Module 10: Amelia and Eleanor Go for a Ride

Anne Arundel County Public Library. (2016). Amelia and
Eleanor go for a ride. Retrieved from https://aacpl.
beanstack.org/books/459

Book Summary: Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt were two of the most famous women in the United States during the 1930’s, and they just happened to be very good friends. They got along well because they were both very adventurous and independent: Eleanor with her fast cars and political activism and Amelia with her flying. One night, Amelia takes Eleanor for a spin up in the air, close to the stars. Not enough adventure to sate their thirst, Eleanor returns the favor by taking Amelia out for a fast drive in her new car. After a night full of adventure, they return to the White House for dessert.

APA Reference:

Ryan, P. M. (1999). Amelia and Eleanor go for a ride: Based on a true story. New York City: Scholastic Press.

Impressions: This was a fun book! I love any story that promotes strong, independent women, and Amelia and Eleanor Go for a Ride definitely delivers that. Additionally, the author’s note at the end provides good historical information, as well as Ryan’s desire to share the story, which is a lovely peek into the author’s mind. And, while the illustrations are in black and white, they are exquisite, and Brian Selznick’s depictions of Eleanor and Amelia are incredibly accurate, which is important for a historical fiction picture book featuring two of America’s most famous ladies.

Professional Review:

Engelfried, S. (1999, September). Amelia and Eleanor go for a ride (book) [review of Amelia and Eleanor go for a ride]. School Library Journal, 45(9), 202. Retrieved from http://www.slj.com/

Gr 1-4 --Ryan imaginatively expands on a true historical event in this intriguing picture book. While dining at the White House in 1933, Amelia Earhart convinces Eleanor Roosevelt to join her on a night flight to Baltimore. The two women marvel at the sights and the excitement from the air. After landing, they sneak away for one more adventure, as this time, the First Lady treats her friend to a fast ride in her new car. The fictionalized tale is lively and compelling, and the courage and sense of adventure that these individuals shared will be evident even to children who know nothing about their lives. Without belaboring the message, the author clearly conveys how the "feeling of independence" that both women treasured was a crucial part of their personalities. Selznick's larger-than-life pencil drawings add considerably to the spirit of the tale. He captures the glorious beauty of the night flight and the beauty of the city below. Varied perspectives and background details consistently draw readers' eyes. An author's note clearly defines which elements of the story are factual. The women were actually accompanied by two I male pilots, but the author decided that it made it "much more exciting" to imagine that they were alone. "Almost all" of the dialogue comes from historical accounts. The title stands well on its own, but will also work as an excellent inspiration for further reading about the lives of Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart.

Library Use: Amelia and Eleanor Go for a Ride would be a great book to include in a picture book display of strong, independent women, such as during March, which is Women’s History Month. Other good books to include in the display are Drum Dream Girl (2015) by Margarita Engle, Firebird (2014) by Misty Copeland, Harriet Tubman: Hero of the Underground Railroad (2007) by Lori Mortensen, Not One Damsel in Distress: World Folktales for Strong Girls (2000) collected by Jane Yolen, Venus and Serena Williams: Tennis Champions (2010) by Diane Bailey, and Sacagawea (2003) by Lise Erdrich.

Admin. (2015, November 25). Life beyond the lies. Retrieved
from http://www.equipawoman.org/life-beyond-the-lies/

Module 9: Who Pushed Humpty Dumpty?

Amazon. (2012). Who pushed humpty dumpty?
Retrieved from https://images-na.ssl-images-
amazon.com/images/I/51xZ0lSP-QL._SX258_
BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

Book Summary: Consists of short vignettes of fairy tales and nursery rhymes that are “genre-fied” by mystery. The vignettes are tied together by Detective Binky who sets out to solve each mystery from who broke into the Three Bears’ House, who poisoned Snow White, and who pushed Humpty Dumpty, what happened to the missing witch who lives in the house made of candy, and more.

APA Reference:

Levinthal, D. (2012). Who pushed Humpty Dumpty? And other notorious nursery tale mysteries.

New York City: Schwartz & Wade Books.

Impressions: I wasn't too impressed with Who Pushed Humpty Dumpty. The idea of a police investigator solving nursery rhyme and fairy tale mysteries is cute, but Levinthal tries to push too much text on one page. Additionally, the illustrations are not very impressive. I like the use of color vs. sepia tones when victims tell what happened vs. present day, but, the actual artistic style is quite upsetting and doesn't seem very appropriate for the intended audience (i.e. giving the children sharp teeth). In fact, the illustrations remind me of Beavis and Butthead.

