Paranormalcy by Kiersten White

Paranormalcy by Kiersten White

So I have been meaning to read this book for some time now, and I finally did it! And it was great! I knew I would love it.

Paranormalcy. I mean, just look at that clever title. Plus there were all those good reviews I read about it being funny and swoony and suspenseful and clean. :)

The story centers on Evie, who is sort of like a secret agent for the government organization that tracks paranormals (vampires, werewolves, faeries, hags, etc.). Sounds awesome, right? Except that it is pretty much all she's ever known, so to her it is totally boring and she dreams of going to high school, having normal friends, a normal family . . . of normalcy.

This one was so much fun I read it superfast. So fast that I can't put a space between super and fast, because yeah. I just had loads of fun with it and couldn't put it down. The characters were wonderful! Nobody did anything that looked suspiciously like an author trying to move the plot forward - yay! By the end of the book I feel like I know them and what to expect from them in general, but not like they're 2D. Lucky for me books 2 and 3 are already out, but if I had to wait between books I think I would still remember people, you know?

The pacing was great and the action was all clear (you know how sometimes you get lost in a fight scene? Not here.). The romanctic engtanglements were just so perfectly done. The ending was even great, which is saying something for the first book in a trilogy. Instead of being like "and we're done. Now lets open up a whole new crazy can of worms!" it was more like, "ok that was crazy but I think we're good-ish now..." and the reader is like "oooh, no, I can tell there is something up that none of us really know about yet . . . must keep reading!" (I do not have the second book yet, or I'd probably be reading it instead of typing this.)

My personal most favoritest part: Evie's love of lockers. I was the exact same way. :)

So pick it up! It might be the perfect paranormal romance. The rest can just hand in their badges.

Cybils finalists announced!

The 2013 Cybils finalists have been announced!

I helped make the Elementary/Middle Grade Non-fiction list this year. These are some seriously good books, people. My two absolute favorites from the list are Locomotive by Brian Floca and The Boy Who Loved Math by Deborah Heiligman. I love the other ones, too though! Benjamin would also have me plug How Big Were Dinosaurs? by Lita Judge.

Click here for the full list of Elementary/MG Non-fiction finalists (plus my mini-review of The Boy Who Loved Math)

Click here for the index of categories, so that you can see what else got a finalist spot. I will for sure be reading from these lists!

A person could get an excellent education in current children's literature by reading the books on these lists. They're the best of the year in terms of kid-appeal and literary merit (those are the Cybils criteria) as evaluated by book bloggers who read widely in their categories.

Doing non-fiction this year was awesome. I've long been a fan of juvenile non-fiction. Often I go to the children's non-fiction section first, when I want to learn about a topic. That's what I did when I thought my son Levi might have food allergies. Reading and skimming all the children's lit on the subject helped me get a handle on the basics and helped me figure out what I wanted to know. It brought my questions out.

I was gratified to hear from my fellow panelists that they were planning on loving not only the books that they were predisposed to love, but the books that brought their questions out -- that got them interested in topics they hadn't been interested in before.

Reading from the list of 95 nominees, knowing I'd have to read as many as I could and help narrow it down to only 7, it was super awesome to have Ellen, Carol, Mike, Amy, Franki and Alice telling me which ones they'd loved and pointing out the reasons why the books I didn't love intrinsically were actually worth loving.

I loved reading books like Locomotive and Look Up! and thinking, "This is children's non-fiction!? I have been missing out."  I read 64 of the nominees between mid October and late December and I tell you what -- that is education by immersion.

So, where to from here? Well I can tell you I'll be browsing the J Non-Fic section more! And I've just got to get my thoughts about some of these books written down and shared with you. Are there any you want to hear about first?

Locomotive

Locomotive by Brian Floca

Wow, wow, wow. Wow. Ok. I loved it.

This book is awesome!

It is one part poetry, one part art, one part maps and diagrams, 10 parts awesome and interesting information about trains! Dude, I've lost track of all the parts. Track, get it? But seriously. It managed to be an interesting story about a family going from one coast to another right after the meeting of the transcontinental railroad was finished at promontory point, but also tell you all about what it is like to drive a train, ride in a train, be a fireman, (oh, we are talking about a steam engine here of course, because, back in the day, you know) etc. Reading the book gives you awesome vocabulary but also it's all in this meaningful context so you know exactly what the words are without a glossary or a big break in the interesting stuff "so that I can explain what this word means to you."

The text and illustrations are perfectly married (which is good because they're both by Brian Floca) and oh my goodness the illustrations! Flippin' gorgeous! They're magical and detailed when they need to be and pure and simple when that is called for. The landscapes! The technical details of the inside of a train! The people's faces! It is all there you guys.

I found it so fun to read Locomotive out loud. The flow of the text is so easy and lends itself so well to expressive reading. Variety in the fonts gave me help in reading it aloud to the boys, without poking me in the eyes. (Yay for fonts well done!) Though some pages have a lot of text, it is spaced in such a way that it is still easy to read and that meshes well with the art. It seems obvious to me that Brian Floca took this trip, saw these places (at least once, if not many times) and just loves his subject. I mean it is so cool. It gets you excited about everything about it! I'm geeking out.

Something else I loved about Locomotive is that it is written in collegial direct address* -- meaning, he says things like "you look out the window and you see this, or that." The direct address made the story much more interesting and relevant to me.

The boys loved it. Benjamin (age 5) sat attentively through all 64 pages; and while Levi (age 2) did some running around while I read it, he stayed within earshot and popped back over to look at pictures. Benjamin's favorite page was the back endpaper, which has a cutaway diagram of a steam engine. We spent a long time looking at that page -- reading and deciphering the inner workings of the engine. Levi's favorite page was the one that showed the toilet. This is unsurprising, since he is potty training. Potty TRAINing? Ok I'll stop.

