A Season of Gifts by Richard Peck

It's the holiday season...and while I am a sucker for classic favorites like The Gift of the Magi or A Christmas Carol, it is always a delight to find a new holiday treat to read with a cup of warm cider or cocoa.

Grandma Dowdel is a character for the folk record books. She lives by the "rob Peter to pay Paul" system of management, and she does it with shotgun in one hand and a loaf of bread for the neighbors in the other. Her heart is always in the right place, even if her tounge is not.

It is now several years since we have last seen her, 1958, the Great Depression is over, but threads of poverty remain in rural Illinois. A new family has moved into town and right next door to Grandma Dowdel--a Methodist minister, his wife, and children. They need more than just a full church, they need a friend in town, and Grandma might just be that friend, whether she wants to be or not. From haunted melon patches, to run-ins at the privy, and a kidnapped tree, this short novel is full of high jinks and misdemeanors that will entertain many for years to come.

Chains by Laurie Halse Anderson

2009 Scott O'Dell Award
2008 National Book Award Finalist

Some authors are one-hit-wonders. You know the type. They write something brilliant for their first novel and then, sadly, they just keep getting worse with each novel. It's like being in a train wreck on a blind date.

Thankfully, Laurie Halse Anderson is not one of these writers. She started out with Fever 1793 and now, six books later, has written the epic Chains. Anderson has crossed all boundries in her writing; time, gender, taboo, and now race. Many times I will enjoy a book. I'll smile and it will give me warm fuzzies. A great book will blow me away and stay with me for weeks, months, and I can't wait to put it into the hands of the nearest student, because I know that they will love it as much as I did. Chains is a great book.

Thirteen-year-old Isabel and her sister Ruth are cheated out of their promised freedom when their master dies and are unscrupulously sold upriver to the Locktons, a loyalist New York City couple. Isabel's thoughts are consumed with keeping Mrs. Lockton happy as she runs errands for her new masters and tries to conceal Ruth's frightening illness, that if discovered, would have her sister sold elsewhere. Freedom for her and Ruth is at the forefront of her mind, and when she is given an offer by a young rebel slave Curzon, Isabel starts to spy on the Locktons. This sets off a chain of events right as the Revolution is headed to New York.

The first book in a trilogy, Chains is a mesmerizing read, full of intrigue and passion. You feel for Isabel and Ruth, their loss of freedom when they are sold like cattle, Isabel's fierce protection of her sister, and her harrowing mistery and pain when she is publicly branded. She holds no loyalty to either Tory or Patriot, she simply wants to be free.

But what side will break her chains?

Around the World in 80 Books (give or take a few)

Travel around the world with childrens books! Click on the above map and it will lead you to a larger version of this world map. Each region and that will lead you to a middle school book list for that region.

I will update this as often as I can.

Enjoy!

Between Us Baxters by Bethany Hegedus

On Tuesday I got to watch in awe and tears as the first African-American President was sworn into office. I can only hope our children understand what a great moment in our country's history this was.

In my parents' history, black children and white children could not go to school together.

When I was one-year-old, a lawyer was speared with a American flag during the violent bussing protests.

I don't remember this Pulitzer Prize photograph moment, but I know about it, and I hope the children I teach know that this history is not so long ago and far away.

It was in my lifetime, and in my hometown.

And it is not lost on me that in the very week when President Obama was sworn in and I read Between Us Baxters, a local disturbed madman killed two innocent people and was on a rampage to kill many more, all in the name to "save his race". Two steps forward, one step back.

In Between Us Baxters, Hegedus puts a twist on the tale of a Southern friendship between two girls, one black one white. One girl is poor, and her family is considered the trash of the town. The other is bright and has plans for going to college, and her family owns a prosperous store in town. Both girls are at the age where it is an unspoken rule in 1959 Jim Crow South that they should have "outgrown" such a friendship. But Polly is a poor white girl who has to wear friend Timber Ann's cast-offs, and she needs all the friends she can get. And Timber Ann is a good friend, and her Aunt Henri is a good friend to her mother, so while these friendships bring shame upon the Baxter family name in town, and scorn from Polly's grandmother and Aunt Clara, they are her and her mother's daily lifeline to keep moving and living.

But when fires start blazing through town, deliberately set to thriving African-American establishments, Polly and Timber Ann's friendship is tested beyond endurement. Families and lives are destroyed as the Civil Rights movement takes hold of this fiercely divided town that resists change at all costs.

As I have witnessed this week in Boston, stories like this need to be told, over and over again. History and hate will continue to cycle through the generations only until the message dissipates, and we can finally see our way through the smoke.

The Traitor's Gate by Avi

Fourteen-year-old John Huffam, the "last male in the Huffam line" is pulled out of school one day by his servant, only to be informed that his father is in debt of 300 pounds for gambling and is going to debtor's prison. His distraught mother and sister have no other means of supporting themselves and must live in prison with him until the money can be raised.

