Fairrosa Cyber Library
Articles, Discussions, and a Reader's Journal of Mainly Children's and YA LiteratureThe Face on the Milk Carton
by Caroline B. Cooney
So much fun to re-read this one, too! I forgot so many details and had a different recollection of the ending to the actual ending. Maybe I read the sequel and mixed them up. The pacing is just perfect: the suspense continues without sacrificing the passing of (quite a long) time it takes a teenager to deal with a truly traumatic event in life. Janie’s journey is entirely credible. Now I have to go and re-read Whatever Happened to Janie.
The Mysterious Dozen
Next Friday, my 4th and 5th graders will participate in a grade-wide Library Quiz Show: Do You Know Books?!
This year, I picked twelve books for the children to read and enjoy and many of them have signed up to participate. These are all mysteries and thus I named this year’s Quiz Show “The Mysterious Dozen Edition.”
Here’s the list of titles:
- Wolf Rider by Avi
- The Sisters Grimm: Once Upon a Crime by Michael Buckley
- The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline B. Cooney
- Last Shot: A Final Four Mystery by John Feinstein
- Running Out of Time by Maragret Haddix
- Flush by Carl Hiaasen
- The Ghost in the Tokaido Inn by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler
- Stormbreaker by Anthony Horowitz
- Regarding the Fountain: A Tale in Letters, of Liars and Leaks by Kate Klise
- Kiki Strike: Inside the Shadow City by Kirsten Miller
- Holes by Louis Sachar
- A Series of Unfortunate Events: A Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket
I am re-reading Holes and just finished re-reading The Bad Beginning and The Face on the Milk Carton. SO much fun had I! Will write another post on these re-reading experiences.
My Heart is Like a Zoo
by Michael Hall
I put this on my “poetry” shelf as well, since it IS an illustrated poem. The colors, shapes, and layout all work beautifully together with the light and bouncy text. Really enjoyed reading/looking at this one. So clever, too!
Hope Anita Smith: What a Pleasure to Have You Here!
This is an open letter to thank Hope Anita Smith, poet, extraordinary teacher, and author of The Way a Door Closes, Keeping the Night Watch, and the 2010 poetry collection, Mother P0ems, for her amazing, awesome, and artistic ways in leading six poetry workshops for all our 7th and 8th grade students at The Dalton School, NYC.
Dear Hope,
We were all under your spell and now are all in awe of you! You brought such energy, generosity, and expertise with you into our classroom and every student got a chance to write a poem under your guidance and inspiration. Some of the poems that were shared brought chills down my and the teachers’ spines: they were good and the students really put their mind and soul into them.
It is not common when we have an author who prepares three different presentations when the audience is on the same level. But you did. The students loved working on the Cool Poem, they definitely struggled a bit with Seven Ways of Looking At ________, and were completely engrossed in “reading” the names of the paint color chips that you brought and applying those to their own Paint Me Like I Am poems.
You are going back to LA today and I wish you the best and I want you to come back to us to work with more students and I want many many more other young people to be inspired by you to explore the wonders of words, to stretch their minds and to discover their hidden potentials as writers and poets. (I know you have many different workshops for different age groups.)
Hope, take care and let our paths cross again soon!
Taking a Moment to Mourn Salinger
J.D. Salinger, celebrated and reclusive author, dies at age 91, as reported in Boston Globe and many other news sources.
I still remember reading Catcher in the Rye as a high school student in Taiwan. I read the Chinese translation, of course. And I don’t think I quite “got” the book — partly because the portrayed culture was so foreign to me and I suspect that some meanings might have lost in the translation. Still, I treasured the book and the almost outlandish experience I had encountering the book. Years later, when I started work on my Master’s in children’s lit at Simmons College, I re-read the book in English and was delighted to fall in love with it again. My teen, NYC independent school students still read and are moved by the tale of Holden — more than half a century after its publication (in 1951.)
