Monday Reading - New Books to Share

             

Visit Kellee and Ricki at UnleashingReaders and Jen at Teach Mentor Texts to see what they and others have been reading! Your TBR lists will grow! Happy Reading!

     Share with the hashtag #IMWAYR 

  

        Still wishing all of you educators good days and having fun and staying safe! 

I shared a special poetry book last Friday by Irene Latham, This Poem Is A Nest, wonderful for a new poetry challenge with students!
      

                 The conflict between the Poles and the Ukranians, then before and during World War II with German and the Soviet Union makes an intense story by Amanda McCrina, showing one main character through some of the beginning experiences in 1941 alternating with the other character's life in 1944 toward the ending of the war. It's complicated and full of the tragic losses of every side. I was occasionally confused because of the myriad of people within the stories but began to mark the alternating chapters of both those young men and I researched some other background of these specific conflicts that had long been occurring even before WWII. 

                 What happens to every character, but especially to those profiled, Aleksey and Tolya, will make you wonder who is the good side and who is the traitor, thus the title? It's a serious and well-done historical novel. 

              Thanks to Walker Books, US, for this Advanced Copy. This was first published in the UK by Firefly Press. 

              It's not a long book and just right for young middle-grade readers ready for a little bit of a scary adventure with all the parts, beginning with Seren, an orphan sent to live with godparents that she's never met. They're wealthy, and the home is in the Wales countryside, huge and gloom-filled. No one, especially that family, is there, and most rooms have the furniture covered with sheets. There is only the stern housekeeper, a groundskeeper, and a boy gardener. And not one person will tell Seren about the boy she has been so happy to meet, the family's young son. Tomas, her age, seems to have disappeared and Seren, clever and spunky, is determined to find out why. There are dark forces involved and magical snow globes, and of course, that clockwork crow, thrust on Seren at the railway station, in pieces and wrapped in newspaper. As soon as she puts the crow together, strange things really begin to happen. Yes, it's an intriguing mystery Seren is not going to hide from. It will be a fun read for kids and maybe a good read-aloud, too! AND - there's a second book adventure on its way!

           It's serendipity, I guess. The following books all have an underlying theme of  love of place, in varied ways sure, but each of us, including those in the animal kingdom, need and love our shelters.

          Many in the world seem to have summer homes and this is a story by Kelly Jordan of time passing told from the cottage's point of view. All the lovely things that happen in summertime include the family, especially this one young girl, arriving. They swim and sail and sit in the evening watching the waves and sometimes the whales swim by. The girl also sits by her window telling the cottage, "You are my favorite place." Time moves by, summers and autumns, winters, then summer visits. But eventually, no one returns until that glad day when the girl, now a mother, returns with her child, to "The Little Blue Cottage", and life repeats again. The family is shown as a diverse family, and most illustrations by Jessica Courtney-Tickle fill with nature scenes in much of the summer, but also autumn, winter, and spring when the cottage waits. 

        It's a new marvelous and nostalgic story from Patricia MacLachlan, illustrated by the amazing Micha Archer with acrylic, ink, and collages. With a large book full of horizontal double-page spreads, readers immediately get a sense of why those earliest words are "Where I was born, there was a sky so big, there was no end of it". Scene after scene shows that broad view and the fun there, lying in the fields smelling Mama's roses, traveling to favorite towns with names like Chugwater, and riding the farm horses, Lyddie and Blue and Joe. Town scenes and porch scenes and finally night scenes make one want to move and be there, right now! It's beautiful! The endpapers, from sunny days to starlit night also "shine". 

            On a thunderous and rain-soaked night the story by Susan Vaught begins, animals are safe and warm in the barn, but a fox approaches in that dark and uninviting setting, "Rain and thunder,/home asunder." In a brief few rhymes and double-page beautifully-painted illustrations by Kelly Murphy, the plight of the fox and then soon other animals are forced to come for shelter. The first to welcome the fox and her kits is a young duckling, so the words to me have a double-meaning. "Together We Grow" can mean changing one's ideas of who can work together and the book shows quite an unexpected gathering together along with what may or may not be an expected ending: "there is room for us all". The endpapers show the beginning with the storm coming and last, the calm ending. I'd love to read this aloud to a group to see what they think about it.

Now Reading: Slowly reading Alone Together: Love, Grief, and Comfort in the Time of Covid-19. It has essays and poetry I imagine everyone enjoying and connecting to. And, I've started A Whale of the Wild by Rosanne Perry, a companion book to A Wolf Called Wander which I loved! It has started quite beautifully!