Blog Post
New Snowy Picture Books to Warm You!
by manz
A chilly winter day is a great time to play in the snow, wish for snow, or cuddle up with a cozy book featuring snowy days and a sweet story.
Samson in the Snow is by Caldecott winner Phillip Stead. In this beautifully illustrated, tender story we meet Samson, a large and friendly wooly mammoth. One sunny day he happens upon a bird gathering yellow flowers for his friend before flying off. Samson continues to wander, and sun turns to snow and Samson can no longer find the bird. As he heads out to search he finds the kind of friends he didn’t even know he was looking for. A very sweet and gentle book.
Before Morning by Newbery Winner Joyce Sidman and illustrated by Caldecott Winner Beth Krommes is simply delightful! The most gorgeous sketched illustrations set the backdrop for a day when a young child wishes snow would come so his pilot mother can stay home. Delightful, tender, with few words, this pretty and poetic book is a treat for a snowy day.
Waiting For Snow is a darling look at a group of animals waiting ever-so-patiently for snow to fall. Waiting is not easy, but it will snow in snow’s time, as badger soon finds out.
How to Build a Snow Bear is also a lesson on waiting. It snowed and it’s time to go play in it! But a sleepyhead who would be a big help in building a snow bear is still hibernating. Wait we must for the sleepy bear to wake up and help out.
Best In Snow features photographs of winter scenes paired with simple words that describe the images and the weather around the onlooker. Air warms, snow softens, it drip drip drops. A lovely book with fantastic photos of snow and animals.
Blog Post
A watch with super powers...
by mansii
A watch with super powers, an underground gestapo, an expert climber, and a mysterious lighthouse...follow Reuben in this swashbuckling adventure as a very scared, ordinary boy fights evil with true friendship, hard choices, and a big dose of courage. Trenton Lee Stewart gave the world The Mysterious Benedict Society--one of the best things to happen to children's literature since Harry Potter. Now, Stewart's new stand alone novel The Secret Keepers has arrived to take fantasy lovers (or just lovers of great story!) by the pant-seat.
The writing is superb, the characters shine, the relationships sparkle, and the layers of story exude goodness from their pores. Stewart's characters wrestle with moral dilemmas that don't have easy answers, and come to understand the internal slavery of those who propagate evil, exercising compassion.
Both a powerful look at the sinister spiral of power's addictive nature and a bracing encouragement, the The Secret Keepers affirms that whatever battles we each must find the courage to fight, all will be well at last. When you rub your eyes to come back to reality, your heart will glow treasuring the life you have been gifted and the people in it that make it extraordinary.
Blog Post
A Series of Unfortunate Events
by PizzaPuppy
A brand new television show based on the popular Series of Unfortunate Events books is coming to Netflix on January 13th, making now the perfect time to catch up on Lemony Snicket's whimsical gothic novels.
Over the course of 13 books we follow Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire: 3 siblings who are orphaned after a fire destroys their house and kills their parents. The children are placed under the protection of their distant relative, the mysterious Count Olaf, but soon realize that Olaf is scheming to steal their inheritance and do away with the Baudelaire children altogether. Along the way, the Baudelaire children discover that their parents were part of a secret organization, and much of the later books revolves around the Baudelaire children uncovering dark family secrets. Lemony Snicket narrates with a quick wit and dark humor, often going off on tangents or explaining the meaning of words as he goes along. Snicket also begins each novel with a polite warning that if a happy book is what the reader is after, they won't find it here.
If you haven't seen the trailer for the new 8-episode series, take a look here.
Looking for more Series of Unfortunate Events-related stuff? Give the Tragic Treasury a try. This collection of songs featured in the audiobooks remains true to Snicket's books, and Snicket himself plays accordion on multiple tracks. Or maybe re-watch the 2004 movie adaptation featuring Jim Carrey as the tricky Count Olaf.
