Just in case you were busy yesterday and missed it, the Cybils Award winners have been announced! 
The winner of the Middle Grade Speculative Fiction is The Fog Diver by Joel Ross! Hooray! And it’s only a couple of months until the sequel comes out, so it’s a perfect time to read it if you haven’t already. 
I’ll check in later with reviews of the remaining Cybils finalists I read.
The winners of the Cybils awards will be announced in just a couple more days! My daughter is in first grade right now, and though she prefers to check out early chapter books for herself, easy readers are really her level right now. And as anyone who’s ever tried to find a good easy reader knows, it’s really tough to write a book simple enough for beginning readers to manage while still being fun to read. Here’s what we read from the Cybils Easy Reader finalist list:
A Pig, a Fox and a Box by Jonathan Feske. Penguin Young Readers, 2015.
A sly fox would really, really like to eat that cute and chubby pig. He keeps thinking of ways to do so, usually involving hiding in the large box nearby. Spoiler alert: in chapter after short chapter, he fails. The amusing part is how, and it’s more amusing the farther along the story goes. Funny enough for the whole K/1 class, for my 6-year-old to read to us more than one, and for the 11-year-old to enjoy reading to his sister. Oh, and it won a Theodore Geisel Honor, too.
Don’t Throw It to Mo! by David A. Adler. Penguin USA, 2015.
Tiny Mo loves football, but everyone is surprised when he actually makes the football team. Will he be able to do anything useful in a real game? The language is simple and the story is uplifting and funny – a perfect combination. I think the K/1 class enjoyed it, but unfortunately, my daughter is not the least bit attracted to football and wouldn’t pick it up. This was also the winner of the Theodore Geisel Award.
Ling and Ting: Twice as Silly by Grace Lin. Little, Brown 2015.
This one is a little more advanced than the first couple. It’s divided into short chapters, though I was still able to read the whole book aloud in 20-30 minutes. I read this one to my daughter while we were waiting at the library during a car repair that went longer than either of the kids wanted to wait, which I’m sure accounts for my daughter’s tepid reaction to the book. Ling and Ting are very silly, Lin’s artwork is delightful, and this story is perfect for kids who will enjoy books like Clementine in a couple of years.
Picture Perfect (Sofia Martinez) by Jacqueline Jules. Picture Window Books, 2015.
This is the book I bought for my daughter when I was at Kidlitcon in October. It’s nudging up just another step towards being a full-fledged early chapter book. Sofia is a vivacious girl growing up in a loving extended Latino family. Her adventures – losing a small pet, trying to distinguish herself from her older sisters – are very relatable. Spanish phrases sprinkled throughout were (I thought) easily understandable in context, and are defined in the back as well just in case. The pictures are bright and happy with a retro-modern feel. This is one we both enjoyed, and one I’ll add to my list of good birthday party gift books.
Have you read any of these? What were your favorites?
So as I said, somehow I’ve not been able to get to all the Cybils finalists I’ve wanted to. There were seven picture book finalists, and I have read only four of them. At least I very much enjoyed the ones I read!
Hoot Owl: Master of Disguise by Sean Taylor and Jean Jullien. Candlewick, 2014.
Besides being a Cybils finalist, Stephanie at Views from the Tesseract listed this as one of her top ten fantastical picture books from 2015. (It was also nominated by my fellow MG Spec Fic round 1 panelist Anamaria of Books Together – thanks, Anamaria!) In the story, an adorable and hungry young hoot owl searches for a meal. The art has mostly dark colors with black outlines that feel like they were painted with a thick brush, though they could be acrylic. The poor hoot owl is not as successful at hunting small critters as it would like, but the drama and the vocabulary are exquisite: “The night has a thousand eyes, and two of them are mine. I swoop through the bleak blackness like a wolf in the air.” “I am a master of disguise. I devise a costume.” We had so much fun with this, and ended up sharing it with my daughter’s class as well.
Mango, Abuela and Me by Meg Medina. Illustrated by Angela Dominguez. Candlewick, 2015.
I honestly can’t remember if I checked this one out because it was on the Cybils shortlist or because of the double Pura Belpré Honor medal – but this book is touching and funny and was a hit everywhere I took it. Abuela has come to live with Mia’s family. Abuela doesn’t speak English, and Mia doesn’t speak Spanish. In poetic language, Mia describes how she and Abuela find words to use together, with the help of a new parrot. “Cozy” might not be a word typically used to describe picture book art, but that’s how this felt to me, so that I could feel the love between Mia and Abuela even when their words couldn’t express it. My daughter asked for it over and over again, and I read it to her Girl Scout Daisy troop, who all loved it, especially and most happily for me, our girl who speaks Spanish at home herself.
