Ban This Book

Ban This Book
by Alan Gratz
Starscape, 2017

"...for all the amazing things books can do, they can't make you into a bad person." p.232

Nope. They open our minds, make us think, introduce us to new worlds and different ways of living and being, entertain us, and call us to action. But they don't make us into bad people, or good people, or any kind of people at all. It's up to us to take action and be the person we want to be.

And that's precisely what Amy Anne learns in this book. She has always been the quiet mouse of a reader, chewing on the ends of her braids, having conversations in her head but not standing up for herself out loud...until her favorite book in the world is banned from the school library. The book is not banned through the formal board-approved process of review. Rather, it is banned because one powerful mother goes straight to the board, bypassing all the rules, and gets what she wants.

Not only does Amy Anne learn to say what's on her mind, she also learns the importance of empathy. It's not until she looks at the situation from the point of view of the book-banning mom is she able to provide the school board with the argument that wins her case -- you can't ban books because a single reader finds fault with them. If you did that, you might as well ban all the books in the library.

Hooray for the teachers in this book and their study of the Bill of Rights. Hooray for Amy Anne's friend Rebecca who wants to become a lawyer and who knows all about Robert's Rules of Order (and wears a suit and carries a briefcase to the school board meeting at the end of the book). Hooray for Alan Gratz for giving book-loving kids a book where the reader is the hero, and a story where the misuse of power is defeated by democracy.

I'm going to add Mrs. Jones to our list of 100 Cool Teachers in Children's Literature even though she's a librarian. She gets fired because of Amy Anne's BBLL (Banned Books Locker Library), but she doesn't hold it agains Amy Anne. She tells her, "Well-behaved women seldom make history. Consider this your first taste of behaving badly in the name of what's right." p.223

I'll end with this: "All the book challenges, the real ones, were because one person saw a book in a very different way than somebody else. Which was fine. Everbody had the right to interpret any book any way they wanted to. What they couldn't do then was tell everybody else their interpretation was the only interpretation." p.195.

Amen.

Poetry Friday -- Love Song to Reading

Hooray for a book of poems that celebrates reading...

The WONDER of reading words

"...that fly like birds
from pages
in your book
to branches
in your brain
where they sing
like soothing
summer rain."

The JOY of learning to read.

"I longed so to read.
This was my hope.
This was my need." 

All the KINDS of reading we do:

Cereal Box
Sports Page
Maps
Road Signs
Field Guides
Google Searches
Birthday Cards
Magazines
Sunday Comics

The ways reading COMPLETES us:

"Every single thing you read
becomes a part of you." 

"A book gives you a double life." 

The ways reading CHANGES us:

"An open book will make you kind." 

"Charlotte taught me what to do." 

"I'm a reader.
I explore." 

Thank you, Amy, for a book that readers of all ages and stages will want to hug and share and read over and over again until it falls apart.

Read! Read! Read!
by Amy Ludwig VanDerwater
illustrated by Ryan O'Rourke
Wordsong, September 2017



Carol has the Poetry Friday Roundup this week at Beyond LiteracyLink.

For next week's Poetry Friday Roundup, Tabatha has invited us to write/share poems in honor of National Mac and Cheese Day, which falls on Friday, July 14 this year. Start cooking up an oozy, gooey Poetry Friday post!! (It's optional, but it was so much fun when we celebrated Billy Collins at the beginning of his birth month back in March.)

A Child of Books

A Child of Books
by Oliver Jeffers
illustrated by Sam Winston
Candlewick Press, September 2016
review copy (thankyouthankyouthankyou!) provided by the publisher

This is a book you'll want to savor.

Start with the dust jacket. Look at both the front and the back. Feel the texture of the foil stamped parts -- the keyhole and the names of the author and illustrator on the spine of the book in the illustration. Think about the key you see on the back. Study the shadow of the book. Notice the words that make up the shadow. Begin to make predictions about what you'll find when you open the cover.

Open the book. Gasp when you see the way the endpapers are decorated. Check the endpapers in the back -- same thing back there. You're distracted, but take the jacket off and go back to the cover of the book. Feel the cloth binding. Notice the blind stamps on the front cover and the back cover. Nice touch, eh?

Before you go back to the endpapers, read the flaps on the dust jacket and learn the term "typographical landscapes."

Now, the endpapers. Oh, my. Look long enough until you notice that there's something else there besides titles and authors. I won't tell you what. You find it. Think about it as you read the story, then go back to the endpapers in amazement when you have come to the end of the story. Go back and forth between the story and the endpapers. Wow.

