This month I have some new displays out in the library! We will be having a contest to see who can guess the shredded book...and I MIGHT have done this:
(but in my style)
Also, come to the YA board and write your own SIX WORD MEMOIR! Basically, you come up, grab a slip of paper and a marker and write any 6 words that describe your life, your mood, your future, etc.
Here are some examples:
I came out to mom yesterday.
Fly high and achieve the best.
Star Wars runs my whole life.
They can be silly, serious, empowering! Just keep it appropriate, please! I trust you guys.
Just finished my second Young Hoosier for this school year! I'm sure many of you are already halfway through them all...just get ready for this book club in October! I bought something years ago I wanted to use and never got to it, so we will be cracking open that box for book club!
The Great Trouble: A Mystery of London, the Blue Death, and a Boy Called Eel
by Deborah Hopkinson
Eel is a 13 year old
mudlark, a boy who scrapes the banks of the Thames for anything to trade for a
few coins. Working all kinds of odd
jobs, at the Lion Pub, cleaning animal cages, tidying the tailor’s shop, and
loading coffin carts, Eel tries to save up money to help his little brother. But all the while, trouble follows him. Fisheye Bill Taylor claims Eel has something
that belongs to him, and a manipulative coworker from the Lion accuses Eel of
stealing money, forcing Eel to leave the pub.
To make matters worse, people all around him are falling ill with
cholera, a disease that kills in a matter of days. Cholera, the blue death, leaks all the liquid
out of a person, causing their lips and skin to turn blue. In order to keep more people from dying, Eel
teams up with Dr. Snow (a real person in history) to find the cause of cholera
to stop it in time. Dr. Snow believes
the cause is the water pump on Broad Street, but the duo have a lot of work to
do to change the opinion that it is transmitted through dirty air. Can Eel and Dr. Snow find the cause, stop the
water flow, AND avoid Fisheye Bill? It's sad, but I didn't even realize this story was historical fiction, and most of it really happened! I tend to know everything :-P but I found out there is something I didn't know. Dr. Snow was a real doctor that went against common belief that cholera was transmitted via polluted air. He argued it was a contaminated water supply--he was right. The Broad Street pump in London was the cause of the cholera epidemic, and through his work, the pump was closed and hundreds of lives were saved. This book is a GREAT retelling, albeit fictional tale, of the cholera epidemic in the 1800s. Eel is a great character, and it is easy to fall in love with him! As long as Florrie does! The author explains a lot of the history at the end of the story, and I couldn't put it down--I wanted to learn all about it, and I also like comparing the true story with the fictional tale. This is definitely worth checking out! And here's the map of London during the cholera epidemic:
Hooray! The Young Hoosier Book Club at NMS has begun! Our first book is The Time Fetch by Amy Herrick. We will meet on September 7 during lunch, and I cannot wait for the fun times to be had!
The Time Fetch
Amy Herrick
Edward is supposed to find a rock for Science class. That's all--simple enough. But the rock he finds has magic in it--the Time Fetch. When his arch-nemesis, Feenix, takes it from him, she enters a magical world with 3 hags that, in their greed, unleash the power of the time fetch releases millions of "time bugs" into the world that are quickly fetching time and destroying everything Edward knows.
Together, Edward and his new friends, must work to relocate the Time Fetch, and get it back to Prospect Park and call back the time bugs to stop their world from being destroyed.
I'm a huge fan of books about time, and this story was extra-attractive because it wasn't just time travel. It kind of reminded me of the old movie, The Neverending Story--time is being eaten away into nothingness.
The four characters of this book are all so different, and the author does an incredible job introducing these characters and maintaining their personalities throughout the entirety of this book.
As a Young Hoosier Book Award nominee for this year, I definitely encourage you to pick this one up---the sooner the better, because our FIRST Young Hoosier Book Club at the middle school will be about this book!
So in the winter, I went to a library conference in Chicago. While I was there, there was one book that was pushed all over the conference, from billboards, to handouts, and more. I bought this book...yes, a little late, but it happened. I have yet to read it, but all I have heard are amazing things about it. I challenge you guys to check it out, read it, and give me YOUR opinion.
