Your favorites

Thanks for all your comments! Interesting to see some books I've never heard of -- and then some old favorites! Please keep posting your books on the form below.

Your Name: Jean B
Book/Author: Phillip Pullman; The Rainbabies Comment: Love many of the books by Phillip Pullman - started reading one of his once without realizing I was not the target market! One of my favorite books for young children is The Rainbabies - can't remember the author - great pictures and a warm hearted story about an older couple who can't have children but one day find 12 babies no bigger than their thumbs and their ensuing adventures.

Your Name: Margaret D
Book/Author: Lay That Trumpet in Our Hands by Susan Carol McCarthy
Comment: This coming of age novel, set against the backdrop of the civil rights movement in Florida in the early 1950's, is an engaging novel for any age. It is one of the summer reading assignments for my middle school son and I am thankful that I read it. McCarthy helps us understand how the civil rights movement affected many of the people that lived in the early 50's.

Your Name: Lois B
Book/Author: Ender's Game
Comment: I have never been interested in science fiction, but a couple of years ago, I kept hearing about Ender's Game. My daughter was reading it (actually her boyfriend was reading it to her); a co-worker mentioned the book at lunch one day. I had to see what all the fuss was about. I so enjoyed this book that I went on to read the next three in the Ender series. Author, Orson Scott Card, does such a wonderful job of capturing what makes us human and the complexities of human relationships - that was the draw for me more than the sci-fi setting.

Your Name: Mara M
Book/Author: Diane Duane
Comment: "So You Want to be a Wizard" series---Friends Nita and Kit discover they are wizards just in time to save the world. Eight book adventure that is a whirlwind of fun, action and drama.

ISBN: 0440982529

Your Name: Cheri A
Book/Author: Robert Munsch
Comment: I have always enjoyed reading aloud Robert Musch's books to my kindergarten and first graders but as a retired teacher and grandmother of a two and five year old I am rediscovering the pleasure they give to both the reader and the listener.

Your Name: Maureen K
Book/Author: Effie's Bath by Richard Thompson
Comment: Two little girls who are best friends are taking a bath. When they put their heads underwater, they find themselves in another world. It starts when they meet an owl and a pussycat traveling in a pea green boat... The drawings are by one of my favorite illustrators,Eugenie Fernandes.

Your Name: Mara M.
Book/Author: Going on a Bear Hunt
Comment: GREAT for little ones, especially read with great enthusiasm. My guys can still recite almost every line! "I'm not scared!"

Your Name: Lesley B
Author/Book: Burnett, The Secret Garden
Comment: If this isn't the first book I ever read on my own, it was the first I remember having been transported by--to a mysterious old house in the middle of "the moors," which I pictured as huge green woods on a carpet of moss, hearing a little boy cry in the dark. I can still remember exactly how I felt reading it.

Your Name: Sandy L
Book/Author: Flight by Sherman Alexie
Comment: I've been wanting to read Alexie for a long time. The other day at the library I spotted this book in the YA section as I browsed for another book. I read 'Flight' in a weekend, probably could have done it in a day.

What a unique style!!! This man is amazingly bright, quick-witted and sharp to the core. He just lays it all out there as seen from the eyes of a half Native-American/half Irish teen, who calls himself Zits. Zits is orphaned by this stage of his life and has been to more foster homes than we have digits, each home having an impact on his life, none of which is good... tragically not even close. Amidst all the turmoil of foster home after foster home, it seems none of the social workers are able to connect with this kid. He sees through their psycho-babble and it leaves him so blatantly alone, unloved, and unwanted. We are in Zits' mind, we see the world the way he sees it, a bit cynical, a bit despairing.

One night after another run in with the cops, Zits meets someone while spending the night in jail. This philosophical character seems a bit like him. They connect and finally there is someone who just might understand Zits and the crazy world in which they live. This friendship leads to a revelation, betrayal and a choice that changes Zits' life drastically.

This is not a book for the faint hearted. There is tough stuff, real life that many of us would prefer not to see or know anything about... so read it and open your eyes.

Your Name: Rebecca
Book/Author: Lemony Snicket
Comment: You should know I'm fickle and _A Series of Unfortunate Events_ is what the kids and I are reading right now. We are on book 11 and I have had fun picking out the literary references - Dante's Beatrice, Clarissa Dalloway, Emma Bovary, The Road Less Traveled and more. Admittedly, it lulls around book 3/4, but the writing is still fun and the series picks up from there.