Professional Review:

Chipman, I. (2012, September 15). Who pushed Humpty Dumpty? And other notorious nursery tale mysteries [review of Who pushed Humpty Dumpty? And other notorious nursery tale mysteries]. Booklist, 109(2), 73. Retrieved from http://www.booklistonline.com/

Grades K-3 A little wisp of a toad named Binky has seen it all, or so he thinks. The black-suited detective (Pinecone Division) gets called to finger the perp in a series of cases, from the blonde porridge-eater troubling the Bear family and the kids who took down the candy house deep in the woods to the piggie who lost his temper with Humpty and an apple-poisoning, mirror-obsessed judge of a beauty pageant. Kids will certainly be familiar with all these stories, and Levinthal supplies just enough of a twist with each one to make them fresh again without necessarily reinventing any of them. What’ll really stop kids in their tracks, though, is Nickle’s acrylic artwork. His sophisticated touch is as equally suited to the dramatic, black-and-white re-creations of the crimes as it is to the cheeky scenes of Binky gumshoeing about with various woodland creatures. Hook this one up with Margie Palatini’s The Web Files (2001) and Jeanie Franz Ransom’s What Really Happened to Humpty? (2009) for a soft-boiled shamus storytime.

Library Use: Teacher resource! In the 2nd grade TEKS, students are expected to compare and contrast different versions of fairy tales and nursery stories. And Who Pushed Humpty Dumpty is a great story to include.

Resources

Texas Education Agency. (2014, August). Texas essential knowledge and skills for grade 2. Retrieved from http://tea.texas.gov/uploadedFiles/Curriculum/Texas_Essential_Knowledge_ and_Skills/docs/Grade2_TEKS_0814.pdf

Module 8: Feed

Elizondo, O. (2015, February 4).
Book review: Feed by M.T.
Anderson. Retrieved from
http://literalbookthief.blogspot.
com/2015/02/book-review-feed-by-
mt-anderson.html

Book Summary: Titus and his friends are out partying on the moon during spring break when they meet Violet. They invite her to join them at a different club, where they also meet this other, older guy who has “brag” dance moves. Turns out, he also has brag hacking moves: he has hacked into Violet, Titus, and their friends’ feeds, smartphone-like devices that are implanted in their brains often from a very young age that allows them to chat/text one another, receive ads from retail corporations, look up information, play games, and more. This hack-attack requires a hospital quarantine and to be temporarily “dormant” from the feed for several days. When they return to earth, Titus and Violet start dating, and Violet reveals to Titus that she received her feed when she was six, which is causing complications because it didn’t have the chance to seamlessly connect with her brain waves/functions. This is causing her to slowly shut down, and she will die. As a result, Violet and Titus spend a lot of time together, and Violet opens Titus’s mind up to unconventional opinions and awareness: about how the Global Alliance feels America has become a dangerous place of consumption, how they are destroying the world by destroying the environment, and how his friends are shallow and consumption-driven because the feed has conditioned them to be that way. At first, Titus is impressed with Violet, but then he becomes exasperated by her unwillingness to conform to his friends’ lifestyles. They break up and Violet’s health quickly deteriorates. When she’s at less than 5% functioning, Violet’s father sends Titus a chat message that she wants Titus to see her one last time before she dies. He takes his upcar to visit her, and he tries to say goodbye in a way that would be meaningful to her: without the feed blabbering in his mind, by telling her authentic and organic stories, by telling her the latest world news. She slips away, and his feed tries to comfort him: “‘Feeling blue? Then dress blue! It’s the Blue-Jean Warehouse’s Final Sales Event! Stock is just flying off the shelves at prices so low you won’t believe your feed! Everything must go! Everything must go. Everything must go.’” (Anderson, 2002, p. 235). The feed will never understand true human emotion.

APA Reference:

Anderson, M.T. (2002). Feed. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick Press.

Impressions: Like most canon dystopias, Feed is weird. It takes awhile for readers to situate themselves in the similar-but-not world, the lexicon and syntax differences, and the societal norms of the book’s people. Anderson tries to make the vernacular differences obvious to today’s lexicon by choosing words that are quantifiably similar, like “meg” meaning “a lot” and “brag” meaning “very”. The diction is very teen-friendly, which is deliberate on Anderson’s part: “To write this novel, I read a huge number of magazines like Seventeen, Maxim, and Stuff. I listened to cell phone conversations in malls” (Anderson, 2002, dust jacket flap). This adds verisimilitude to the style of Feed, which I appreciated and is always necessary in sci-fi novels.

The message behind Feed worries me. Its theme on how technology and consumerism is turning us into mindless drones is frightening to think about too long and/or too hard because I do worry that we are becoming overly dependent on technology, but I also love technology: information is at my fingertips thanks to my iPhone. I can store thousands of books on my Kindle. I can fly from Houston to Stockholm in 12 hours. We are cutting down forests to make room for suburbs. We are poisoning the air we breathe from all the pollution in the air. Global warming is making our planet increasingly unfriendly for animals to live in. People are mind-numbingly accepting what they see on tv as true, whether that be biased news sources or fallacious commercials. Feed could be our future if we aren’t careful.

