I don’t like to believe in writer’s block (boy is that a wishy-washy statement), but if you do suffer it, this may be just the book for you. Subtitled “73 Authors Reveal Their Fiction Writing Fixations” this is not the kind of book that you read from cover to cover. It’s the kind of book …read more…
Monthly Archive for June 2011
The Castaways by Rob Vollmar
It is the height of the Depression, and thirteen-year-old Tucker Freeman’s father is gone for good. To survive, he and his family move in with the Widow, his father’s humorless and ultra-religious older sister. Convinced by the Widow that he isn’t pulling his weight on her farm, she hands him fifteen cents and tells him …read more…
Straw Into Gold by Gary D. Schmidt
The cottage he shares with Da and the clearing beyond are the only world Tousle has ever known. When a visit to see the King’s procession results in his being given a riddle to solve within seven days or be killed, the simple life he once knew seems long in the past. Now on the …read more…
My Dad’s A Punk edited by Tony Bradman
Again, this book was another one of those lucky finds as I wandered around in the library: a book of short stories for reluctant readers, and a book about things boys think and wonder about written just for boys (many of whom are reluctant readers). The title story, by Sean Taylor, is probably my favorite, …read more…
I Am Not Joey Pigza by Jack Gantos
If you’ve been following this blog, then you know how much I love the Joey Pigza books and how accurately they depict the life of a young boy with ADHD. You also know that this is a series that many young people, especially boys, really seem to connect with. So I was a little reserved …read more…
Bog Child by Siobhan Dowd
This book had been on my radar for a long time, but hadn’t been available in our local library. Now I know why. Eighteen-year-old Fergus is living through “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland. His older brother is in a British prison for being involved with the IRA, and while he plans to go to college …read more…
He Said, She Said: The Fine Art of Dialogue Attribution
I have just spent the last year being in and out of classrooms, and I noticed that many of the English classrooms (especially in middle school) displayed posters that provided synonyms for the word “said.” In one room I saw poster that extended horizontally over half the length of the wall, listing over 300 “synonyms” …read more…