Your Name: Lisa S
Book/Author: The Secret Garden, A Little Princess, and The Chronicles of Narnia
Comment: The first two are classic children's. As far as the Chronicles, I still think they beat Harry Potter hands down.

Your Name: Mary Jan B
Book/Author: Knuffle Bunny, by Mo Willems
Comment: VERY clever and meaningful to the preschooler crowd. Knuffle Buny, Too is also awesome. My genre, if you can call it that, is pre-K picture books. I love books that are simple enough for preschoolers but get at something very meaningful in their lives such as separation, family, friends, etc.

Your name: Natalie M.
Book/Author: All of a Kind Family by Sydney Taylor
Comment: This series of books about a Jewish family with 5 girls who live on the Upper East Side during the early 1900's. I loved the characters, and without even realizing it learned a lot about the Jewish culture and the immigrant experience!

Your name: Natalie M.
Book/Author: "Winnie-The-Pooh" by A.A. Milne
Comment: Still one of my favorites!

Your Name: am
Authors: Jon Scieszka/ Lane Smith
Comment: the true story of the three little pigs made me laugh out loud. :) still does. i think the wolf has a brooklyn accent.

Your Name: Mary J Nickum
Author: Erin Hunter
Comment: Hunter's series (3), Warriors, is the best constructed series of stories about cats that I've ever read! I wish it had been around when I was young. A wonderful, imaginative story about feral cats and their fictional cat society.

Your name: Karen
Book: The Underneath
Comment: You will absolutely love this book, a first novel for the author. It revolves around an old bloodhound that is tied to a 20-foot chain. He can get under the porch where he befriends a cat who has kittens. It's a story about love and revenge.

A is for Art by Stephen Johnson

So, I LOVE picture books and have read a lot of them while I was working on my dissertation. We have the largest collection of international children's books in the country here on the ground floor of our college, so all of my classes had lots of opportunities for browsing great picture books. I particularly like multicultural books (my dissertation was on bilingual books from small presses), books about art, ABC books, and books with awesome artwork. A Is for Art: An Abstract Alphabet is an incredible alphabet book like none I've ever seen before. Johnson, who is a fantastic artist, doesn't portray apples and zebras -- each letter is a painting that uses that letter in really creative ways. For example, the letter F is a painting of "Fourteen hundred and fifty-five fake French fries were flipped, flicked, and flung onto a full-size field of faint fuchsia." WOW! I can't imagine how he thought up all these pieces, much less created them. Johnson also wrote Alphabet City, where he created paintings of normal city scenes that contained letters hidden in them.

Bog Child by Siobhan Dowd

Bog Childis the second book I've read by Siobhan Dowd, and the first one that was published after her death at the young age of 47 of cancer. She published four books in all. Bog Child isn't as lighthearted as The London Eye Mystery but she is a very good writer. This one is set in Northern Ireland in 1981 when Fergus McCann is getting ready for the school exams that will help him get to med school. While he and his uncle are digging peat, Fergus finds the body of a girl buried in the bog. She is from the Iron Age, and Fergus becomes friends with the archaeologist who is examining her and her daughter Cora, who is Fergus' age.

A lot happens to Fergus over the summer. His brother is in prison, apparently because of his connection with the IRA. He joins several other prisoners in a hunger strike that is based on a real story. In the meantime, he is roped into delivering mystery packets across the manned border between northern and southern Ireland, an act that could land him in jail as well. Not only that, but he finds his feelings for Cora getting stronger.

Fergus is a strong character; he comes across as a typical Irish teenager during that time, but also demonstrates a depth of feeling for his dying brother, his worried mother, his Uncle Tally who seems to be drifting through life, for Owain, the young Welsh soldier at the checkpoint, and Cora, who has her own feelings to work out. While I didn't understand enough about the history of Ireland at the time, it does make me want to go and learn more about it.

The London Eye Mystery by Siobhan Dowd

The London Eye Mystery is a great book for two reasons: the mystery is quite compelling and is solved in a very satisfying way, and the narrator, Ted, has Asperger's -- a milder form of autism. Ted and his sister Kat take their cousin, Salim, to ride on the London Eye (the giant Ferris wheel in the middle of London). They watch him enter a pod, which then rises into the air. Thirty minutes later, the pod comes back down, but Salim is not in it. With Ted and Kat feelng responsible, they must put their heads together to solve the mystery. Ted's head is "wired differently" so he thinks differently from others, and Kat is a little bit impatient, but they manage to come up with and test nine theories of what happened to Salim. In the end, it is Ted's method of thinking that allows him to crack the case and end up a hero.