Professional Review:

Rawlins, S. (2002, September). Feed [review of Feed]. School Library Journal, 48(9), 219. Retrieved from http://www.slj.com/
Gr 8 Up. For Titus and his teenaged friends, having transmitters implanted in their heads is as normal as going to the moon or Mars on vacation or as common as the lesions that have begun to appear on their bodies. Everyone's "feed" tells them everything they need to know--there's no need to read or write. All purchases are deducted from the credit account that's part of the feed. Talking out loud is rare because everyone "chats" over the feednets. Then Titus and his friends meet a girl named Violet at a party on the moon, and a hacker attacks them and damages their feeds. Everyone is OK except for Violet, who is told in secret that hers is so damaged that she is going to die. Unlike other teens, she is homeschooled and cares about world events. She's not afraid to question things and is determined to fight the feed. Anderson gives his characters a unique language that teens will relate to, but much of it is raw and crude. Young people will also appreciate the consumeristic lifestyle and television shows that are satirized in the book. Violet and her father are the only truly sympathetic characters. The other teens are portrayed as thoughtless, selfish, and not always likable. Only Titus learns anything from his mistakes and tries to be a little less self-centered. A gripping, intriguing, and unique cautionary novel.

Library Use: This would be a great teacher resource recommendation to include in a lit circle focused on dystopias like Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.

Carswell, B. (2012, July 26). 21 faces of Brave
New World- Happy birthday, Aldous Huxley.
Retrieved from http://www.abebooks.com/
blog/index.php/2012/07/26/21-faces-of-brave-
new-world-happy-birthday-aldous-huxley/

Temple, E. (2011, June 25). George
Orwell's 1984: A visual history.
Retrieved from http://flavorwire.com/
190248/george-orwells-1984-a-visual-
history

Amazon. (2016). The handmaid's tale
(vintage classics). Retrieved from https://
www.amazon.co.uk/Handmaids-Tale-
Vintage-Classics/dp/0099511665

Simon & Schuster. (2016). Fahrenheit 451.
Retrieved from http://www.simonandschuster.
com/books/Fahrenheit-451/Ray-Bradbury/
9781451673265

Module 7: The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy

Birdsall, J., and Frankland, D. (2016). The
Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four
Sisters, Two Rabbits, and  a Very
Interesting Boy. Retrieved from
http://jeannebirdsall.com/books/
the-penderwicks/

Book Summary: The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy is a cute summer-time romp of a story featuring four sisters, their dog, and their widower father, who vacation at a summer cottage for three weeks. At Arundel, they meet an upstart and bad-at-listening "landlord", her son, and a teenaged gardener and his two rabbits. Rosalind, Skye, Jane, Batty, Hound, and Jeffery go on adventures and get up to some trouble thanks to a bull, a gardening competition, a potential husband for Jeffrey’s mother, and an escaped rabbit, but they always uphold the Penderwick Family Honor.

APA Reference:

Birdsall, J. (2005). The Penderwicks: A summer tale of four sisters, two rabbits, and a very interesting boy. New York City: Alfred A. Knopf.

Impressions: The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy is a humorous tale for elementary readers. Birdsall does an excellent job of characterization for all five of the main characters (six if you count Hound). Each sister is wholly her own person, and this is not only evident in what they say and how they act, but also their thoughts as Birdsall’s third-person omniscient narration jumps up from character to character. And, once Jeffery is added to the mix, every reader and his/her likes and dislikes are present: music, math, soccer, imagination, writing, adventure, responsibility, and more. This would be a fun story for a family to read together as every child will be able to identify with at least one of the characters. Additionally, Mr. Penderwick is present just enough to be a firm parental figure, but absent enough to provide the girls opportunities to be their own person and do their own things. He isn’t a git (to use Jane’s word) like Disney Channel parents, but he isn’t overbearing like Mrs. Tifton. He is supportive of their individual personalities and commandeering of their polite and respectful upbringing.