I buy books based on Middlebury teens more than anything else. I would love to hear your input. The book is:
The night Quin Kincaid takes her Oath, she will become what she has trained to be her entire life. She will become a Seeker. This is her legacy, and it is an honor.
As a Seeker, Quin will fight beside her two closest companions, Shinobu and John, to protect the weak and the wronged. Together they will stand for light in a shadowy world.
And she’ll be with the boy she loves–who’s also her best friend. But the night Quin takes her Oath, everything changes.
Being a Seeker is not what she thought. Her family is not what she thought. Even the boy she loves is not who she thought. And now it’s too late to walk away.
Just finished the 2nd book for the NHS Book Club! My 5 teens picked out pretty much every book this year, and I think this one, specifically, was a request by one of them.
Conversion
by Katherine Howe
Colleen is an ambitious, driven, and intelligent senior at St. Joan's Academy, a private girls' school in Massachusetts. It's important the her and her friends and classmates keep it together as they prepare to graduate and go to college--until it falls apart.
At first, it's only Clara, who falls out of her seat in class having seizures that leave her with a debilitating tic and speech impediment. Then another girl loses all her hair, a star athlete loses the ability of her legs, and the snowball has turned into the size of a boulder.
The media, the family, the school, and the girls rush to find the cause of these afflictions--pollution, stress, witchcraft? Set in the town of Danvers, the original site of the Salem Witch Trials, the past becomes present and Colleen must solve the puzzle and any connection to Salem and the popular play The Crucible by Arthur Miller.
This book is nuts! I mean, in a completely good, wanna rip your hair out to find out the answers, but you can't because it's 400 pages and you HAVE to figure it out on your own with cheating, kind of way. This may be the first book in years where I ended up doing extra research because it was so interesting. The connection to the Salem Witch Trials and The Crucible were an immediate attraction to this story.
When I looked up the book on Howe's website, there was a link to a REAL case similar to this from 2012 (Find it here: LeRoy Mystery Illness). There were a few girls in this town that developed tics and stutters, but no one could figure out the cause. This is the stuff that keeps me so intrigued, because there HAS to be an answer somewhere, but do we turn to science? or paranormal phenomena, such as witchcraft?
I think readers of this story will be thrown all over the place trying to make sense of everything--and because of that, I think it might be the best book they ever read.
THANK YOU NHS book club for suggesting we read this one! And thanks to Kaeley for bringing it to my attention last year!
Here is the video explaining the real account in Le Roy from 2012:
I'm not a teacher, but I can only imagine what they go through with teens on their phones at school! Seriously, give it a break! Nothing can be THAT important that you haaaaave to text your friends in 3rd period English. Especially if you have Mr. Lanctot. Do NOT make that man wait on you--he's the best teacher there!
Anyway, found this on Pinterest to help me get my point across...
Last year, I read the first book of this series...and it coincided with the same week I MET the AUTHOR! I loooove being a Librarian. So, I finally got around to reading my signed copy of the second book!
Strange Skies
by Kristi Helvig
In this sequel to Burn Out, Tora wakes up, after being captured leaving Earth, to a white room, strapped to the bed, and highly medicated. She also finds out that her father is alive and also being held captive on the new planet, Caelia. When an unlikely ally helps her escape, Tora finds herself among a rebel camp in the forest.
But is the group strong enough to stand against the Consulate? And when Kale returns to lead the rebels, she must remain hidden, lest she is killed. Together, Tora and her friends must locate the guns her father programmed for only Tora to use, get to the ships, and escape both the Consulate and Kale before it's too late.
Kristi Helvig certainly does not disappoint in this sequel. Helvig is an great author that focuses on creating her characters and growing them throughout her stories. Tora has become a wiser, stronger, and fiercer young woman the more she finds out about what her father has done, who the Consulate really is, and the boy she loves.
Set in the future on a distant planet also adds to the allure of this novel. While much of the story can be imagined on Earth in a lush forest, Helvig creates new animals, foliage, and water content to convince the reader that she spent time creating this new, incredibly prosperous new world!
Thank you teens, once again for making such a great 3rd Friday for the patrons, and making my life a heck of a lot easier! I know I had a great time, and I love spending some quality time with my teens and library patrons. Here are some photos from our Minions 3rd Friday...