Last Stop on Market Street by Matt de la Peña. Pictures by Christian Robinson. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2015.
I was thrilled when this book won the Newbury, and now I’m very curious to see what the Round 2 Cybils committee thinks! Young C.J. wants to go home and play after church, like all his friends, but his grandmother takes him on the bus with her to go serve soup at the soup kitchen. The journey is just as important as the destination here – C.J.’s grandmother finds beauty and community everywhere she goes. My daughter and I enjoyed this lots, though sadly, it wasn’t a hit when I read it to her class.
Sidewalk Flowers by JonArno Lawson. Illustrated by Sydney Smith. Groundwood, 2015.
This is one I brought home over the summer, I think, as I was hearing so much good about it. A young child and father walk through city streets. The child (referred to in most reviews as a girl, though there’s really no indication one way or the other) picks flowers from sidewalks and leaves them again in places that need them – for a homeless person, or a dead bird, for example. The art is mostly shades of gray, with spots of color for the child’s red coat and the bright yellow flowers. It is really beautiful, but unfortunately, not one that my daughter liked at all. Hopefully it will be more appealing to other kids, and even maybe to her in a different mood!
Here are the books I still need to read:
Blizzard by John Rocco.
Bug in a Vacuum by Melanie Watt.
In a Village by the Sea by Muon Van.
Have you read any of these? What are your thoughts?
Here’s me trying hard to have read all the Cybils finalists before the winners are announced February 14. I’m failing in most every category – somehow life never just lets me sit down and read the way I’d like it to. I came closest in this category, with six out of seven books read. (I’m amused now to see how many of the finalists were nominated by fellow mg spec fic panelists from this year and last.) Continue reading
When I did my end-of-year stats earlier this year, I was really depressed by how few of the books I’d read were diverse, when I felt like I’d been trying to focus on reading that more accurately reflects the world around me. So I decided to set a goal: 60 diverse books this year, including both authors and characters, but trying to focus more on authors at least for ethnicity. (I’m finding myself hesitant to probe into author’s sexual preferences, so I’m going to stick with character diversity there, unless authors are really upfront about it themselves.) That would be a touch under a quarter of my reading, just because 63 seemed like an odd goal.
I further decided that to increase my accountability to myself, I’d post about it monthly. That way if I find I’m off-track, I can try to correct it.
I logged 21 books in January, (oops… I only logged one of the dozen or so books that I read for my Diversity for Daisies project.) If I include authors from countries other than the US and the UK in my diversity count, I’m close to a third of my reading being diverse. And if I look only at ethnic diversity but include character as well as author diversity, I’m very close to 50% of my reading. Those are number I’m much happier living with than the 13% diverse authors I had last year. I will keep trying!
Latino/a – 2
Black – 1
Other – 1
LGBT – 1
Non-American or British (French, mixed) – 2
Total Diverse Authors: 7
Black – 3
Latino/a – 3
South Asian – 1
LGBT – 2
Other diversity, including dyslexia, low income, non-Christian religions – 5
Here are the books with ethnically diverse characters by white authors:
Total ethnically diverse reading combined: 10
Total other diversity, including orientation, religion, non-neurotypical, low income: 7
As always, if you have any good diverse fiction to recommend, especially fantasy, please let me know!
Julia Child: an Extraordinary Life in Words and Pictures by Erin Hagar and Joanna Gorham. Duo Press, 2015.
It’s true: I was convinced to read this book by chatting with the author at Kidlitcon in October, after which I asked the library to purchase the book so I could read it. I didn’t really know much about Julia Child – I haven’t read her book, though we have it on our cookbook shelf as a classic, nor have I seen her cooking show. I do have a vague memory of seeing her kitchen at a long-ago visit to the Smithsonian. But there is this: we are a family that cooks, and I’ve always had a deep if uneducated respect for Julia Child for re-popularizing real cooking in America as well as for having the guts to learn her cooking in a male-dominated world.
This is a short and very kid-friendly biography, perfect for both school reports and biography lovers. It’s done in a style that the author told me was inspired by Brian Selznick, prose chapters interspersed with full-page wordless illustrations that look rather like movie stills, which depict significant moments. (They look to me like colored pencil and watercolor, in a highly realistic style, though I could be entirely wrong about the medium.) After showing the moment in France when she ate the meal that changed her life, it goes back to her childhood, her awkwardness and height, explaining the expected role of women at the time and Julia’s difficulty fitting in with it. It talks about her spy work in WWII – something of which I was entirely unaware – before moving on to the part, much later in her life, where she falls in love with French cooking and starts on the journey that made her famous. I found the book very engaging, great at emphasizing Julia’s skills and her contagious enthusiasm. The final chapter covers her legacy and the lasting impression she made on food culture.