Professional Review:

Gray, B.A., Jones, T.E., Toth, L., Charnizon, M., Grabarek, D., Raben, D. (2005, July). The Penderwicks: A summer tale of four sisters, two rabbits, and a very interesting boy [review of The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy]. School Library Journal, 51(7), 95-96. Retrieved from http://www.slj.com/

Gr 4-6-- This enjoyable tale of four sisters, a new friend, and his snooty mother is rollicking fun. The girls' father is a gentle, widowed botany professor who gives his daughters free reign but is always there to support or comfort them. Rosalind, 12, has become the mother figure. Skye, 11, is fierce and hot-tempered. Jane, 10, is a budding writer of mysteries who has the disconcerting habit of narrating aloud whatever is occurring around her. Batty, four, is an endearingly shy, loving child who always wears butterfly wings. The family dog, Hound, is her protector. The tale begins as the Penderwicks embark on a summer holiday in the Berkshire Mountains, at a cottage on the grounds of a posh mansion owned by the terribly snobbish Mrs. Tifton. Her son, Jeffrey, is a brilliant pianist, but her heart is set on him attending a military academy like her beloved father. The action involves Rosalind's unrequited love for the 18-year-old gardener, Skye's enmity and then friendship with Jeffrey, Jane's improvement in her melodramatic writing style, and Batty's encounter with an angry bull whom she rather hopefully calls "nice horsie." Problems are solved and lessons learned in this wonderful, humorous book that features characters whom readers will immediately love, as well as a superb writing style. Bring on more of the Penderwicks!

Library Use: The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy would be a fun book display/passive program combination. Books like this one and other summer-centric juvenile fiction tales like Cody and the Fountain of Happiness (2015) by Tricia Springstubb, Diary of a Whimpy Kid: Dog Days (2009) by Jeff Kinney, The Fletcher Family Takes Rock Island (2016) by Dana Alison Levy, The Green Dog: A Mostly True Story (2003) by Suzanne Fisher Staple, and Fort (2015) by Cynthia DeFilce can be displayed with a place for young patrons to write/draw out their summertime adventures (on summery post-its like suns) and post on the wall nearby.

Module 6: Z Is for Moose

Amazon. (2016). Z is for moose (Booklist editor's choice. Books
for youth (Awards)). Retrieve from https://www.amazon.
com/Moose-Booklist-Editors-Choice-Awards/dp/0060799846 

Book Summary: Z Is for Moose features Zebra who is trying to arrange different items and animals for each letter of the alphabet. Moose is Zebra’s overzealous friend who keeps trying to jump his turn, then is very put out when Zebra ends up choosing Mouse for M instead of Moose. In the end, Zebra lets Moose be Z: Zebra’s friend Moose.

APA Reference:

Bingham, K. (2012). Z is for moose. New York City: HarperCollins.

Impressions: SUPER CUTE ABC book! I love the twist it takes on the typical ABC book. It would be perfect for the precocious 3 or 4 year old who already has a good grasp on the alphabet.

Professional Review:

Staff. (2012, January 15). Z is for moose [review of Z Is for Moose]. Kirkus Reviews. Retrieved from https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/kelly-bingham/z-moose/

A wry twist on an alphabet story makes for laugh-out-loud fun.
Poor Moose. He tries to get into the alphabetic act on every letter page from D to L, but Zebra, who’s directing the assemblage, insists it’s not his turn yet and that he must move off the page. When it IS time for M, Zebra decides to go with Mouse, and Moose flips his antlers—well, his lid. Zebra tries to console the despondent moose, telling him he can still be in the book even though the only letter left is Z. Solution? Z becomes “Zebra’s friend, Moose.” How perfect that Z-elinsky is the illustrator. His often-elegant style turns comedic here, with brightly colored borders framing each letter in a simple scene. The borders become a design device for Moose, as he pokes his head over the edges or stomps the scene within angrily. In others, Moose tries to camouflage himself, as when he squeezes behind an Ice-cream cone or hitchhikes a ride in the Kangaroo’s pouch. Dialogue balloons express Moose’s eagerness, asking, “Now?” and declaring (mistakenly), “Here it comes!” Zebra, wearing a referee’s black-and-white striped shirt and carrying a clipboard, answers, “NO, not yet!” Kids who are learning their ABCs or have just learned them will find this hysterical, and it has great potential for storytimes.
Just label it F for funny. (Picture book. 4-6)

Library Use: It would be fun to have a passive programming during the summer that highlights ABC books like Z is for Moose, A Is for Autumn (2011, Maass), SuperHero ABC (2006, McLeod), Z Is for Zamboni (2002, Napier), Click, Clack, Quackity-Quack: An Alphabetical Adventure (2005, Cronin), and others. Then, have taped to across a wall in the children’s section 8.5x11 sheets of paper. Invite kids to draw different items/animals that start with each letter directly on the paper or have them take half-sheets of paper home to draw on and bring them back and tape up for everyone to see.

Resources

Cronin, D. (2005). Click, clack, quackity-quack: An alphabetical adventure. New York City: Atheneum Books for Young Readers.

Maass, R. (2011). A is for autumn. New York City: Henry Holt.

McLeod, B. (2006). Superhero ABC. New York City: HarperCollins Publishers.

Napier, M. (2002). Z is for zamboni: A hockey alphabet. Chelsea, MI: Sleeping Bear Press.