Archive for category: Great books

That’s every grade-one child, including those home-schooled, or in any school in the country, private or public.

What’s the catch? There is no catch. This has been going on every year for the past 11 years. A pile of books arrives for the grade ones (and twos, if it’s a split class). That’s more than half a million books—the biggest print run in Canada.

It’s a joint project with TD Bank Group and the Canadian Children’s Book Centre (CCBC). TD picks up the $1-million-plus tab for most of the program.

And it’s always such a great book. This year, it’s Gifts (Cadeaux, translated into French), by Jo Ellen Bogart and plasticine artist Barbara Reid.

Gifts is a book that kids will read over and over again—with an adult or by themselves. It’s great for shared reading because it’s full of lyrical phrases. It’s also great for kids to discover and re-discover because the words and the images have lots of things hidden in them to be found.

Gifts tells the story of a grandmother who travels to different countries over the course of a number of years. She asks her granddaughter, “What would you have me bring?” with the granddaughter asking for impossible souvenirs like, “a rainbow to wear as a ring” from Hawaii and “an iceberg on a string” from the Arctic.

Grandma is incredibly inventive as she comes up with solutions for each request.

The book follows the pair as they both grow older, eventually ending with the girl now a fully-grown adult with a daughter of her own.

There are lots of reasons to get teary-eyed, here. (Not that I am. My contacts are just a bit scratchy.) First, there’s the wonderful, multi-layered story. Then there are the colourful, detailed plasticine images. Then there’s the 500,000 free books. And then there’s this story:

The CCBC and TD get tons of fan letters after they distribute the books each year. One in particular stands out in the memory of TD rep’s Alan Convery.

They’d just distributed the books, a little before the Christmas season a couple of years ago. Convery got a letter from a principal in the Northwest Territories, thanking him. She said that for most of the children, this would be the first book that they would own. And then she added that this would also be the only Christmas gift many of the children would receive that year, since the families in that particular community were having trouble making ends meet.

(The CCBC later shipped the community another supply of different children’s books.)

It’s so important for kids to own their own books. It empowers them. It lets them feel entitled to use books. And statistics show very clearly that there is a link between kids who have their own books and those who go on to higher education.

Kleenex!

I heard about this book and thought it sounded interesting.

Long-story (oh-so-long!) short, I ended up having to get a review copy sent to my vacation-hotel in California because the publisher wouldn’t ship to Canada.

Was it worth it? Yes. Memorable characters and interesting premise. Things get a little wild and crazy in the middle, which became a bit distracting for me, but of course that’s just the sort of stuff kids love.

It’s a story about a bunch of gifted kids who run into some bad guys and use their own gifted creations to get away from them.

Here’s my precis.

The School for the Insanely Gifted, by Dan Elish
Daphna writes music that puts people into a trance. Harkin has developed a flying car. And Wanda is designing a bridge from New York to Moscow.
If these are the projects the students at the Blatt School for the Insanely Gifted are working on, just imagine what Mr. Blatt himself is creating!
As Daphna and her fellow students prepare for the upcoming Insanity Cup competition, they’ll also have to solve the riddle of her mother’s disappearance and reveal the enormous secret Mr. Blatt is hiding from the world.
Join in a race around the globe as the kids try to outrun the bad guys using their own inventions, clues from Daphne’s mother and their insanely awesome brains.

Probably the thing I like most about this book (besides main characters Daphna and Harkin) is the author. Dan Elish has written a number of kids’ novels, and lives in New York with his wife and two kids; he seems. from our email correspondence when he helped me obtain a copy of his book, like a truly nice guy. Check out his website.

Here is a wonderful trailer for Brian Selznick’s new book, Wonderstruck.
Brian Selznick’s the guy who wrote and illustrated the uber-brilliant The Invention of Hugo Cabret.

Here’s a mother-daughter book you may want to check out.

Wait, I’m assuming you’ve both read (and loved) the Anne of Green Gables series.
You have? Good. Let’s continue.

So, I’m browsing the shelves of Chapters in a small town in Ontario recently, and my fingers are drawn to a soft green cover with gold embossed writing on the spine. It says, The Blythes Are Quoted, by L. M. Montgomery.

I’m intrigued. I take it down from the shelf. It’s beautiful, a hefty volume of about 500 lovingly bound pages with a painted scene of PEI on the cover.

I call a Chapters-woman over. “What’s this?” I ask her.

