Young Fredle by Cynthia Voigt. Read by Wendy Carter. Fredle is a young mouse who lives behind the walls of the kitchen of a farm house, also inhabited by Mr. and Mrs., Baby, two dogs and a cat. He and his more adventurous girl cousin, Axel, enjoy pushing the boundaries of the strict mouse rules, talking while foraging and even foraging outside of the normal times. And then they find something new and delicious – a peppermint patty. They both eat themselves sick. Axel is able to run away to wait to get better, but Fredle is pushed out of the nest onto the pantry floor. From there, Mrs. takes him outside, presumed by all the mice to be a death sentence. Getting to this point of the story took long enough that I was surprised at how many discs were left of the audiobook – but this is really just the beginning. Fredle gets better, has an outside mouse bring him food, and discovers the stars and what he thinks are multiple moons. He must learn very quickly how to find food outside and how to stay safe from the outdoor cats as well as raptors, owls, snakes and racoons. Somehow, he makes friends with Sadie, the flightier of the two dogs, and develops an exploratory friendship with a young woodshed mouse who defies her colony’s rules against talking with house mice. He spends what seems like forever searching the perimeter of the house for a way back in, only to be kidnapped by a band of raccoons, the Rowdy Brothers. And when Fredle finally makes his way back home, he finds that he can no longer just go along with the rules that have always been followed, when he can see that doing things differently could save lives.
Many of the Amazon reviews talked about how the message was the importance of Freedom. Which is a nice all-American message, but not really the message that I got out of the book. It is some about freedom, of course – but when Fredle was first dumped on the grass outside, he was perfectly free and absolutely in danger of his life, both from the illness and from not knowing his way around. I think the more important lesson that Fredle learned was about flexibility and adaptation. Rules are fine if they’re really helping to keep you alive and safe, but they need to be re-evaluated regularly to make sure they really are still the best way to do things. Unmentioned in those reviews, but going along with it, is Fredle’s learning to appreciate beauty, not just going through the day trying to find enough to eat and then sleeping the rest of the day away. Many Amazon reviewers also found it slow, and aside from the slowish though not uninteresting beginning that I mentioned earlier, we did not find this to be the case. I listen to audio books in the car with my son daily, and rarely does he complain about the suspense of just having to stop wherever we land when we get to school. This time, he was waiting anxiously to find out what would happen to Fredle, especially as we had to turn it off just as Fredle had been spotted by a snake.
This was a runner-up for the annual ALA Odyssey awards for best audio for youth and teens. It was indeed very pleasant listening, though there are also illustrations in the print version that we didn’t see. This is a good choice for elementary-age kids and would make a good fine family read-aloud.
Cross-posted to http://library-mama.dreamwidth.org and http://sapphireone.livejournal.com .
The Amazing Adventures of Bumblebee Boy by David Soman and Jacky Davis. When Ladybug Girl first came out a few years ago, I loved it, but the premise of a preschooler left out by her older siblings needing to come up with her own superhero way to play didn’t quite mesh with our family. My son, then an only child, had never been left out of the older kids games and couldn’t quite relate. He and I both loved the next book in the series, Ladybug Girl and Bumblebee Boy, where Lulu and her friend Sam take multiple tries to come up with a way to play together and end up having a fabulous playground adventure as the titular superheroes. We actually bought this one, and I brought it up for years whenever the boy had his frequent similar difficulties playing with his friends. There have been other books in this series, but this one has been the first since Ladybug Girl and Bumblebee Boy that once again grabbed the whole family with that perfect balance of real-life dilemmas and fabulous but true-to-life imaginary adventures. In this book, Sam – probably aged 4 or 5 – is playing Bumblebee Boy at home, when his little brother, probably around 2, keeps wanting to join the game. What to do? “Bumblebee Boy flies alone” – but Owen is really determined about wanting to join in. And Bumblebee Boy, busy with pirates, saber-toothed lions, bank robbers and aliens, might find that he needs an assistant. The illustrations alternate between showing the real and imaginary worlds, and the endpapers look like they could be photocopied and cut out for action paper dolls of Bumblebee Boy, Owen and their enemies. Once again Soman and Davis have made a hit for everyone in my family. 
Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu This is a Snow Queen retelling. I don’t actually like many Hans Christian Anderson stories, but this retelling made me fall in love with the story. Hazel’s been having a rough time lately, what with her parents’ recent divorce and having to leave her beloved school. Still, she’s at least at the same school as her best friend, Jack, whose home life is also less than stellar. Hazel’s creativity and immersion in fantasy worked well at the old school, but she can’t seem to make friends with classmates or teachers at the new school. And then – we know, but neither Hazel nor Jack do – a magic mirror shard pierces Jack’s eye and freezes his heart. One day, he stops talking to Hazel, and the next, he’s gone. Both Jack and Hazel and Hazel and the new friend her mother is trying to get her to make had been making up a story about the impenetrable fortress of a winter snow queen-type person – where would she live? What would her motives be? And then Hazel’s rival for friendship with Jack tells her that he saw Jack climb onto a sled with an odd-looking woman dressed in white and drive off into the woods. Hazel knows that she is the only one who has a chance of rescuing Jack. She sets off into the woods, woefully underprovisioned. As in “Into the Woods”, the woods by her sledding hill turn into the Woods, into which all real and fairy tale characters wander eventually. It’s full of fairy tales characters and conventions, but while she recognizes pieces, the rules are not quite what she knows from her books, and she must use her wits and work hard to keep her goal close to her heart as she journeys. 
Knit Kimono Too by Vicki Square. This is the second book of knit kimonos from designer Vicki Square. I haven’t read the first one, though I did listen to a lovely interview with her on the 
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle. 2012 year marks the 50th anniversary of one of my all-time favorite books. There was even a whole blog tour about it, to go along with 50th Anniversary Commemorative Edition. This has yummy extras, such as a brief bio and memories of L’Engle by her granddaughter, photos, a facsimile of the manuscript for the first chapter with corrections, and L’Engle’s Newbery acceptance speech. 
Linger by Maggie Stiefvater. Read by Dan Bittner, Pierce Cravens, Emma Galvin, & Jenna Lamia. There isn’t really a way to tell this story without spoilers for the first book. In the first book, Sam, a young werewolf, and Grace, bitten as a child but somehow never turned, fall in love and risk it all to find a way to stay together, as Sam will otherwise just turn into a wolf and stay that way forever. A new werewolf, Jack, also attempts a cure but dies instead. And Sam is horrified to see the leader of the pack and Sam’s adopted father, Beck, turn up with a truck full of new werewolves to ensure a future for the pack. 
Everyone is waiting for warm weather to turn wolves human again and answer mountains of questions. Are Beck and Ulrich really permanently wolves? Did the new wolves, including Grace’s friend Olivia, survive the winter? Will the pack be able to survive the impact of Cole’s turbulent past? Will Sam and Grace remain undiscovered, and what will her parents’ reaction be if they find out? I was really wishing that I had more time in the car (something I rarely wish) so that I could finish this sooner. Stiefvater has for me a perfect combination of good characters, compelling plot, just detailed enough world, and beautiful writing. She’s able to make me believe that two teenagers could fall in love and know it’s forever, even when most of the time in real life, I’d advocate for waiting a bit longer. I love the shifting theories about how being a werewolf works – rules that, like real-life science, exist but aren’t easy to nail down. This is the middle volume, and so of course you’ll want to start at the beginning and end at the end. But even with all of that against it, this was a story that grabbed me and hasn’t let me go yet. I recommend this trilogy to anyone who enjoyed Twilight, especially Team Jacob, as supernatural romance done better. 
