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Posts by Jody M
Author Candace Fleming and illustrator Eric Rohmann have wowed the children’s book world with a very engaging and detailed book about bees. Did you know bees are quite hairy?! The oil paintings of bees in this book are so close-up you’ll feel like you’re just as tiny, getting exclusive access of a nest from a bee's point-of-view.
Suraya has always found it hard to make friends and being a new student doesn't help. She does have one good friend, although it comes in the form of a grasshopper. It’s a pelesit, a spirit familiar that serves Survaya, inherited from her estranged grandmother. The book begins with the reader being empathetic of lonely Suraya and welcoming of her pelesit. You’ll be rooting for them thinking, “I’m glad he’s there to protect her from those bullies!” But soon things take a wicked turn, reminiscent of a popular horror movie when awful things start happening to Suraya herself.
What are seven young ladies to do when the headmistress and her brother abruptly falls over dead during dinner? They don't want to go back to their homes and there may be a killer amongst them. The solution: bury the corpses in the garden and dress up one of the students as their headmistress. The mystery thickens as the young ladies, each with her own unique characteristic, tries to keep up this farce and deal with meddling neighbors, a lovestruck admiral, long-lost relatives, and inquisitive constables.
It’s been a while since I’ve read really a good anthropomorphic novel (stories where animals take on human characteristics). When the ALA awards were announced and Scary Stories for Young Foxes was named a Newbery Honor, I figured it must be special. Special is only one of the many ways to describe this book. Harrowing, magical, sad, corrupt, and resilient are other words that come to mind but once you read it you’ll have your own words to describe it. “All scary stories have two sides,” says the old storyteller to the seven fox pups eager to be frightened.
How would you, a college freshman with little social skills, get the attention of the hot, tattooed baker/barista with an equally hot-but-manipulative ex-girlfriend with an enviable Insta feed named MsLOLAXO?Answer: Save his life with your EDC (Every Day Carry) bag of emergency items and become each other’s emergency contact (cause you know, the baker/barista is bare bones making it in life and can’t afford healthcare).
New Kid by Jerry Craft is the first graphic novel to win the Newbery Award. Craft also won the Coretta Scott King Author award. He stated in a Publisher’s Weekly article that he wrote books he wished a 10-year-old Jerry Craft could have had that might have made him read at an early age. At that young age, there weren’t any books that were right for him or had a character that looked like him.
