VVMBookBlog

The results are in for VVMS!

Here are our winning books for the 2005-2006 Maud Hart Lovelace Minnesota Young Readers’ Award:

1. Fill Tilt by Neal Shusterman
2. Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
3. (Tie) – City of Ember by Jeanne Duprau & House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer

Our results will be added to all the other schools and public libraries in Minnesota and we’ll find out the statewide winner at the end of April. At that time we’ll also find out what books will be on next year’s reading list.

Here’s the website with more information: http://www.isd77.k12.mn.us/lovelace/lovelace.html

I’ll be the first one to say that I’m not a big fan of reading fantasy books. Strange beasts and social groups of thinking and talking rabbits or rats, let’s say, just usually aren’t my favorites to read. Then I read Airborn by Kenneth Oppel and I think I could be convinced fantasy isn’t such a bad thing.

Matt Cruse works as a cabin boy on a huge airship/dirigible that transports rich people around the world, following in his dad’s footsteps except his dad died in an airship accident years ago. Matt is happiest when he’s flying and feeling the bouyancy of the airship.

Early in the story Matt helps rescue a dying man in another smaller balloon. As the man died, he talked about seeing some strange furry, winged creatures. No one took him seriously until a year later when his granddaughter, Kate, and her chaperone boarded Matt’s airship, the Aurora. Kate is determined to find the truth in her grandfather’s sightings and gets Matt to help her.

Disaster comes to the Aurora in the form of pirates robbing the wealthy passengers, and then a huge storm forces the airship to land on a tropical island. And then the excitement really begins!

What will Kate, Matt, and the rest of the passengers and crew do while they are on the island? And what’s going to happen between wealthy Kate and Matt, a lowly cabin boy? It’s a real page-turner at the end and then comes the sequel called Skybreaker. What can happen next?

Our school district participates in a book preview program where publishers send our district copies of the newest books they have published. We pick out titles that would be good for our school, read them and then write up a review giving our opinion of the book and how our students would like it. Some teachers have done some reviews and we have also asked some students from time to time.

One of these preview books was Bang! by Sharon Flake, but it was a tough book with some tough issues to read about. Mann and his family live in an area of town with lots of random, and not so random, shootings–killings, and his family is affected directly by this situation when his younger brother, Jason, is shot and killed while playing on their front porch.

Mann has enough problems dealing with Jason’s death and his own guilt about whether he could have saved him. But then Mann has to deal with his father’s reaction to the shooting. His father says he won’t lose another son and reacts by deciding that he needs to toughen Mann up to the problems of the street–teach him to be a man! But the way Mann’s father does this is almost too much to take! He wants to go back to his African roots where young boys would be sent out into the wilderness to learn how to survive. The problem is that Mann’s “wilderness” are the dangerous streets of his city and the challenges to his survival are huge.

I can’t say I enjoyed reading this book but I had to stick with it to see how it ended. I do prefer another book by this author, The Skin I’m In, but if you want to see how some middle school age people have to live every day, try Bang!, now in our media center.

Thanks to everyone’s support of this year’s bookfair, we are able to add these books to our shelves:
Double Identity (2) – Haddix
Lion Boy: The Chase – Corder
Flush – Hiassen
Chicken Soup for the Preteen Soul (2)
World Plagues – Book 1 & 2
Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane (2) (Sequel to Gregor the Overlander)
Small Steps (2) – Sachar
That’s so Raven: Psyched
Best Friends for Never (2) -Harrison
Invasion of the Boy Snatchers (2) – Harrison
Series of Unfortunate Events – (2 each of #11 & #12)
Silverfin: A James Bond Adventure (3)
Private Peaceful (2) – Morpurgo
Secret Language of Girls (2) – Dowell
Disappearance: A Premonitions Mystery (2) – Watson
Becoming Naomi Léon (4) – Ryan
Airborn (4) – Oppel
Skybreaker (2) – Oppel
Camp Confidential TTYL
Code Orange (2) – Cooney
Sweet Miss Honeywell’s Revenge (2) – Reiss
Inkspell – Funke
Simpsons Books – (2 each of 3 different books)
Cool Stuff and How it Works

Give us a day or so to process these and then come and check them out!

(Originally posted 3/1/06)

Charlie, 12 years old, has been locked in the basement of his house for a LONG time, haunted by an image of a huge, reddish spider off to the side of his vision. His father sent him down there as a punishment for some unnamed crime, and his mother can’t seem to speak up to help him.

He sneaks up into the kitchen for a PB sandwich every night and a drink from the faucet. But it’s when he stepped outside one night to relieve himself–his father didn’t allow him to use the bathroom!–that he got locked out and ended up out on the street, cold and sick.

He woke up in a hospital room where people realized he didn’t know his name, and gradually realized he had never gone to school, couldn’t read or knew anything about everyday things like soccer, Halloween, TV and more! But Charlie only wanted to go back to the only security he knew–his abusive parents!

What was going on with his parents and how is he going to move on from these horrible memories? With the help of his doctor, Dr. Leidy, his new foster mom and foster brother, and his friend Aaron, maybe he can forget the horror of being locked in a basement and learn to live again.