Overcoming Dyslexia by Sally Shaywitz, M.D. Shaywitz is a Yale doctor who has been involved in dyslexia research for decades, including writing an article about dyslexia that was published in Smithsonian magazine in the mid-1990s. This is a thick and comprehensive book about the history, nature and treatment of dyslexia. On the one hand, very good information, at least considering that it’s now nearly a decade old. On the other hand, the text was so dense, with tiny type and frequent fillers about the marvels of modern science, that I found myself wanting to hurl the book across the room and tell Shaywitz to get to the point already. The revolutionary teaching method promised in the subtitle was not introduced until page 172, especially amazing given that dyslexia is often inherited, making it very likely that a dyslexic parent would be trying to muddle through this. /end rant
Dead End in Norvelt by Jack Gantos. It’s 1962 in Norvelt, a Pennsylvania town founded as a self-sufficient homestead community by Eleanor Roosevelt in the Depression. Now, in 1962, the original residents are slowly dying off – all women, as the men died of black lung from working in the mines much earlier.When I first started this book, about a boy named Jack Gantos growing up in the same town as author Jack Gantos, I was prepared for another thoughtful and moving but ultimately somewhat boring book about growing up in a slow, long-ago time. The start felt a tad slow to me, as young Jack gets in trouble for accidentally firing a Japanese WWII rifle that he hadn’t thought was loaded at the local drive-in screen. One of his major entertainments seems to watching war movies from his yard using binoculars. Maybe not boring for boys, but boring for me. The tension ramps up for Jack as his father orders him to mow down his mother’s treasured field of corn for feeding the poor, with the upshot that Jack is grounded for the summer. His big project is digging a bomb shelter and a runway for the old fighter plane his father is trying to fix up. This plane and destruction building the runway causes are symptomatic of the tension between Jack’s mother, who was born in Norvelt and loves it, and his father, who wasn’t and who considers it a dead-end town to be escaped. The only time Jack is allowed to leave the house is to help one of the original residents, the former town nurse, Miss Volker, type obituaries of the others as they pass, as Miss Volker is too arthritic to do so. Long ago, she promised to marry Mr. Spizz, the tricycle-riding town sheriff, when all of these ladies were dead, and he never lets her forget it. Additional color comes from the nosebleeds Jack gets whenever he is frightened, from his best friend Bunny, a fierce Small Person who is the daughter of the local mortician, and the unexpected death by truck of a strange Hells Angel. All of these elements weave together into a story that has lots of over-the-top gross humor combined with nostalgia and sorrow at the ending of a utopia as well as good old-fashioned kid fun. Spoiler – the old ladies turn out to be dying of unnatural causes, and somehow, this is mostly treated as something to laugh at. This treatment makes the book lighter for the grade-school readers it’s aimed at, but I still found the casualness the murders were treated with a little horrifying. For those who can get past this, this book has enough excitement to pull a reader in as well as enough meat to leave the reader with something to think about. 
Uniquely Gifted by Keisa Kay and Beverly A. Trail “Twice exceptional” is a term I’ve newly become acquainted with. It refers to people (often specifically children) who are both gifted and have some sort of disability like a learning disability, ADD or ADHD, or sensory integration issues… among many other possibilities. My friend Dr. M. actually told me to look for the term. You can Google lots, of course, but sometimes a book is nice, and this is the book that I found that I could interloan easily. It’s divided into three sections, with lots of essays from parents and kids, teachers, and administrators each talking about their experience with (or as) twice exceptional students. This book came out a dozen years ago, and that 2000 copyright makes a big difference when it comes to things like finding resources on the Internet. However, educational systems change at a glacial pace, so the stories of struggles by families for support still sadly ring true, and effective methods for support will still be the same. I came to the happy conclusion that my boy is much closer to the normal range than most of the children described in this book, so that the extreme adaptations sometimes described won’t be necessary for him. Also unlike some of the horror stories here, the teachers and administrators at his school are all very supportive so far and commited to helping him reach his full potential. However, I have quite a few friends whose kids do fall into the twice exceptional spectrum, for whom this book might be useful. 
alibrarymama 