I’ve long recommended children’s nonfiction to adults looking for concise treatment of a topic as well as to kids. For reference, I looked up “Julia Child biography” on Amazon. There are several, the most popular of which is currently the 2012 book Dearie by Bob Spitz. It clocks in at 576 pages in paperback. This sounds great for the serious Child fan, or the dedicated biography reader (there are many of these). For me, preferring my steady diet of fiction as I do, I found this book to have just the right balance of depth and length – enough to leave me with more knowledge and a deepened affection for Julia. I’d definitely recommend it both to kids and to adults looking for a more casual but still engaging look at this cooking pioneer. I guess I’m not the only who felt this way, because this book developed hold list and hasn’t been checked in at the library since I brought it back.
Try pairing this with some of Jim Ottaviani’s more traditionally comic-book style biographies of ground-breaking women: Primates and Dignifying Science.
There are only a few more weeks until the Cybils winners will be announced! I’ve been reading finalists in other categories trying to prepare, and I’ll try to get reviews of those up soon. In the meantime, here are more of the middle grade speculative fiction nominees that I enjoyed, including the last of the finalists.
Moon Rising. Wings of Fire Book 6 by Tui Sutherland. Scholastic, 2015.
This sixth book in the series starts a new sub-series, so that even though I haven’t read any of the previous books, I was still able to understand what was going on. Now that the war between the different types of dragons is over, work is underway to bring them together. The first step is to have young dragons go to school together, sharing rooms with dragons of other tribes. It’s really hard to break distrust, though, when dragons are asked to make friends with the very dragons they fought against and who killed their relatives. Our main point of view character here is Moonwatcher, a member of the hated Darkwing tribe, who was raised hidden in the rainforest and isn’t used to being around anyone at all. She has the gifts of the Darkwings that no one believes in anymore – the ability to read thoughts and have visions. This plays out as serious sensory issues – she’s immediately overwhelmed by all the dragons around her and their thoughts. Plus, will she ever make friends with her wingmates whether or not she tells them the truth about herself? Meanwhile, she’s overheard conversations about someone planning to attack the school, and the voice of an ancient, probably evil, but encouraging dragon that keeps talking in her head. I was quickly caught up in Moon’s story, and am now considering going back to the other books.
Valiant by Sarah McGuire. Egmont, 2015.
Hooray, a fairy tale retelling! The Brave Little Tailor is retold in a setting that feels like Eastern Europe in the 18th century. Saville and her borderline abusive father are journeying to the capital city, Reggen, where her father is convinced that the innovative techniques that got him banned from the local guilds will make him the king’s favorite tailor. Saville isn’t happy about any of it, but when her father has a stroke and is unable to care for himself, it’s up to her to dress as his apprentice and try to earn the king’s custom herself. She also takes in a homeless boy, Will, and trains him to help a little, taking satisfaction from knowing that her father would disapprove. Trying to survive pretending to be a boy and taking care of two people ought to have been enough, but Saville also finds herself caught up in dangerous politics when the city is attacked by the giants no one really believed were real. The king is weak, his advisors divided, and his sister being prepped for use as a mindless pawn. There’s a touch of romance, and a lot of looking at the importance of diplomacy and real listening. There’s quite a bit of violence, and between that and discussion of marriage, I’d say this is better for the older middle grade to teen crowd. Lovers of fairy tale retellings will find this right up their alley.
The Toymaker’s Apprentice by Sherri L. Smith. Putnam, 2015.
Stefan is not dealing well with the death of his mother. He’s about to leave his father, a master toymaker, and head out to be a journeyman on his own – when his uncle Christian Drosselmeyer appears, with the Moorish Royal Astronomer of Boldavia. Christian is a master clockmaker, and offers to take Stefan on and travel with him, catering to Stefan’s wish to make brand-new toys that use clockwork. But Christian isn’t his own man, either – he’s bound to find the magical Krakatook nut, which will free the Princess Purlipat, who was turned to wood by the Mouse Queen’s curse some years before. His quest will now be Stefan’s as well. Meanwhile, we also hear part of the story told from the point of the view of the travelling rat tutor who is hired to train the monstrous seven-headed son of the queen mouse – each head named after a fearsome human leader, each with its own personality. Though the tutor doesn’t really believe this can end well, he still does his best to train the prince to take over the world of men. (Take Charlotte’s warning to heart: do not read this if you’re squeamish about rodents.) This is a story inspired by the Nutcracker – very faithfully, from what I remember from my childhood reading of the original novel – but without any touch of dancing snowflakes and candies. I quite enjoyed it, and kids interested in history, machinery, and epic inter-species battles should enjoy it as well.
