Sunday, October 24, 2010

More Books!

This time we've got a whole lot of new picture books - colourful, witty, sensitive, sometimes silly! We also found some very special middle grade/young adult books:

Karen Hesse's 'Out of the Dust' won the 1998 Newbery Medal, competing with Lily’s Crossing by Patricia Reilly Giff, Wringer by Jerry Spinelli, and Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine.

This is a book written in verse, best for mature readers.

Publishers Weekly
said in a starred review, "Readers may find their own feelings swaying in beat with the heroine’s shifting moods as she approaches her coming-of-age and a state of self-acceptance."

Kirkus said, "The poem/novel ends with only a trace of hope; there are no pat endings, but a glimpse of beauty wrought from brutal reality."


About Jerry Spinelli's 'Crash', School Library Journal says,

"A winning story about seventh-grade Crash Coogan's transformation from smug jock to empathetic, mature young man. In a clever, breezy first-person style, Spinelli tackles gender roles, family relationships, and friendship with humor and feeling.

As the novel opens, Crash feels passionately about many things: the violence of football; being in charge; the way he looks in shoulder pads; never being second in anything; and the most expensive sneakers at the mall. Although a stereotypical bully, the boy becomes more than one-dimensional in the context of his overworked, unavailable parents and the love he has for his grandfather, who comes to live with the Coogans and then suffers a stroke. It is because of his affection for Scooter that Crash comes to appreciate Penn Webb, a neighbor and classmate whom for years Crash has tormented and teased about his pacifism, vegetarianism, second-hand clothes, and social activism...

Readers will devour this humorous glimpse at what jocks are made of while learning that life does not require crashing helmet-headed through it."


Stephanie Tolan's 'Surviving the Applewhites': When Jake Stemple arrives at Wit's End, the Applewhite family's home school, little does he know that the experience will foster a deeply hidden passion in him. Each Applewhite family member--from patriarch Grandpa to E.D., Jake's counterpart, to 4-year-old Destiny--sparkles with individuality and offers Jake a new lens through which to look at the world. (from Audiofile)

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