She tells me essentially what the book’s foreword says, which is, “The Blythes Are Quoted is the last work of fiction the world-famous author of Anne of Green Gables prepared for publication before her untimely death on April 24, 1942. It has never been published in its entirety… Until now, the full text of The Blythes Are Quoted has remained something of a secret.”

Apparently someone delivered the manuscript to Montgomery’s publisher on the day of her death, but it was never published. Long-story short, any publisher who tried to put it into print either annotated the material or left half of it out.

There’s a reason for that. The book is a collection of short stories, none of them directly about Anne of Green Gables (but she’s usually mentioned at least in passing). After each story is a poem or two that “Anne” has written, and some dialogue between Anne and her family members about the poem.

Here’s the other reason: some of the stories are kind of dark. There’s one about a girl who is taken by her aunt into a forest upon each full moon to meet ghosts. There’s another one about a man who is taken on a joy ride by a knife-wielding lunatic. Actually, did I say “kind of” dark? These stories are dark. But oh so much fun!

Some publishers left out the poems, and some left out the “dark.” Viking Canada in 2009 and now Penguin this year have published all of it, and it’s good stuff.

If you’re an Anne of Green Gables fan (you people in Japan*, I’m talking to you), you and your daughter would do well to pick up this strange and delightful nugget of Anne-inspired wonderfulness.

It’s not exactly a spunky redheaded orphan getting into mischief. More like her dead, insane, murderous older sister on a drunken rampage—if she were still cute and likeable.

Anyway, the price of the volume is worth it just for the lovely cover art.

*I’m not trying to be funny… the Japanese love Anne like the French love Jerry Lewis. They’re obsessed with her. They’ve got good taste.

I can’t get the smile off my face – the new Robert Munsch book arrived in the mail this week.

This isn’t just any Robert Munsch book.
It’s the result of 170,000 kids voting on the best plot.

Remember the contest we told you about? Where kids got to choose which plot they liked best, and Robert Munsch would write his next book about it?

The kids have spoken! And the result is probably the awesomest Munsch book yet, Give Me Back My Dad!

It’s set in Rigolet, Labrador. Munsch visited the town 20 years ago, and never forgot Cheryl, a young girl he met there, who inspired this wonderful, cheeky story.

I’m not even going to tell you what it’s about. I’ll just say that it’s 28 pages of awesomeness. Twenty-eight pages of classic Robert Munsch at his finest. Hooray, hooray, smile, smile, smile!

Related Link
Illustrator Michael Martchenko takes you through the process of illustrating Give Me Back My Dad! here. There are also some wonderful sketches and the story about Munsch visiting Rigolet.

You can read them in a box,
You can read them with a fox!

They discovered seven new Seuss stories you see,
Filled with crafty rhymes for you to read.

But don’t go to the store yet, please remember…
They won’t be published until September!

Yes, you’ve got it right—seven new Dr. Seuss stories have been discovered, and they will be published in a new book called The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories by Dr. Seuss.

The stories were published in the 1950s in magazines, but they have never been put into book form before. They are being published by Random House.

Charles D. Cohen discovered the stories. He is a dentist by trade but a serious Dr. Seuss scholar on the side. He has the largest private collection of Seuss memorabilia in the world.

The new book will have seven stories in it, including Steak for Supper, about fantastic creatures who follow a boy home hoping for a steak dinner; The Bippolo Seed, in which a scheming feline leads an innocent duck to make a bad decision, and The Strange Shirt Spot, which was the inspiration for the bathtub-ring scene in The Cat in the Hat Comes Back.

Random House says the stories in this book are a departure from his rhyming approach to kid-lit.

Share these outrageous Seuss facts with your kids (you may have to censor some of them)

* His real name was Theodor (Ted) Geisel.

* His car license plate was GRINCH.

* He wrote 44 books for children.

* Some of his most popular books are: And to Think That I Saw it on Mulberry Street (his first book, published in 1937), The Cat in the Hat (1957), Green Eggs and Ham (1960), One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish (1960), Oh, the Places You’ll Go! (1990) and Hop on Pop (1963).

* He won a Pulitzer Prize for Literature, an Academy Award, three Emmy Awards and a Grammy. (A Grammy!)