I try very hard to come up with creative displays in the Young Adult section, and I thank the Lord for Pinterest! This past month, we have had the Punch Box Fortunes...there MAY still be a few more left to punch out! I'm very pleasantly surprised that I haven't had people coming through and destroying it--everyone takes one turn..the only problem is that a lot of the books are already check out :-/
Once the fortunes are all gone, I will be having a Shredded Book Page contest! There will be THREE jars full of cut up page pieces from three different books. Do NOT open the jar! You can turn it, tilt, stare at it, and when you have a guess, put your name/age and the book title on a piece of paper and place it in the jar next to the book. I have a small-ish prize for the first name I pull out with the correct answer for EACH book!
I got a new vampire/magic/nightmare series from the Goshen Public Library...I'm trying to decide if I need to buy this whole series for MCPL.
The Nightmare Affair
by Mindee Arnett
Being the only
Nightmare at Arkwell Academy, a boarding school for magickind, and
living in the shadow of her mother’s infamy, is hard enough. But when
Dusty sneaks into Eli Booker’s house, things get a whole lot more
complicated. He’s hot, which means sitting on his chest and invading his
dreams couldn’t get much more embarrassing. But it does. Eli is
dreaming of a murder.
Then Eli’s dream comes true.
Now
Dusty has to follow the clues—both within Eli’s dreams and out of
them—to stop the killer before more people turn up dead. And before the
killer learns what she’s up to and marks her as the next target.
Finally the era of the Twilight story is over. Vampires are not shimmery, crossed-in-love blood suckers. Nightmares are real, and there are magical persons that feed off of them. This story combines a murder mystery with the magical creatures we have all grown up knowing and loving.
The story has a kind of Taming of the Shrew or Pride and Prejudice vibe, as Dusty and Eli do not, at first, get along...but when they truly understand one another and what they can accomplish together, there may be a bit more to them.
On the flip side, Dusty's closest friends and lovers may not quite be who they say they are--and will stop at nothing to retrieve the Sword in the Stone for Merlin's dark purpose.
MCPL currently does not have this title, but I know Goshen does, and I will get it through Inter-Library Loan if you want!
Have you all seen the Minion movie already?! To celebrate, MCPL will be having Minion crafts for 3rd Friday from 5pm-8pm. All materials are FREE! My incredible teenagers will be staffing each craft station to help everyone make all the different crafts.
IF we do not have 25 people that have come through by 6:30pm, we are closing up shop! I want my teens to be able to have fun, and sitting around waiting isn't so fun :-/
Not only is it set in Indiana, but the characters are trying to find the "natural wonders" of this seemingly boring state, which I believe is something middle schoolers have to do in Social Studies. This book WILL be a movie!
The Fault in Our Stars meets Eleanor and Park in this exhilarating and heart-wrenching love story about a girl who learns to live from a boy who intends to die. Soon to be a major motion picture starring Elle Fanning! Theodore Finch is fascinated by death, and he constantly thinks of ways he might kill himself. But each time, something good, no matter how small, stops him.
Violet Markey lives for the future, counting the days until graduation, when she can escape her Indiana town and her aching grief in the wake of her sister’s recent death.
When Finch and Violet meet on the ledge of the bell tower at school, it’s unclear who saves whom. And when they pair up on a project to discover the “natural wonders” of their state, both Finch and Violet make more important discoveries: It’s only with Violet that Finch can be himself—a weird, funny, live-out-loud guy who’s not such a freak after all. And it’s only with Finch that Violet can forget to count away the days and start living them. But as Violet’s world grows, Finch’s begins to shrink.
This is an intense, gripping novel perfect for fans of Jay Asher, Rainbow Rowell, John Green, Gayle Forman, and Jenny Downham from a talented new voice in YA, Jennifer Niven.
Melinda is headed to high school, and since that high school party she went to over the summer--the one where she called the cops--no one has talked to her. She is now an outcast--a prude that got a lot of kids in trouble at a party with alcohol.
But no one knows Melinda's story. Trying to deal with what happened that night, unable to speak up and explain or share her feelings, Mel floats through her freshman year trying to make sense of who she is. With the help of her art class, and her lab partner, Mel begins to learn how to speak.