This book was so awesome that I went and found Brian Floca's previous book, Moonshot. Locomotive is still my fave but Moonshot was good too.

Definitely check it out! Have you already read it? What did you think?
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*do not be impressed, I did not know this is what it was called until I read it on his website, courtesy of a Kirkus reviewer.

A very fun new series

I have a problem with book groups. Even though I love to read, I don't love being told what to read (which is why I was an English major in college for exactly one day). I especially don't love being told what to read when the books in question are not my kind of books. So even though there is a book group in my congregation every time I move to a new place, I never join.

Well. I am not alone in my anti-book-group feelings. Some other young moms in my ward (an LDS congregation) got together and decided to start up their own underground book group where we will not read edgy, tragic, ultra-modern, and let's face it, often hard-to-get-through books. We're gonna read for fun! At the end of a long day, if I'm going to sit down to pick up a book, it's not going to be with a whole lot of remaining mental energy. I just wanna be entertained.

Our first book-group read was a new-ish middle-grade fantasy book called Keeper of the Lost Cities, by Shannon Messenger. I totally loved it and had to immediately reserve book two, Exile, at the library. Book two was, perhaps, even better. I really love this series. Imaginative, fun, exciting, clever, sometimes laugh-aloud funny, and just-plain great. Alas, book two was published this year, which means I have to wait for the next. I don't know if it's a trilogy or a series. On the back of the book, it's described as Harry Potter meets Lord of the Rings. That's kind of true. Definitely more Harry Potter vibe than the latter. Check it out, though, especially if you have a middle-grade reader who loves fantasy. Or if you are an adult reader who loves middle-grade fantasy. :)


Our next underground-book-group read is Keturah and Lord Death. My choice. I can't wait for my friends to read it!

Hoop Genius: How a Desperate Teacher and a Rowdy Gym Class Invented Basketball

Hoop Genius: How a Desperate Teacher and a Rowdy Gym Class Invented Basketball 
by John Coy, illustrated by Joe Morse.

Well, the title gives one a pretty good idea of what this book is about, I'd say! It tells the story of James Naismith and the invention of basketball.

Though not a wordy book, Hoop Genius manages to tell about why Naismith wanted to invent the sport, his inspiration for it (a childhood game called Duck on a Rock), the first two games played, the first games played by women, and the inception of basketball into the Olympics! It's fun, well structured (plotted? Not sure that plot is the word), and accessible to those who don't like to see too many words per page. :) There was one paragraph that I found super awkward and had to re-read in order to parse properly, but other than that the writing does a great job of staying out of the way of a cool story.

The illustrations intrigued me -- deep hues and high contrast make the book eye catching. And so many good pictures of people playing basketball! All of the pictures where subjects are in motion were spot-on for me. Some of the illustrations of people holding still were not so golden in my opinion. Take the cover as an example. Though the players' bodies are perhaps out of proportion, it lends a sense of motion to the image. The center portrait of Naismith, however? Just odd. There were a few other pages that bothered me in this way, too. Still, well done overall, and if you're going to illustrate a basketball book, you'd better be good at depicting people in motion!

Super Bonus: All the awesome moustaches! Also the endpaper, which is a facsimile of the first draft of the rules of basketball.
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This book is nominated for the 2013 Cybils in the category of Elementary/Middle Grade Nonfiction. My views, stated above, are my own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the round one judging panel, of which I am a member.

Cybils 2013

Hello! Here is some exciting news for you: Cybils nominations are open! If you've read a good children's/YA book that was published in the last year, you can nominate it for the Cybils award! Check here for the rules and the nomination form.

Also of interest: I will be a first round judge on the Elementary/Middle Grade Nonfiction Panel, taking all the nominations and choosing the best handful for the round two panel to evaluate. I'm super excited! I have never been on a nonfiction panel before -- all my previous Cybils experience is in the Middle Grade Fiction and the Graphic Novels categories. I do adore children's nonfiction though -- when I research a subject I often turn first to children's nonfiction about it because it is often the most accessible, easiest to read, most enjoyable and accurate information on the subject. For a broad picture of a subject, for an interesting story on a subject, for the basics, children's non-fiction is great.

Here again is the link to the Cybils site. Poke around there for great book lists in all genres, and don't forget to nominate the best titles of the year!

Witchlanders

It's been too long since I posted anything---pretty much because it's been a long time since I had a chance to read a book! I was hungering for a little fun book-reading time, and I grabbed this one at random off the bookshelf in the YA section of my library. (Am I alone in feeling like I should get in and out of that section as quickly as possible, certain that the teens are giggling at my oldness behind my back? Guess I've retained some of that everyone-is-watching-me teenage paranoia myself. Oh well.) :)

Witchlanders did not disappoint in fun, fast-action, interesting plot and characters, and un-put-down-able-ness. It was a great story. I am bummed that the author seems to have no interest in writing a sequel. It's kind of begging for the story to be continued. She says she thinks it works as a stand-alone. But the big, overarching problem the book presents---an impending war---is unresolved. So. Personally, I think there needs to be a sequel.

Ryder does not believe in magic. His mother has raised him to laugh at the idea of it, at the religion that everyone else in the town follows---including his father and sister. Grudgingly, he gives his tithe to the witches, the bone-casters whose job it is to tell the future and warn their country of danger. When his mother sees a vision of an assassin in the mountains, Ryder has no choice but to follow what she's seen, digging far deeper into the history of his war-torn country and of magic itself than he ever could have imagined---or believed.