Blog Post
Radiant Child
by manz
Radiant Child: The Story of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat is a beautifully illustrated picture book that is a wonderful introduction for young children to a one-of-a-kind modern artist. There is definite Caldecott Medal buzz around the bold and colorful illustrations by author Javaka Steptoe.
The book focuses on Basquiat’s childhood in Brooklyn, his early passion for drawing and his declaration that he will some day be famous. The message that art doesn’t have to be neat or clean shines through as we follow the artist on his journey to become a cultural phenomenon with a true vision (before his untimely death, which doesn't grace the pages of this book).
Blog Post
"Who Builds Anything in this Country"
by endless
When the heroine of Colson Whitehead's National Book Award winning novel, The Underground Railroad, asks who built the system of passages and caves that burrow throughout the southern states, a conductor answers "Who builds anything in this country?" It's a rhetorical question in the novel, but Whitehead's novel itself challenges our mythology of the underground railroad. From middle school history lessons through to the Underground Railroad museum in Cincinnati, white Americans have used the underground railroad as a way to imagine ourselves on the right side of history. And yes, there were white underground railroad conductors, many of them Quakers. But more often escaped slaves were smuggled by free blacks, branches of the African Methodist Episcopal church, or gained freedom by purchasing it from their masters. Whitehead includes these characters in The Underground Railroad: Ceasar, who was promised freedom when his master's wife died, only to be sold off to settle his debts, the elderly free black "proctors" at Cora's state run community in North Carolina with their pressed dresses and their equally pressed respectability politics, and Cora's mother who ran off when Cora was a small girl, choosing freedom and abandoning her daughter to slavery.
The Underground Railroad owes "our" ability to engage with it as a literary topic to a wave of stories about Harriet Tubman, the engaging Underground Railroad Museum that opened in Cincinnati in 2012, and the popular Jim McBride novel Song Yet Sung Tracy Chevalier's The Last Runaway, andSue Monk Kidd's The Invention of Wings. White Allies with a penchant for magical realism will appreciate this last book, as well as "Song Yet Sung." If you liked Whitehead's second most popular novel The Intuitionist, Paul Beatty's White Boy Shuffle and Baratunde Thurston's How to be Black deal with similar themes with more of Whitehead's usual sardonic tone.
This book is perfectly pitched to be an Oprah’s choice, to form part of high school curriculums, or to be a freshman reading experience novel at the U of M. The violence is off stage or muted, the history is traceable, and it answers a question we grapple with today – what are the benefits and violence on all sides of interracial solidarity?
Blog Post
Storytime: W is for Wind!
by eapearce
This week at storytimes at Westgate and Traverwood, AADL storyteller Elizabeth shared stories about wind! Whoooosh! An old man complained about his noisy house and the wind outside in Too Much Noise, until the town’s wise woman solved his problem in a unique way. Ben floated away to the moon with his red balloon in Come Back, Ben and the mouse and his boat were blown every which way by the wind in The Mouse and the Wind, a story from Arnold Lobel’s classic Mouse Tales. We also tracked down the owner of a lovely hat that the wind had whisked away in Whose Hat Is That?
For more windy favorites for preschoolers, try Windblown by Edouard Manceau and The Wind Blew by Pat Hutchins.
Blog Post
A Holiday Romance from Jill Shalvis
by CeliaM
Looking for something heartwarming and delightful to read this holiday season? Look no further than The Trouble with Mistletoe by Jill Shalvis.
Back cover:
Willa Davis is wrangling puppies when Keane Winters stalks into her pet shop with frustration in his chocolate-brown eyes and a pink bedazzled cat carrier in his hand. He needs a kitty sitter, stat. But the last thing Willa needs is to rescue a guy who doesn't even remember her. Saddled with his great-aunt Feline from Hell, Keane is desperate to leave her in someone else capable hands. But in spite of the fact that he sure he never seen the drop-dead-gorgeous pet shop owner before, she seems to be mad at him. Willa can deny that Keane changed since high school: he less arrogant, for one thing--but can she trust him not to break her heart again? It time to throw a coin in the fountain, make a Christmas wish--and let the mistletoe do its work.