* Why did he change his name from Geisel to Seuss? He got in trouble in college (drinking in his dorm room, yes that’s what I said) and the Dean said he could no longer be editor of the school magazine where he published his cartoons. Instead of stopping, he just published his cartoons under different names: L. Pasteur, D. G. Rossetti, T. Seuss and Seuss. He used “Dr.” to jokingly make his name sound more important. (Dr. Rebel, if you ask me.)

* He nearly became a scholar but his girlfriend, Helen Palmer, (who he married in 1927) pointed out that he was more of a draw-er than a scholar.

* His first job out of college was drawing ads, including an ad for a bug spray called Flit. Everyone knew his ad’s catchphrase, “Quick, Henry – the Flit!”

* He started writing for children because his contract with the ad agency precluded him from writing for adults.

* Seuss never had any children with his first wife, Helen Palmer. However, they “made up” lots of pretend children: Chrysantemum-Pearl, Norval, Wally, Wickersham, Miggles, Boo-Boo and Thnud. They would invite neighbourhood children over to pose with them for their annual Christmas card and tell everyone, “these are our children.”

* More than two dozen publishers rejected his first book, And To Think That I Saw it On Mulberry Street. Seuss was walking down Madison Avenue, about to throw his manuscript away, when he met up with an old school chum, Mike McClintock. McClintock was an editor with Vanguard Press, and immediately gave Seuss his first book contract. Seuss later would say that if he’d been walking on the other side of the street he might have ended up a dry cleaner.

* Several of his books (Yertle the Turtle, The Sneetches, Horton Hears a Who!) were written as metaphors against racism. The famous phrase from Horton, “A person’s a person, no matter how small,” offers “a rhymed lesson in protection of minorities and their rights,” the Des Moines Register wrote in a book review.

* He wrote Cat in the Hat because he was frustrated by reports about low literacy rates among children. He felt that kids needed more interesting beginner-reader books than Dick and Jane.

* He wrote Green Eggs and Ham after someone bet him he couldn’t write a book using less than 50 words.

Related Links

The publisher of the new book is Random House.

Random House’s Dr. Seuss website.

See how many Dr. Seuss books you recognize.

There are (not surprisingly – did you read those facts?!) a number of biographies about Dr. Seuss. We got our facts from the Random House site and there’s plenty more where they came from. Read more about Dr. Seuss’s fascinating life.

Gary Kohl – elementary schoolteacher and writer – offers his review of Dust City, by Robert Paul Weston.
The book is recommended for kids age 12+.

By Gary Kohl

Robert Paul Weston’s new book, Dust City, has many magical elements scattered through its 300 pages of mystery and intrigue. Weston reaches back to the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, and ancient mythology to weave his spells and adventures. These magical elements are both literal and abstract as the title refers to the dust that fairies use to grant wishes.

Our main character, Henry Whelp, son of the famed big bad wolf from the Grimm’s “Little Red Riding Hood,” is determined to follow through on his now incarcerated father’s plans to discover the truth regarding the disappearance of fairies and their magical dust. Not only will this quest help him to clear his father’s name, it may stop a great injustice that could have significant consequences for all creatures living in this world of dwarves, giants, talking animals, and more. Along the way, the reader encounters many familiar characters, from Jack, of beanstalk fame, to a cold-hearted villain with a King Midas touch.

Robert Paul Weston’s book will appeal to readers who have been enjoying the world of fantasy so wonderfully re-energized over the past 10 years by the Harry Potter series. The chapters are short, with each one leaving the reader wondering what outlandish characters are going to appear next to challenge or befriend our hero on his quest to save everything he cares about.

Readers can expect everything, from a love interest to some horrific acts that sometimes catch you off guard. Readers can really let their imaginations run wild while trying to picture what some of Weston’s creatures might really look like and, quite often, smell like.

Some chapters are not for the faint-of-heart, but if it’s adventure and life and death scenarios you’re after, then Dust City should prove wholly satisfying and easy to follow.

Related Links
Here’s Dust City’s pretty intriguing website.
Robert Paul Weston’s website.

Bone is a very popular (understatement) series of graphic novels. Many a reluctant reader has been enticed into reading because of the Bone series. Parents will be thrilled, then, by this latest Bone offering – it’s an actual novel without the graphics. Kids who’ve been reading and enjoying Bone may be ready to step up and get into this longer version of their favourite book. We asked book enthusiast Alexander Kelly to read and review the new Bone novel.

By Alexander Kelly, age 11

Quest for the Spark is about Tom Elm, a 12-year-old farm boy who dreams of being a hero.

