Blog Post
PreK Bits - "K" is for KANGAROOs
by ryanikoglu
Ms. Rachel presented kangaroo stories in Storytime.
POUCH! is a story of 2 baby kangaroos ... just growing out of the pouch!
In the “I’m a Kangaroo” song ... we have lots of bounces and "BOINGS" to do.
KATY NO-POCKET is the story of Katy who has no pouch to keep her baby close.
If you like kangaroos and you like stories, here are more favorite kangaroos:
NIGHTY-NIGHT COOPER by Laura Joffe Numeroff.
ADELAIDE The FLYING KANGAROO by Tomi Ungerer.
HEART In The POCKET by Laurence Bourguignon.
I LOVE IT WHEN YOU SMILE by Sam McBratney.
DO KANGAROOS SEAT BELT by Jane Kurtz.
WHAT DO YOU DO WITH A KANGAROO? by Mercer Mayer.
BIG RED KANGAROO
A KANGAROO MOB
Now you can "hop and jump all day!".
Do you have a pouch?
Blog Post
Fabulous Fiction Firsts #628, Pt. 2 "If you are here today...you are a survivor. But those of us who have made it through hell and are still standing? We bear a different name: warriors.” ~ Lori Goodwin
by muffy
Former book editor Jennifer Ryan's charming debut Chilbury Ladies' Choir takes us to a small village in Kent during the spring and summer of 1940.
With the men off to war, the vicar disbanded the church choir until the newly arrived Miss Prim(rose)Trent, a worldly, take-no-prisoner university music professor, challenged the women to form an all-female choir.
Over the course of six months, through letters and journals, we watch as these women continued to cope with the fall-out of war, scrimmage over village affairs, and struggle with matters of life and death, while the choir brought them together, sustained them in their darkest hour, and took them to great heights, far beyond their expectations.
Widowed Mrs. Tilling is resentful having to billet Colonel Mallard in her son David's room, only to find love when she least expects it; Edwina Paltry, a scheming midwife with a sinister plan and a shady past, is determined to cash in on other people's misfortunes, come hell or high water; 19-year-old Venetia Winthrop, wild and impulsive, is courting trouble by seducing a dashing artist who might very well be a spy; a 13-year-old accomplished First Soprano, Kitty Winthrop, plucky and fearless, finds solace in her music while navigating the grown-up world and her first heartbreak. Silvie, a young Czech refugee, taken in by the Winthrops, is anxious about the state of her homeland and the fate of her family.
For fans of Mary Ann Shaffer's The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society ; and Home Fires, a PBS period television series based on the book by Julie Summers. Television rights to Chilbury Ladies' Choir have been optioned by Carnival TV, the production company behind PBS' Downton Abbey.
Blog Post
Unbecoming, by Jenny Downham
by manz
In Unbecoming, by Jenny Downham., we meet three generations of red-headed women, all with their own secrets and stories.
Seventeen year old Katie lives with her uptight mother Caroline and her younger brother, until one day Caroline’s Mother Mary abruptly comes into their lives. Estranged for years, Caroline does not want her mother to come live with them, even though she is suffering from dementia and needs care. As she temporarily stays with the family while social services sorts things out, everyone’s world turn upside down in different ways. On top of caring for her brother, and now her grandmother, Katie struggles to please her mother and keep secret who she’s been kissing. Caroline tries desperately to keep the past in the past and shove Mary away, while Mary tries so hard to remember her past as she wakes up daily wondering who these people are that she’s living with.
Wonderfully crafted, the book mostly stays in present day, but shifts back to Mary’s young adult life. The truth begins to unfold a rich family history of strong women who are either trying to break the rules or trying hard to follow them and keep things quiet and uneventful. Mary will have none of it! She wishes for adventure. If only she could remember.
It is an absolutely touching YA novel and it was a pleasure to spend time with these characters finding their place within their family and in the world. I would love to have a picnic with Mary on the beach.
The Stonewall Book Award is given annually to English-language children’s and young adult books of exceptional merit relating to the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender experience. This year there was one winner and three honors – one of which was Unbecoming.
Blog Post
Hooray for Owls!
by manz
This week at storytime Ms. Amanda brought some cute owl stories featuring a playful owl, a sleepy owl, and a reading owl. Owls sure do have a lot of interests!