I'm now reading another book by Siobhan Dowd, Bog Child. She is a very good writer; unfortunately, she died at the age of 47 in 2007 from cancer. She had published two books prior to her death and two afterwards.

This is a great book to introduce people to modern-day London but also to the inner workings of someone with Asperger's. Dowd makes Ted an engaging character who is often flummoxed by the expressions people use (he thinks that making small talk means using words with one syllable) and his fascination with the weather actually helps him to think about Salim's disappearance in a way that makes sense to him.

The London Eye Mystery, 2007, NY: Random House

Criss Cross by Lynne Rae Perkins

I have been reading some articles about the Newbery Medal award winners for the past few years. It turns out that a lot of librarians are, shall we say, less than impressed by the books that have won the award recently: Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!; The Higher Power of Lucky; Criss Cross; and Kira Kira, to name a few. The librarians said they haven't bought the award winners for several years, because they haven't been books that children really enjoy. Well, I tried to get through Criss Cross, which won the award in 2006. Keep in mind that I RARELY start a book that I don't finish; in fact, I can think of only a handful over the years. I have to admit, I found Criss Cross to be so slow, so insipid, so -- I have to say -- boring that I finally just started skimming through it. I discovered that I hadn't missed a thing. I can't even tell you what it is about, except for a group of friends who do boring stuff over a summer. I have to agree with Anita Silvey and all those librarians; I don't see how this book could possibly interest kids enough to read it. I can't even imagine how the people on the Newbery committee came up with this book as an award winner. This is the same year that American Born Chinese and Octavian Nothing came out, but this book won the award.

What do you think about Newbery award winners, especially the recent ones?

What I Saw and How I Lied by Judy Blundell

What I Saw And How I Lied evokes the film noir genre of the 40's and 50's -- I can just see Fred MacMurray playing the role of Joe. It takes place right after the war, when Evie's stepdad Joe returns from Europe and everybody is in a mood of excess. The family takes a vacation to Florida where Evie meets and falls for Peter, a handsome young man who soon attaches himself to the family. Evie is the quintessential young girl who falls for (perhaps?) the wrong guy. Her inexperience in the ways of love causes her to miss all the warning signs until a terrible tragedy lands her parents in court.

Blundell effortlessly captures the feeling of America and Americans right after World War II, when they were tired of going without and ready to enjoy the good life. I could picture many of the scenes in my head as a black and white movie. She also keeps you guessing until the end about how Evie lies to save herself.

2008, NY: Scholastic Press

Savvy by Ingrid Law

In Mibs Beaumont's family, your 13th birthday is a big one; that is when you find out what your savvy, or special power, is. Mibs hopes hers isn't setting off storms like her brother Fish, but when the big day arrives her dad is in a hospital miles away from home, and Mibs' mother and older brother leave to be with him. When Mibs discovers her savvy, she realizes it can help save her dad's life. She sneaks on a pink bus heading to her dad's hospital in Salina, and before she -- or the driver -- knows it, she is heading away from Salina with Lester, the harried bus driver, her two brothers Fish and Samson, Bobbi and Will, the preacher's kids, and Lill, a down and out waitress. Their adventures on the way to Salina will change them all, but especially Mibs, who finds out that perhaps she had her savvy all along.

This was a very fun book -- the idea of having a "savvy" was very creative, and it's hilarious to find out how each person in Mibs family deals with their own savvy. Of course, everyone has savvy -- some more magical than others.

I always enjoy kids books that are great writing and fun to read, but that also leave you thinking about things -- I hate to say that they have a "moral" but they do really get you to consider your own life -- and maybe make you feel just a bit better about being yourself. Savvyis one of those books!

2008, NY: Dial Books for Young Readers

The Underneath by Kathi Appelt

The Underneath is the story of an unlikely family -- a bloodhound named Ranger, a calico cat, and her two kittens, Sabine and Puck -- who live underneath the house of Ranger's owner, a social outcast who lives to hunt animals. When Puck, against his mother's warnings, adventures out from under the house, all of their lives change in ways they couldn't have imagined. Woven into their stories is the story of Grandmother Snake, her beloved daughter, Night Music, her husband Hawk Man, and their daughter.

Appelt has a gorgeous writing style, one that brings to mind timelessness and interconnectedness of all nature. She weaves together themes of love and hate, betrayal and redemption, and how we can build a family out of unlikely relationships. There are some difficult scenes in this book (the fact that the blurb likens it to Sounder, Shiloh and The Yearling should give you a hint!) but it is a story for the ages.

NY: Atheneum Books for Young Adults