Final Books of 2018

              Visit Kellee and Ricki at UnleashingReaders and Jen at Teach Mentor Texts to see what they've been reading, along with everyone else who post their favorites. 

              The Cybils' finalists will be announced tomorrow! Be sure to watch for them.

              These stories shared today at the end of the year also welcome the new year with some lessons in living, some 'how-tos' with inspiration. Wishing you all the happiest of times in 2019. Tomorrow is the first blank page of a 365-page book. Write a good one. 

― Brad Paisley

           Sy Montgomery who also wrote 'The Soul of an Octopus", begins by sharing her childhood wish to talk with animals, to be a dog like Molly, her family’s Scottish terrier. She writes ten essays of 13 critters special in her life from Tess the border collie and Chris the extroverted pig to spiders and octopuses. Other animals she shares show her travel life (on assignment) to meet and connect with creatures that she feels a special kinship with. She left a newspaper job to shadow emus in the Australian Outback and becomes friends with a tarantula in the jungles of South America. It is on her New Hampshire farm, during an ermine attack on her beloved "ladies", her hens, one Christmas night, when she found further personal connections. I loved reading of her personal learning about these animals, imagine how special it would be to read aloud and share this with an older child who also has a love for all creatures. There is a bonus at the back where Montgomery shares titles of other books that have inspired her, most of which I love, too. She adds a list of others, one for adults and one for children. Illustrations add to the poignancy of this memoir from someone who knows animals well and can help readers understand why they love them, too.

        There's hope in the world when someone celebrates stories as beautifully as Paul Czajak has in this book. A mayor of a town wants his people to listen "only" to him, orders all books destroyed. A young boy finds goodness in his own words that plant seeds for all. Rashin Kheririyeh's illustrations celebrate books in lovely ways, even on the inside covers. And there is that black cat companion who's with the boy all the way. It's a lovely fable for reading aloud.

       Beautifully enticing wordless book. I couldn't wait to turn the page but also had to linger to be sure I didn't miss each detail, first looking in the windows, then searching for the mice and viewing the pictures on the walls, finally following the cat as the boy did, up and up, to a surprise!

     If you follow this pig's dream, you cannot stop making the dream real. With persistence and resilience, patience and friends' help, big things can happen. For everyone to ponder, for teachers to read and encourage students to "dream" for their own new beginnings in 2019. Il Sung Na's illustrations entertain with soft colors in his depictions of the pig's journey, his successes and failures. The author's note shares that inspiration for the book was his own "trial-and-error pursuit of that calling", the one to create beautiful picture books. 

        Illustrated in shades of brown, not exactly a happy story, but one of hope for someone hated by a town because he was "the" outlaw who created "a trail of misdeeds". What he does later and how he changes is met with skepticism until one ally offers support. Can someone change and begin to do good? Can someone speak up against a crowd in order to help? These are questions to consider, perhaps for older students in a group discussion. 


WHAT'S NEXT: I'm reading the adult Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari, a gift from a bookstore friend, and Katherine Applegate's The Last (Endling # 1)