In the wonderfully illustrated Hooray for Today!, Owl wakes up and is ready to play but the friends he wants to play with are still sleeping! Whooooo wants to play? This is by the same author as Hooray for Hat!, and both are recommended.
In I’m Not Reading!, Baby Owl is trying to read a story to Tiny Chick, when they keep getting interrupted by more and more bouncy chicks who also want to hear the story. It’s an adorable and cute picture book by Jonathan Allen to read together.
We then met an owl in Good Night Owl who was trying to go to sleep but he kept hearing a loud SQUEEK. He then tears his house apart searching for the noise. It’s quite silly! What’s silier than an owl in a bathrobe tearing the roof off his house?
Blog Post
All Our Wrong Todays
by Lucy S
Screenwriter Elan Mastai’s debut novel is a delightful, insightful and wild ride that takes us on a winding path through time, space, and alternate realities, impelled by strong, witty dialogue and a looming sense of “what-if.”
All Our Wrong Todays is difficult to describe. It challenges your mind with a plot that twists through the space-time continuum with rapidity, but I highly recommend that you pick-up this witty, worthwhile book and take this incredible, zigzag of a journey with Mastai’s affable narrator, Tom Barren, as he loops back and forth through time, space and consciousness. Mastai has created in Tom a wonderfully readable narrative voice who keeps his story funny and artful even when describing frightening situations that reveal the darker forces that might be at play inside all of us. When we are introduced to Tom, he is living in a futuristic-like 2016 that could have been imagined in the 1950s and featured in The Jetsons; hover cars, clothes that are a second skin and regenerate every day, perfectly designed, person-specific meals. Everyone in this “future” has everything they could want or need. In a world where “oil was irrelevant, basic resources were plentiful, and everyone had access to all manner of technological enhancements...scientific discovery was the dominant social motivator.” And the scientific discoveries in this book are decidedly big and life-altering, sometimes literally. Tom’s father is hard at work developing the first time-travel machine, and Tom is employed as one of his back-up “chrononauts.” Tom’s failure in his father’s lab sets off a mad-capped series of events that have us boomeranging through various time periods, past and future, and altered versions of Tom himself, and of his friends and family.
All Our Wrong Todays is positively mind-bending in its whorls through these dimensions, as Tom introduces who he might have been, or still could be, in a parallel universe. Tom asks “What happens if the hard skin of reality punctures? What comes out?” His alter egos, John and Victor, show what might happen by demonstrating the success and failure, and the good and bad, that live inside each of us. Ultimately All Our Wrong Todays is about how we choose to live in the present we are given, and the way we reconcile all the dreams and voices we carry with us.
For fans of The Martian and Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
Blog Post
Fabulous Fiction Firsts #628, Pt.1 "If you are here today... you are a survivor. But those of us who have made it through hell and are still standing? We bear a different name: warriors.” ~ Lori Goodwin.
by muffy
Two extraordinary debut novels set during WWII come out on Valentine's Day, and both speak to the capacity of the human spirit to endure in the face of the 20th century’s darkest moment.
We Were the Lucky Ones is based on the true story of the Kurc family of Radom, Poland. In 1939, prosperous and educated, Jewish merchants Sol and Nechuma were trying their best to live normal lives with their family as war was looming, observing religious holidays and doting on their new grandchild. When Germany invaded Poland, Sol and Nechuma decided to stay with daughters Halina and Mila, while their sons Genek and Jakob joined the Polish army.
Middle son Addy, an engineer and budding composer was stuck in France and was eventually conscripted. Over the course of the war, the three generations of Kurcs were flung to distant points on the globe, from the jazz clubs of Paris to the beaches of Rio de Janeiro to Kraków’s most brutal prison and the farthest reaches of the Siberian gulag, they were driven by an extraordinary will to survive and to reunite.
Debut novelist Georgia Hunter first learned that her beloved grandfather Eddy (Addy in the novel) came from a family of Holocaust survivors as a result of a high school English project "to dig up pieces of our ancestral pasts" (Author's Note). Through oral history interviews with her grandmother, a memorable Kurc Family reunion on Martha's Vineyard, and a decade of research, thorough and precise in its details, "Hunter sidesteps hollow sentimentality and nihilism, revealing instead the beautiful complexity and ambiguity of life in this extraordinarily moving tale." (Publishers' Weekly)
Read-alikes: City of Women by David Gillham; Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly; and The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah.
