Pandemic Booklist for H.

The Serpent's Secret Giveaway

So. I have (double) pneumonia and a headache, and a ton of school related deadlines coming up, and am feeling, in general, pretty ick. So, for this week's (belated) giveaway, I picked a comfort read. I had the privilege of meeting Sayantani DasGupta last year at a conference, and she's a lovely and brilliant human being. I really enjoyed talking to her about folklore and the ways that our stories unite us. I love fantasy based in folklore of various cultures, and I love brave girls, and this book has both. Instead of trying to type more about how awesome this book is, I'm just going to pop in an overview I wrote from the protagonist's point of view for a class last semester. Ahem. A lot of parents tell their little girls that they're princesses. Except, it turns out that when my parents said "Kiranmala, you're a princess!", they were being literal. And not just any princess, oh no! A princess of ANOTHER DIMENSION. Which is information ...

One Crazy Summer Giveaway

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. ...

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 ...

Books for Folks

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