Laurie Halse Anderson is a powerhouse author. There is not a book she's written that hasn't knocked me out of my seat. Speak is a powerful book about a real, scary, and emotional situation, that unfortunately happens more and more often these days.
The self-hatred, isolation and shame that Melinda goes through is real. I could relate to her feelings of isolation and the thoughts that no one understands. As a secondary person to any of these situations, you find yourself yelling at Mel, and any other victim, asking why you didn't just SAY something...but Anderson teaches you--it's not that simple.
If you have not read this book yet, I encourage you to come down to the library and check it out. The first person to read this blog, and reference it to me at the library will a get a FREE NEW COPY of this book to keep.
Thank you to Hannah for being my other guest book reviewer! She read a book by an author I met, so of course I was excited she chose this one to review!
Melt
Selene Castrovilla
Dorothy, a typical sixteen year old
good girl meets Joey, a troubled boy who hasn’t told anyone about the awful
violence he sees daily at home. Joey’s mind is filled with fragments of melted
thoughts due to everything he’s seen. Dorothy is slowly able to reach into
Joey’s melted mind and attempts to pull him out of his miserable world. All is
well until one event threatens to turn even Dorothy’s clear mind into a melted
puddle.
This novel was full of suspense and
made me want to read more and more. At times I was a little confused because of
the way Joey’s thoughts were fragmented, but by the end it all made sense. I
didn’t quite understand the Wizard of Oz background
in it, because I actually have never seen the movie, but I still thoroughly enjoyed it. I liked how the author showed Joey’s
brokenness through his broken thoughts scattered across the page.
Elder and
Amy have told the people the truth about Godspeed
and now some people of the ship, along with Amy and Elder, have decided to
start a new life on Centauri-Earth. Not only will they start a new life
together but Amy will now be able to have her parents alongside her. However,
when the group of Earth-born and Ship-born land on this new planet, things
start to go downhill. The small colony of people must fend for themselves
against who or what, is out there. Not only do they have to fend themselves
against this new world but they also have to fend themselves against a traitor
in the group. As Amy and Elder start to uncover the truth about what is
happening to them, all chaos explodes leaving both Amy and Elder in
heart-breaking decisions.
I listened to this novel on audio (again) and absolutely
loved it. I still think the second novel was my favorite but this one definitely
comes in second. This novel kept me on my toes and wanting more. I loved how
emotional this novel was compared to the other two. As the narrator’s told the
story I felt I was alongside the characters, feeling what they felt and seeing
what they saw. The ending was my favorite by far because I was not expecting
what happened to happen. I really enjoyed this novel and all the emotions and
images it brought with it.
Hooray! Today is Mary's Birthday! I believe this is the big #18! Happy birthday to one of the most efficient, kind, smart, and incredible pages I know! Good luck this year, and I hope you have the best birthday ever...
Let's take a walk through Mary's library memory lane...
Mary is back! Here's the second book of the trilogy she read and reviewed!
A Million Suns
Beth Revis
Amy has
been on Godspeed for three months now
and nothing has gotten better. Amy is becoming home sick and misses the outside
world. Not a day goes by when she doesn’t go to the bottom of the ship to sit
with her frozen parents and try to remember life on Earth. Amy is not the only
one who is having a troublesome life; Elder, Amy’s friend, is also having
troubles. Elder is now in charge Godspeed
and all of the people and responsibilities that come with Godspeed. However a turn of events cause Elder and Amy to dig for
the real truth about the spaceship sent out hundreds of years ago. This dig for
the truth causes trouble, not only on the ship but between Amy and Elder as
well. But the real truth is, can they be saved?
Once again,
I did not actually read this novel; I listened to it on audio. I enjoyed
listening to it on audio but the problem for me was, the voice portraying Elder
was different then the last novel. After I got over this fact, I really enjoyed
the novel. I especially liked how with certain chapters the suspense would
build and build and then, boom! There would be a change of events that kept me
wanting more. The characters seemed to be more developed in this novel which
made them seem so much older than they really were. This novel definitely had
more action, in my opinion, than the first book. By far this book was my
favorite out of all three.
