Books for Folks

As you can tell from all the hardware on the cover, I am in astute company when I tell you: this book is good. It received a Newbery Honor, the Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction and the Coretta Scott King Award. It was also a National Book Award Finalist. The other good news is that it's the first in a trilogy-- so when you finish it (and love it), you can move right on to the next book.  During the summer of 1968, sisters Delphine (11), Vonnetta (9), and Fern (7), are sent from their home in Brooklyn to Oakland, California, to visit their mother. It has been nearly 7years since any of them have seen her. Their mother is a poet who by all indications views her children's presence as an imposition. When they arrive, Nzilla (formerly Cecile) packs them off to a summer day-camp run by the Black Panthers as often as possible. The girls spend their summer making new friends, struggling with their relationship with their mama, learning chants, and painting signs. ...

Reading is a Conduit to Wholeness. -- Jason Reynolds Two years ago in January, I was feeling pretty despondent. It was the middle of winter, which is always kind of hard, and the things that were happening in the world were making it hard for me to maintain any sort of faith in goodness or humanity. I was floundering, I was angry, and I was desperately sad. Then, on a road trip, I read-- well, listened to, actually-- a book featuring three kids, a dog, a couple of wise adults and several malevolent ones, and a dragon that had (and I quote) "diabolical flatulence." I had picked up Adam Gidwitz's The Inquisitor's Tale with an Audible credit after, honestly, seeing it pop up on Amazon fifty billion times and thinking huh, what a weird subject for a kid's book. Friends, it is definitely unique among middle grade novels, and it is bloody brilliant. My family hummed down the interstate in the dark and every one of us was spellbound. Listening to that book was like ha...

Some books I love. I really, really love books. I always have-- my earliest memories involve being read to, and once I learned how, I read basically non-stop until I became an adult.  I took an extended break in early adulthood-- whatwith college, marriage, a few international moves, and a bunch of gestating. One of my favorite things about being a parent has been reading with my kids, discovering new books together and watching them learn to read (and love to read) themselves. And a couple of years ago, everyone got sturdier and more self-sufficient (and potty trained) and I started reading voraciously again. I have been kicking around the idea of starting a blog about books for two years now. Between my indecisiveness about form and focus, my easy distractibility, full time graduate studies, and wrangling my four kids-- excepting one pretty spectacular false start-- I haven't committed. There are already one million blogs devoted to books. I'm a passable reviewer ...