Don't ignore the dedication page.

Read the book about twelve times. First, just look at the illustrations. Then, just read the main text. Do that thing I mentioned with the endpapers, and the savoring I started out with.

As soon as possible after your twelve times, read this book to and with children of all ages. Then get started reading all the books in the endpapers, one at a time, for the rest of your long, rich, imagination-filled life.







Bibliography for this review:

How to Read a Picture Book
Terms for parts of a book

Books About Books and Reading

Cupcakes for everyone!!

Thank you, kind readers, thank you.

You made our 7-day Blogiversary a week to remember! So. Much. Fun.

Not only that, you helped us refresh and reinvigorate our sidebar list of Books About Books and Reading.

Here are the new titles we added:

The Lonely Book by Kate Bernheimer
Miss Brooks Loves Books (And I Don't) by Barbara Bottner
The Year of the Book by Andrea Cheng
Otto the Book Bear by Kate Cleminson
Henry & the Buccaneer Bunnies by Carolyn Crimi
A Bedtime Story by Mem Fox
Miss Smith's Incredible Storybook by Michael Garland
A Story for Bear by Dennis Haseley
The Gentleman Bug by Julian Hector
The Reader by Amy Hest
How Rocket Learned to Read by Tad Hills
The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore by William Joyce
Open This Little Book by Jesse Klausmeier
It's a Book by Lane Smith
Interrupting Chicken by David Ezra Stein
We Are in a Book! (An Elephant and Piggie Book) by Mo Willems
Dog Loves Books by Louise Yates


POETRY
Forgive Me, I Meant to Do It: False Apology Poems by Gail Carson Levine
BookSpeak!: Poems About Books by Laura Purdie Salas


NOVELS
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak


PROFESSIONAL
Book Love: Developing Depth, Stamina, and Passion in Adolescent Readers by Penny Kittle
The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child by Donalyn Miller

Blog Birthday: Giveback-Giveaway #7

Hard to believe that we've been blogging for SEVEN years!

This year we'd like to celebrate by giving back to our readers with a Giveback-Giveaway every day for seven days.

We'll choose a random winner from the comments each day and send them the featured book of the day. The books we've chosen are all new(ish) books that celebrate books and reading. (As we were choosing books, we realize that we need to update our Books About Books and Reading list in the sidebar. Are any of your favorites missing from our list?)

Thanks for stopping by to help us celebrate 7 years!

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Blog Birthday Giveback-Giveaway #7 -- HOW READING CHANGED MY LIFE

We decided to end our series with one of our favorite adult books about reading-How Reading Changed My Life by Anna Quindlen.  Anna Quindlen is a reader and she writes about how reading changed her life in this little book written for adults.  Anna Quindlen shares stories from her life as a reader and how important books have been throughout her life. I have read the book cover to cover many times and have used many excerpts with my students. We thought that Quindlen's celebration of reading was one of the best ways to give back to our readers. If you don't have a copy of this book, we highly recommend it. Comment below and you have a chance to win a copy! (But if you don't win, we still HIGHLY recommend this book to all readers out there!)

Blog Birthday: Giveback-Giveaway #6

Hard to believe that we've been blogging for SEVEN years!

This year we'd like to celebrate by giving back to our readers with a Giveback-Giveaway every day for seven days.

We'll choose a random winner from the comments each day and send them the featured book of the day. The books we've chosen are all new(ish) books that celebrate books and reading. (As we were choosing books, we realized that we need to update our Books About Books and Reading list in the sidebar. Are any of your favorites missing from our list?)

Thanks for stopping by to help us celebrate 7 years!

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Blog Birthday Giveback-Giveaway #6 -- BOOKSPEAK by Laura Purdie Salas

A 2011 Nerdy Poetry Winner

A 2012 NCTE Notable Books in the Language Arts title

A 2012 CYBILS Poetry Finalist

AND

A must-have for every classroom library

As we wind down our 7 days of Blog Birthday Giveback-Giveaways, it is with great delight that we will give this fabulous book of poems about books to one lucky commenter today!!

Blog Birthday: Giveback-Giveaway #5

Hard to believe that we've been blogging for SEVEN years!

This year we'd like to celebrate by giving back to our readers with a Giveback-Giveaway every day for seven days.

We'll choose a random winner from the comments each day and send them the featured book of the day. The books we've chosen are all new(ish) books that celebrate books and reading. (As we were choosing books, we realize that we need to update our Books About Books and Reading list in the sidebar. Are any of your favorites missing from our list?)

Thanks for stopping by to help us celebrate 7 years!