Carry On by Rainbow Rowell. Read by Euan Morton. MacMillan Audio for St. Martin’s Griffin, 2015.
Fangirl was Rowell’s captivating look at a highly introverted geek girl trying to make it in college. Said geek girl, Cath, spends most of the book working on an unofficial series ender to a Harry Potter-like series, starring Simon Snow and his rival Baz, the Draco-like vampire he falls in love with. Carry On basically is that novel. We join Simon Snow, the Chosen One and the Mage’s Heir, for his final year at the Watford School for Magicks.
I’ll preface this by saying that I’ve never been a reader or writer of fanfic myself, nor has the idea of a Draco/Harry pairing in that universe ever made much sense to me. But I am a sucker for Harry Potter and a sucker for a well-written, convincing romance, and Carry On caters to both of those interests in spades. It works quite well as a story on its own, whether or not you’ve read either Fangirl or any of the Harry Potter books. At the same time, as a conversation around Harry Potter, it speaks volumes – a “but what if instead?” on top of the standard “what if” that makes speculative fiction. Continue reading
In the spirit of Multicultural Children’s Book Day, I thought I’d share a project that I’ve been working on for a couple of months now. It’s not done yet, but I would like to ask for input from you, dear readers. Here is the situation:
I am the fourth assistant leader and troop librarian for my daughter’s Girl Scout Daisy Troop, currently all first-graders. The main project the girls work on is earning their petals – one petal for each line of the Girl Scout Law. The handbook has a story for each line of the law, but the main leaders’ experience from last year was that the stories, while beautifully illustrated, aren’t well-written enough to hold the girls’ attention. Could I, as a librarian, find better books? Continue reading
For the first time ever, I missed signing up to participate in Multicultural Children’s Book Day. While I’m super sad that I missed out on the fun in advance, there’s no reason for you to do so now! Follow the links and read more to find reviews of multiultural children’s books, opportunities to win them, a twitter party and more!
Multicultural Children’s Book Day was created by Valarie Budayr from Jump Into A Book and Mia Wenjen from Pragmatic Mom in 2014. As the official website states:
“Despite census data that shows 37% of the US population consists of people of color, only 10% of children’s books published have diversity content. Using the Multicultural Children’s Book Day, Mia and Valarie are on a mission to change all of that. Their mission is to not only raise awareness for the kid’s books that celebrate diversity, but to get more of these types of books into classrooms and libraries. Another goal of this exciting event is create a compilation of books and favorite reads that will provide not only a new reading list for the winter, but also a way to expose brilliant books to families, teachers, and libraries.“
The MCCBD team’s mission to spread the word and raise awareness about the importance of diversity in children’s literature. Our young readers need to see themselves within the pages of a book and experience other cultures, languages, traditions and religions within the pages of a book. We encourage readers, parents, teachers, caregivers and librarians to follow along the fun book reviews, author visits, event details, a multicultural children’s book linky and via our hashtag (#ReadYourWorld) on Twitter and other social media.
Here are all of the sponsors of this year’s events:
Multicultural Children’s Book day 2016 Medallion Level Sponsors! #ReadYourWorld
Platinum: Wisdom Tales Press * StoryQuest Books*Lil Libros
Gold: Author Tori Nighthawk*Candlewick Press,* Bharat Babies
Silver: Lee and Low Books*Chronicle Books*Capstone Young Readers T
Tuttle Publishing ,NY Media Works, LLC/KidLit TV
Bronze: Pomelo Books* Author Jacqueline Woodson*Papa Lemon Books* Goosebottom Books*Author Gleeson Rebello*ShoutMouse Press*Author Mahvash Shahegh* China Institute.org*Live Oak Media
Multicultural Children’s Book Day has 12 amazing Co-Hosts. You can use the links below or view them here.
All Done Monkey, Crafty Moms Share,Educators Spin on it,Growing Book by Book,Imagination Soup,I’m Not the Nanny,InCultural Parent, Kid World Citizen,Mama Smiles,Multicultural Kid Blogs,Spanish Playground
Finally, here are my Multicultural Children’s Book Day posts from 2015 , 2014 part 1 and 2014 part 2.
alibrarymama 