But is the debt real? And who is the mysterious inspector that keeps watching his father? And why does his great-aunt refuse to help his family but offers him a job?

With twists and turns, and a cast of characters that could have been transplanted straight from a Dickens' novel, Avi's Victorian-era mystery is a delight. Black and white illustrations decorate the story and characters. Descriptions of seedy undergound London are to be savored, the smells and sounds are sure to tickle any imagination.

John must seperate lies from the truth, and untangle the web of treason his father and others has created if he is ever to release his family from prison. But first he must learn that no one is to be trusted.

Feathers by Jacqueline Woodson

2008 Newbery Honor

"Hope is the thing with feathers/that perches in the soul" so says Emily Dickinson in a poem that is in the mind of sixth-grade Frannie, trying to figure things out in 1971 when a white boy enters her all-black school.

Feathers is a rare gem. When a new student, dubbed "Jesus Boy" brings with him a sense of calm and peace into a rowdy classroom, Frannie and her classmates begin to question if he really is Jesus and their own faith. Because, as her friend Samantha says, "If there was a world for Jesus to need to walk back into, wouldn't this one be it?"

Frannie questions all that surrounds her at school and at home as she watches her beloved older brother, who is hearing impaired, struggle to be accepted by the hearing world. And she watches her mother be full of hope and worry with her new pregnancy. Frannie feels the worry in her family surround her, but carries the poem in her heart while she searches for the thing with feathers.

When Trevor, the classroom bully, rages against Jesus Boy, truth is shone on both children. And Frannie asks herself, was he God's child? Aren't we all?

Woodson was smart to set this quick novel in 1971, during the rising tide of the Vietnam War, and the racial tension of desegregation. For the questions asked then still mirror the questions children growing up today ask themselves.

Before Green Gables by Budge Wilson

I must confess, I could never quite manage the series of the Anne books when I was a child. I would skip over the long passages where Anne would ramble on so. It shocked me that there was a character in literary history that could talk more than me. So I would skip to where there was action, and pictures. The copy that I had when I was 10(and still have) had color plates that helped move the story along. But when one entire page was one long monologue of Anne's dramatic speech about something describing the Haunted Wood, or the Lake of Shining Waters, I tended to skip it.

But that isn't to say that I didn't get the main point of the story, and that I didn't have a genuine love for the characters, because I did. So when PBS released the Kevin Sullivan production with Meagan Follows as Anne Shirley, I was in love with the books all over again, even though I knew the movie mixed them up, and cut them back drastically (Davie and Dora, where are you??). I even convinced my mom to take a family summer trip to P.E.I with her and my older brother (what a sport!) so I could see the Anne house, the red clay beaches, and all that my imagination had created while speed-reading the books and watching the movies. My trip did not disappoint. I loved it. And I hope future generations of Anne readers will get a chance to take this trip as well.

So now it is the 100 year anniversary and a writer has taken it upon herself to create Anne's world before Montgomery imagined it, using hints mentioned in the previous novels. This is no small feat, and Wilson has done a marvelous job. She has to please Anne fans and critics alike.

Remember, Anne's life before the Cuthbert's was not a happy one, she's an orphan, and Wilson does not shy away from the grim reality of being parentless during this time period. Despite baby Anne's horrid homelife, her exuberance shines through. She has an imagination that allows her to rise above the servitude she is forced to live and she survives within her own world. Wilson writes this without being too heavy handed, you cheer for Anne all the way through because you know how it is going to end.

Anne's journey to Green Gables is a wonderful read, not as amusing as the other books in the series because her transfers from horrible home to horrible home are so sad, but she meets many wonderful characters, mirroring the character journey in the other books. And these characters become her friends, and you know she has become important to them. This book is about her journey, her resilient spirit, and her search for a loving home.

Now if only it had color plates...

http://www.beforegreengables.com/

Miss Spitfire: reaching Helen Keller by Sarah Miller

I have had an obsession with Helen Keller and Laura Bridgman since I was a little girl. For those of you who don't know, Laura Bridgman was the pre-Helen Keller. She was famous before Helen Keller, was blind, deaf, and mute just like her from a very young age and acquired language as well. But she was not very pretty or even-tempered as she grew up, so she was not quite the showcase for the Perkins School, but she paved the way for the next generation of blind, deaf, and mute learners like Helen Keller.

Miss Spitfire is the story of Helen Keller from the beginning of Helen's education from her teacher, Annie Sullivan's point of view. Much like the famous movie, The Miracle Worker, it includes all the famous scenes with the doll, the locking in the room, the antics of learning to use a napkin in the dining room, and of course, the culminating scene by the water pump. But because this novel was researched using Annie Sullivan's letters, each chapter is started with an inspiring and insightful words from the letters. It is a wonderful fictional biography that has filled my obsession nicely.