When an evil being called the Nacht is awakened, people in the valley start to fall asleep. To save his family and the kingdom, Tom must embark on a quest to find the spark, the only thing that can save his family and the people in the valley from endless sleep. With help from an odd team of questers, Tom must find the spark before everyone is encased in endless sleep.

This novel is written by Tom Sniegoski and not Jeff Smith, the author of the Bone series, although Jeff Smith did illustrate the book. If you liked the Bone series, you might like this book although the style of the writing and the author are completely different. Unlike the Bone series, it is not a graphic novel but is an actual novel with some illustrations. Some of the characters and setting will be familiar to people who have read the Bone books. The two stupid rat creatures, Roderick the Raccoon, Grandma Ben and Queen Thorn appear in this novel.

You might like this book if you are aged 6 to 9. For older readers this book might be a bit basic and even a little cheesy. Correct me if I’m wrong, but a book with characters named Smelly and Stinky might be a tad childish for some older readers.

When kids see adults reading they’re more likely to read, themselves. It isn’t just a theory, there’s been research done on this.

When a kid sees an adult reading a children’s book, he’s even more likely to read. Try picking up a kid’s book for yourself the next time you’re at the library; the effect on your child will be very interesting.

My literacy colleague, Jen Robinson, has a slew of other great reasons why adults should read children’s literature:

*Re-reading the books you loved as a child will transport you, like a time machine, back to your childhood.

*Some of the new children’s books are fantastic. If you don’t read them, you’ll have missed out on some great reading.

*Bonding. If your child loves books already, you’ll be able to talk to her about what you’re both reading.

*You’ll better understand what your child is interested in (or concerned about) if you read what she’s reading.

*If you didn’t read much as a child, now’s your time to catch up on what you missed.

*Since good tends to triumph in kidslit, children’s books may uplift you and inspire you. It also tends to charge those imagination muscles that may have become slightly dormant in adulthood.

*If you read what your child is reading, you’ll be aware of the kind of content he’s being exposed to–especially if you’re wondering whether a particular book is appropriate for your child. It also gives you a chance to explain, or put into context, any content you think might be confusing for him.

*It’s a great way to show your child that you care about what’s going on in his world. You’re taking the time to be interested in what he’s interested in.

*Children’s books are faster reads than adult literature. Even if you “don’t have time to read,” you do have time to read a children’s book.

*It’s fun. Pick up Percy Jackson–I guarantee you won’t be able to put it down until you’ve finished it.

Children's literacy blogger Jen Robinson

How to get started
Ask your child to recommend a good book. (He’ll be proud that you asked him, and it will be a chance for him to show off his knowledge a bit.) If he can’t decide on one, just pick up whatever he’s reading now–you can read it after he’s gone to bed.

Jen Robinson has also put together this handy list of 25 children’s books that adults will enjoy.

Let me add to her list my own favourites:

*The Twilight series;

*The Percy Jackson series;

*The MacDonald Hall series;

*The Encylopedia Brown series; and

*The Mysterious Benedict Society (book one).

Here’s Jen’s original article.
Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Take a dash of something kids like… and add a dash of something parents like… and you’ve got Bone, the novel.

The Bone series by Jeff Smith has long been an enormous hit with kids. At our elementary school library, we have tons of copies of each one of them and we can’t keep ‘em shelved (I know, because I help do the shelving.)

The kids are nutty about Bone. Me, not so much. While I respect the plain fact that something that’s that popular with kids has to be on to something, I find Bone kind of hard to relate to. But that’s probably good (for me, and for Bone) since I’m not the target audience.

Yesterday, however, Nikole from Scholastic sent me something really neat. A Bone chapter book. It’s called Quest for the Spark and it’s a full-length novel – 216 pages – with one or two colour illustrations per chapter. Book one of a trilogy, in Quest for the Spark, “something evil has poisoned the Dreaming and is now invading the Waking World.” (From Scholastic’s media release – I haven’t read it yet, I just got it. Plus, I’m still reading Lucia. For, like, the fifth time.)

Since kids are already hooked on Bone, there’s a huge likelihood that they’ll read the novel.

Something they like plus something we parents like. Bonus! (See what I did there? Bone? Bonus?)

(BTW if you’re new to this website, no not everything we do here is about Nikole at Scholastic – she just happens to be on a roll right now.)