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Blog Birthday Giveback-Giveaway #5 -- THE BOOK WHISPERER

Although this is not a brand new book, how could we not include it in our celebration of books and reading? The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child by Donalyn Miller is a book that for so many of us, helped us remember the important work we do with children. Awakening kids to reading is the work we do and Donalyn shares her own story here. Donalyn Miller is a master at matching kids with books and creating a reading community in her classroom.  Donalyn shares her vision as well as the nuts and bolts of how she accomplishes this each and every year. We know that many of our readers already own this book, but we feel like this is a good one to put in the hands of a colleague.  We are all about paying it forward this year, so if you already own this book (or a few copies of it as I do:-), please comment so that you have a chance to win and pass it along to a new teacher or someone you know who will love it too!

Poetry Friday and Blog Birthday: Giveback-Giveaway #4

Hard to believe that we've been blogging for SEVEN years!

This year we'd like to celebrate by giving back to our readers with a Giveback-Giveaway every day for seven days.

We'll choose a random winner from the comments each day and send them the featured book of the day. The books we've chosen are all new(ish) books that celebrate books and reading. (As we were choosing books, we realized that we need to update our Books About Books and Reading list in the sidebar. Are any of your favorites missing from our list?)

Thanks for stopping by to help us celebrate 7 years!

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Blog Birthday Giveback-Giveaway #4 -- FORGIVE ME, I MEANT TO DO IT

This is one of the books that suffered the fate of compromise as the first-round poetry judges for the CYBILS honed our list of finalists. I was THRILLED, then, to see that it was chosen as a Nerdy Poetry Book for 2012.

Our fifth graders ended 2012 by writing business letters. (Side note -- I'm thinking that this genre of letter-writing is headed the way of the dinosaurs. It's not that our students didn't have a lot they wanted to say to companies about their business or their product(s), but the kids really couldn't comprehend why they couldn't just email the company. And when it comes to finding mailing addresses online...it would seem that companies would rather communicate by email as well.)

So. Business letter follow-up. I'm thinking that before we fully immerse ourselves in our next writing project, it will be fun to write some false apologies...and this book will be our mentor text!

Have you seen it? The table of contents is hysterical. Every poem has the same title, after all...

The introduction is about 20 pages in -- one of the many fun surprises in this book.

There are kid-sized literary allusions in many of the poems -- Mother Goose rhymes, fairy tales, etc.

So much to love about this book. Franki reviewed it last March, and now we'd like for one lucky commenter to have a copy of this book for their home library, their classroom library, or to give to a friend who doesn't have it yet. Happy Poetry Friday!

Matt has the roundup today at Radio, Rhythm & Rhyme. The shiny new roundup calendar is posted in our sidebar and in the Kidlitosphere Yahoo group calendar. The html code for your very own sidebar calendar is located in the files of the Kidlitosphere Yahoo group. If you'd like me to send you the code by email, drop me a note at mlhahn at earthlink dot net. (Sorry I ran us so close to the wire this time. December almost got away from me. Thanks to all of the roundup volunteers!!)

Blog Birthday: Giveback-Giveaway #3

Hard to believe that we've been blogging for SEVEN years!

This year we'd like to celebrate by giving back to our readers with a Giveback-Giveaway every day for seven days.

We'll choose a random winner from the comments each day and send them the featured book of the day. The books we've chosen are all new(ish) books that celebrate books and reading. (As we were choosing books, we realize that we need to update our Books About Books and Reading list in the sidebar. Are any of your favorites missing from our list?)

Thanks for stopping by to help us celebrate 7 years!

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Blog Birthday Giveback-Giveaway #3 -- BOOK LOVE by Penny Kittle

If you are looking for a great new professional book to ground you in good teaching that leads to helping students become lifelong readers, we highly recommend Book Love: Developing Depth, Stamina, and Passion in Adolescent Readers by Penny Kittle.  This book is an incredible celebration of books and reading and how important it is that we, as teachers, commit to helping every child become a reader.  Although this book is written with adolescent readers in mind, Penny's stories have messages for teachers at all levels.  She spends time telling us stories of reluctant readers who found the right book, she shares routines and strategies that work for her as a teacher. She shares great books. But she also shares the challenges that come with this commitment as a teacher. She knows the struggles we face when grading. She knows that it takes time and energy to build a classroom library that our kids deserve. And she knows that the work of committing to all readers is not always easy work.  The book is centered on being passionate about our readers and our classrooms. It is a powerful read and one that I believe all teachers should read.  Penny has the right message for us in these testing times and she is the perfect person to share it.  Definitely a book that must be added to your professional bookshelf.  This is a book I'll revisit over and over again and one that we are excited to give away!  Comment below for a chance to win this amazing professional read!

