goodbye in Robot is that kind of book.


When Beatrice moves to Baltimore during her senior year of high school, one of the first people she meets is Jonah (aka Ghost Boy). Beatrice is by no means what anyone would call "a girl's girl," in fact her mother frequently tells her that she is a robot. So, even though the popular crowd eagerly invites her in... she would rather spend her days, and nights, with Jonah.


Jonah isn't too eager to let anyone into his life - they don't call him Ghost Boy for nothing -  but step by baby step, he and Beatrice form an intense, one-of-a-kind friendship. Together, they try to right the wrongs of the past, support each other's secrets, and make sense of the life they've been given. There is no doubt that Ghost Boy and Robot Girl love each other, but between a ghost and a robot... is love enough?


How to Say Goodbye in Robot is like nothing I've ever read. The transcipts of The Night Light Show were so brilliant. Each character (Dottie! Don Berman! Myrna and Herb!) was fully formed, even if they were only a voice on the radio. I want to go on a flying carpet ride to Ocean City with this fictional group of friends.


I looooved the fact that it was set in Baltimore: high school kids drinking Natty Boh, a new house in Canton, driving up Charles Street, the Washington Monument lit up on its hill. The city was just as much a character as any of the humans. For the inside scoop on other Baltimore institutions that were "disguised" for the book, check out this interview with Natalie Standiford from The City Paper.

Even visually, this book is a gem. With brightly scripted conversations, unique fonts, and bold red calendar pages marking time, it was like a bite of literary eye candy.


While by the end of the book I had begun to grow weary of Ghost Boy's constant melancholy (not that he didn't have good reason!), I was still enchanted by the fact that this was a story where the two main teenage characters fully loved each other... without actually being in love. How often does that happen in YA lit? 


I actually finished Beatrice and Jonah's story while walking through Baltimore's Inner Harbor after work one day. I was honestly so into their lives that I couldn't put the book down long

1 Comments on How to Say Goodbye in Robot, last added: 5/26/2010

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Sara said, on 5/26/2010 8:46:00 PM

Awww I'm so glad you liked it! I LOVED this one too. It was so unique and weird- definitely different in a great way. I felt emotional at the end too. Thanks for the amazing review :D

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Today's Author Spotlight is on Natalie Standiford and her new novel "How to Say Goodbye in Robot," which tells the story of Bea, an alterna-girl after my own heart. Starting senior year of high school as the new kid, thanks to a professor dad who... Read the rest of this post

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By Evan Schnittman

Corey Podolsky has written an excellent essay, Book Widgets and Book Selling 2.0 that clearly explains the thinking behind the large scale repository efforts underway at a few publishing giants. He posits wisely that Web 2.0 viral marketing, especially on sites like MySpace.com, is wonderfully afoot. These publishers have enabled their content to be safely and securely discovered and displayed in the hope that at some point, some sort of monetary transaction will occur. (more…)

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