I'm a huge sucker for holiday romances but they do tend to follow a couple of familiar tropes:
- Hero returns home after ten years to discover heroine has a child who is, suspiciously, ten years old.
- Everyone learns the true meaning of Christmas through a big holiday festival.
- Hero and heroine are stuck in a snow storm and are forced to shelter in a conveniently located abandoned cabin.
This book too has some of those classic elements - the heroine is obsessed with Christmas decorations and wears lots of sweaters and aprons with holiday themed puns embroidered on them. But it also has adorable animal antics, a cast of witty, meddlesome secondary characters, and some refreshing, unpredictable plot twists. Bonus: if, like me, Carl the doberman becomes your favorite character, he is featured in the novella sequel, One Snowy Night.
Blog Post
Storytimes: D is for Dog!
by eapearce
Elizabeth shared Dog stories this week at storytimes at Traverwood and Westgate! We heard about the adorable, yet misbehaving dog who wouldn’t drop the shoe in Drop It, Rocket … until he heard a story, of course! Farm animals had to bravely venture into the scary doghouse to find their missing ball in Jan Thomas’ The Doghouse. Mack the dog ate a cake intended for the farmer in The Cake That Mack Ate, and we met a “talking” dog in Lois Ehlert’s Rrralph! Of course, storytime wouldn’t have been complete without a rousing version of B-I-N-G-O!
AADL’s new Westgate storytimes take place three times a week in the program room:
Mondays, from 11:00-11:30am
Wednesdays, from 1:00-1:30pm
Fridays, from 10:00-10:30am
Storytimes are intended for ages 2-5 years. All are welcome and no sign-up or registration is required.
Blog Post
Quirky new picture book: Pug Man's 3 Wishes
by eapearce
The delightful new picture book Pug Man’s 3 Wishes, by Sebastian Meschenmoser, is described as a “misanthropic gem of a story” by Publishers Weekly and “the antidote to every cute fairy book.” The quirky story features Pug Man, a bipedal pug dog who is having a very bad day. He slept late, there’s nothing to eat for breakfast, and a morning rain has made his newspaper soggy. He’s feeling very sorry for himself when a brightly colored fairy appears out of nowhere and grants him three wishes. Children (and adults, for that matter) might think that they know what he’ll wish for, but everyone—including the fairy!—is in for a surprise. Readers will be touched by Pug Man’s modest wishes, and tickled by his obstreperous third wish in particular.
German author Meschenmoser adds to the book by depicting Pug Man’s bleak life in all black and white until the fairy appears, bringing bursts of color and fantastical beings with her. The unusual story is not for everyone, but certainly will appeal to those tired of fairies coming along to save the day… and to anyone who’s felt a little cranky when they wake up in the morning.
Blog Post
Just Added! New Genre Offerings from Teen Bestselling Authors
by nicole
If you're into Teen lit and looking for something new to obsess over, a couple of popular Teen authors have released (or will soon release!) some brand new titles:
Veronica Roth, author of the dystopian bestseller Divergent, will release Carve The Mark in January 2017, the first in a science fiction duology (because trilogies are so 2012) that calls itself a "stunning portrayal of the power of friendship—and love—in a galaxy filled with unexpected gifts." You'll have to check it out yourself to verify its "stunning"-ness, but readers of Roth's Divergent series will at least be in for something new--this title looks like it will be a much more epic, intergalactic brand of Science Fiction.
Fans of the Sci-Fi fairy tale Cinder will be excited to know that in November Marissa Meyer released Heartless, a story from Wonderland history, long before Alice fell down the rabbit hole in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. School Library Journal calls it "an unforgettable story of the evolution of the Red Queen from a young girl who dreamed of true love and freedom to a madwoman best remembered for the phrase 'Off with his head!'" Anyone who's read Meyer's Lunar Chronicles won't be surprised that the author is telling the semi-sympathetic story of another evil queen, but this title trades in the sprockets and cyborgs for some clean-cut Fantasy.