Mark Twain: Young Writer
by Miriam Mason

Most nights, my son and I like to curl up together on the sofa or in his bed and read to each other. We go chapter for chapter for about a half an hour. We are both in the middle of books of our own lately so we have been sharing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Each chapter or two spells out a day in the life of Tom, and we never finish without a belly laugh.

While we were reading, my son was reminded of the biography of Mark Twain he read as a new reader. He leapt up and retrieved a stack of red, white, and blue paper backs from the bottom of his book shelves. Read More...

Ballet Shoes

Ballet Shoes
by Noel Streatfeild


My niece was recently cast as the parrot in her school production of Aladdin.  Needless to say, she is thrilled.  In this role, she gets to sing and make jokes.  A perfect part!  To mark the occasion, I wanted to send along a book with the perfect note inscribed on the inside cover.  When I went searching for a title I was reminded of the books about shoes written by Noel Streatfeild.  Because I have never read any of the stories, I started with Ballet Shoes.  It gets a remarkable recommendation by the online reading community and teachers.

I must say I agree with the critics.  The language is challenging for a middle reader, which I like, and the lessons in hard work and determination are well explored.

The novel concerns three orphans who are adopted by an explorer and collector.  While he is away on a rather lengthy voyage, his great niece is left to raise the girls.  All is well, until the money begins to run out.  Uncle Gum has been away too  long.  To raise money, and as it turns out the girls, the house is opened to boarders.  Each boarder has a special quality or talent that they impress upon the girls.  It is nice to read how this "village" comes together to sacrifice to improve the children's lives.The last thing you should know is that the girls claim one another as sisters and invent a surname of their very own- Fossil...you will have to read the novel to find out why.  With the knowledge that they are the only Fossils around, they vow to make the name famous. 

You should know that I did get Ballet Shoes for my niece, but as a prequel to Theater Shoes, the novel I will give to her on opening night! 

Band of Brothers
by Stephen E. Ambrose

recommendation contributed by:

Seventh grade Student
Handle:  Jason Connery

The Book Band Of Brothers by Stephen E. Ambrose is an amazing piece of non-fictional literature. In this book Ambrose portrays the perilous times of E. Company in the airborne division. This book is a non-fictional book, yet Ambrose portrays it almost as if it was a piece of fiction. The book starts of slow, yet it slowly picks up to a non stop action book you can't put down. Even if you don't like non-fiction you will love this book!

The Emerald Atlas

The Emerald Atlas
by John Stephens

With short, rainy days hanging around my house and spring break just around the corner, I keep wondering where we should go to get out of town.  "Where" is a question my book clubs and I are pondering this semester, as well.  Does setting, time and place, really matter to a novel?  One of my groups of fifth graders decided today that it definitely does.  As a matter of fact, they also determined that how a character gets from one place to another significantly impacts the pace of the story.  I offer this wonderful time travel adventure, The Emerald Atlas, as a case in point (a book I have mentioned here before, but have just now read myself ).

Not unlike many young adventurers, the three siblings in the novel are considered orphans.  I say considered, because the children believe their parents are alive.  After a series of orphanages, each more dismal that the last, the children are finally sent to a small town on the edge of Lake Champlain that can only be accessed by a boat.  As they approach the opposite shore, a fog and heaviness settles in creating a place that looks and feels hopeless.  When Kate, Emma and Michael arrive to Cambridge Falls they find only a creepy grand home, a deserted town, a cook and a groundskeeper.

Before long, the children find a strange book.  Michael, who is a novice photographer with a Polaroid camera, takes charge of the book.  He slips a photograph into its blank pages, and he and his sisters find that they have traveled to the time of the photo.  As you might guess, they find that in the past Cambridge Falls has many peculiarities.  Each, as discovered, explains its current state. It is a tangled tale that finds the children traveling to new times and places at lightening speed.  The chase for answers, that begins when Michael places the photo in the book, will lead the children to answers they didn't even have questions for.

Boy: Tales of Childhood

Boy: Tales of Childhood
by Roald Dahl

I find that you always have to be on the look out for a book suggestion.  If you are reading this, I hope you have found some good recommendations here.  I must admit that I can find a book title everywhere.  The other afternoon, while flipping channels, I came across the movie, You've Got Mail.  They were at the scene where Tom Hanks takes his aunt and brother into Meg Ryan's bookstore for story hour.  With an eye on the book Ryan was reading, I noticed the name Roald Dahl under the title Boy.  Now, I was sure I had read every book written by the man, so this intrigued me.

I turned off the t.v., got out my computer, opened up our library's web site, and searched for the book.  I found it in the Biography section.  Yeah!  Requesting it, I only had to wait a day or two and it was then mine to borrow and read.  (I LOVE the lending library!)

I was so delighted by the stories of this man's boyhood.  The tales he shares in this volume stretch from birth to age 20.  I have been doing research on my grandfather, lately, and was delighted to find that they were born in the same year, 1916.  After all of my reading about the depression in America, it was nice to learn a little about what was happening on the other side of the pond.  Not to mention that it just fueled my longing for the next installment of Downton Abbey.

If your young reader isn't a fan of fiction, you ought to let them try this biography.  As usual, Dahl paints dramatic and hilarious portraits, and in this case they are real.  They will also be granted some insight into the seeds of some of his famous novels.  If you find that they have an appetite for the book, there are a few other  volumes:  D is for Dahl, facts and trivia about the author, and Going Solo, about his time in the Royal Air Force during WWII.  And as ever, his novels are without compare.  Reading his biography might the just the thing to persuade your young reader to give his novels a try!

Fahrenheit 451

Fahrenheit 451
By Ray Bradbury

In celebration of the upcoming 60th anniversary of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Simon & Schuster hosted a contest to design a new cover for this iconic classic.This is the new cover art for the novel, annouced just a few days ago.  Not only is it AWESOME, the winner of the contest is from my home town, Little Rock, AR.

Congrats, Matthew Owen!

Lately, I have been thinking about books about books. So, what does Fahrenheit 451 have to do with books? It is the temperature at which a book burns. Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, firemen start fires. They burn books and the houses that contain them...Read More.

The Double Game

The Double Game
by Dan Fesperman

I've been looking for books for my more advanced readers in the eighth grade.  They don't have an appetite for the dystopian literature their peers are so crazy about.  They do love books set in Europe with at least a little intrigue.  In reviewing book summaries, The Double Game stood out as a possible choice.  It is categorized as an espionage-thriller.  I was drawn to it because books take center stage in the plot.

The novel digs into the possibility of double agents during the Cold War. Journalist Bill Cage, while interviewing an ex-CIA agent turned author of spy thrillers, discovers that he was once enticed by the world of the double agent.  The story gets out of the the young Cage's control, and he finds that he must leave the paper.

Jump forward twenty years and we find Cage lonely and unsatisfied with his life.  We learn that he is the son of an employee of the CIA and lived all over the world during his childhood.  We also learn that he and his father love the world of the spy novel.  Through a series of surprising events, that include the delivery of actual pages of his beloved novels, Cage is lured into a hunt that will reveal whether the information he tripped onto during that long ago interview is indeed true.

Though written for adults, this is a novel that any accomplished high school reader will love.  It concentrates on plot, character, and setting, leaving romance and unnecessary drama to other novels.  It is also a great introduction to politics during the Cold War, an era I knew surprisingly little about.  I will be looking for more historical fiction from this time period, and if it contains a thrill or two, all the better.