Blog Birthday: Giveback-Giveaway #2

Hard to believe that we've been blogging for SEVEN years!

This year we'd like to celebrate by giving back to our readers with a Giveback-Giveaway every day for seven days.

We'll choose a random winner from the comments each day and send them the featured book of the day. The books we've chosen are all new(ish) books that celebrate books and reading. (As we were choosing books, we realize that we need to update our Books About Books and Reading list in the sidebar. Are any of your favorites missing from our list?)

Thanks for stopping by to help us celebrate 7 years!

**~~~**~~~**~~~**~~~**~~~**~~~**~~~**

Blog Birthday Giveback-Giveaway #2 

The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore by William Joyce. Franki first discovered the book as an amazing interactive ebook on her iPad. She reviewed it on the blog then.  Today, we will be giving away the hard copy of book.

This is an amazing story of the power of books and we are happy to share it today -- comment for a chance to win!

Blog Birthday: Giveback-Giveaway #1

Hard to believe that we've been blogging for SEVEN years!

This year we'd like to celebrate by giving back to our readers with a Giveback-Giveaway every day for seven days.

We'll choose a random winner from the comments each day and send them the featured book of the day. The books we've chosen are all new(ish) books that celebrate books and reading. (As we were choosing books, we realize that we need to update our Books About Books and Reading list in the sidebar. Are any of your favorites missing from our list?)

Thanks for stopping by to help us celebrate 7 years!

**~~~**~~~**~~~**~~~**~~~**~~~**~~~**

Blog Birthday Giveback-Giveaway #1 -- OPEN THIS LITTLE BOOK

I was lucky enough to receive an advanced copy of Open This Little Book from Chronicle last week.  I was immediately drawn to it and noticed that it was illustrated by one of my favorite illustrators, Suzy Lee.  The author is Jesse Klausmeier and this is her first picture book.  What a treat it is!

This is a book that reminds me of so many books I love, but one that is unique on its own. It reminds me a little bit of Press Here because I can see kids having the same gleeful reaction to this one as they do to Press Here.  And it is a great one to add to my collection of books about books and reading.

When you open this book, you see that the inside pages are smaller than the cover. They are smaller because they are actually a book inside the book. The surprises every time you turn a page, continue. I can't even explain the design but I recommend you open it up because, as I said, it will make you gleeful :-)

Somehow Jessie Klausmeier and Suzy Lee have told a story about the power of reading and books in the simplest, most joyful way I've seen.  It is a simple, yet powerful message. But the details are far from simple. Even the end pages share a message.  It is a colorful book and the design is as important as any other part of the book.   Every time I open the book to reread it, I notice something I missed before. Like I said, a real treat.

Young children are going to love this one. It is definitely a great gift book because it is one parents and children can enjoy together over and over.  And it is perfect for EVERY the classroom and library. I can't wait to share it with my 4th graders.

There aren't many books that meet the needs of so many readers. The flap inside the book says of this author/illustrator team, "Together they have created a book of startling imagination that is not only an entertaining and interactive read for the very youngest reader, but also a stunning showcase of design that will delight even the most sophisticated book enthusiast." They certainly got that right in my opinion. It is not often that a book can do so many things in such a perfect way.

I love when I read a great book early in the new year. This is already one of my favorite books of 2013 and I am sure it will remain on my list of favorites forever.

Comment below for a chance to win this great new picture book!

WHAT ARE YOU DOING? A Book About Reading

We haven't added a book to our BOOKS ABOUT BOOKS AND READING booklist in a while. I just found a new one at Cover to Cover called WHAT ARE YOU DOING by Elisa Amado.   This book is a simple story with gorgeous illustrations by Manuel Monroy. (From the jacket flap, I learned that he is one of Mexico's most celebrated illustrators and from this book, I can see why!)

It is Chepito's first day of school, but before the day begins, he walks around town and finds lots of people reading. To each one he asks, "What are you doing?".  He then follows up with the questions, "Why?". Each reader is reading something different--from a newspaper, to the comics, to a manual, to a fashion magazine. And each reader has a different reason for reading.  The story ends with Chepito going to school and discovering the joy of books.  This simple story will start lots of great conversations around books and the reasons we read.  The repeated phrases and predictable storyline make it perfect for young readers.  An added bonus for our family was to discover that the author, Elisa Amado is a Guatemalan-born author and translator.