Blog Post
After you've finished Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad
by endless
If you're one of the hundreds of patrons who have checked out and enjoyed Colson Whiteheads award winning novel, Underground Railroad, you might be looking for another narrative journey about slavery, freedom and the routes in between. These novels are rich with historical detail, sense of place and the weight of telling long-hidden stories. Their flinty, insightful heroines struggle against systems that define them as property, and also against the pull of "home" with their enslaved family and friends.
James McBride's novel about a runaway slave who learns to follow a "code" of five knots invokes oral histories of maroons, parables about freedom and captivity, and the fierce will of it's main character to live a free life. Sue Monk Kidd's recently well received novel, The Invention of Wings tells the story of Hetty "handful" Jackson/Grimke, who grows up belonging to the famous 19th century abolitionist and feminist Sarah Grimke. Hetty's nickname is well earned, and this novel tells the story alternating between her inner monologue and Sarah's, giving readers an intricate picture of slave and free black society at the time. Edward Jones's pulitzer prize winning The Known World which follows Frederick Douglass' journey to Ireland and back, before and after his manumission.
Octavia Butler's Kindred is the foremother for all of these more recent novels about captivity and escape. Kindred uses science fiction tropes of time travel to explore the dangers of living in Maryland as a free black woman during slavery, and as a black female author telling a story about slavery. Like The Known World, Kindred jumps between slavery and freedom, questioning how one state depends on the other.
Blog Post
PreK Bits - "C" is for COOKIE!
by ryanikoglu
Cookie Monster says, "C is for Cookie!"
That's good enough for Ms. Rachel in Storytime too!
IF YOU GIVE A MOUSE A COOKIE is a cautionary tale that takes you in a circle right back where you started from.
Banjo Betsy and Ms. Rachel led the action song "Gonna Walk, Walk, Walk" ... until we need to "Sit Down."
This action song can be found on the the following recordings ... HONK! HONK! RATTLE! RATTLE! and RISE And SHINE.
The WOLF’S CHICKEN STEW is a Chef's kitchen story. The Wolf is fattening up Ms. Chicken for his stew ... but there is a surprise.
All of his cooking is successful in a new way!
If you like cookies, you may enjoy more favorite "Cookie" stories as follows:
B. BEAR And LOLLY: Catch That Cookie!
WATCH The COOKIE!
OLIVIA VENDE GALLETAS
The GINGERBREAD MAN LOST IN SCHOOL … and many more versions of the Gingerbread characters.
The COW LOVES COOKIES
The DOORBELL RANG
The DUCKLING GETS A COOKIE
SUGAR COOKIES: sweet little lessons on love
WHO TOOK The COOKIES FROM The COOKIE JAR
NO MORE COOKIES!
FABULOUS FOOD … a recorded CD full of songs and rhythm including “Who Stole The Cookies”!
And don't forget to play with Cookie Monster in C Is For COOKIE!
YUMMO!
Blog Post
LEGO Batman: The Movie
by PizzaPuppy
LEGO fans will be excited to hear that the new LEGO Batman Movie is due to arrive in theaters this Friday, February 10th! In it, Bruce Wayne struggles with fighting the criminals of Gotham City, as well as raising the young boy he has adopted (who most will recognize as his sidekick Robin!).
To prepare yourself for the new movie, you might want to catch up on what the Caped Crusader has been up to in books such as LEGO Batman Movie: Robin to the Rescue! or any of the LEGO DC Super Heroes books: Batman's Missions, Ready for Action!, or Carnival Capers.
We also have several LEGO Batman movies for you to check out, such as DC Super Heroes Unite!, Gotham City Breakout, Cosmic Crash, and Justice League vs Bizarro League.
You can remind yourself of why "Everything is Awesome" with the first LEGO Movie (or by listening to the soundtrack).
Can't get enough LEGO? We have a really fun LEGO Connection program coming up on Sunday, February 26th at 1 pm at the Westgate branch where you can come build whatever you like during open LEGO play.
Blog Post
African-American History Month - grades K-3
by ryanikoglu
It's African-American History Month and here is a Public List for Kids Picture Book History - AFRICAN-AMERICAN stories - for gr. K-3.
There are great stories from real lives being told in picture books.
These stories are first steps into someone else's past. We see "history written" ... about people with famous and not famous names.
They are stories worth hearing.
Grab some titles and find out why these names are saved for posterity.
Stories from the past might inform decisions for the future.