This Year's Favorites

This is a book that has been on recommendation lists since I was in elementary school, but it wasn't until this year that I actually gave it a shot. Surprise surprise -- it's excellent!

A twelve-year-old boy named Moose moves to Alcatraz Island in 1935 when guards' families were housed there, and has to contend with his extraordinary new environment in addition to life with his autistic sister.

This book is a must-read for any library kid. It poses important questions, like: who gets to decide what kids read? If you ban one book, can you ban any book? 

When fourth-grader Amy Anne Ollinger's favorite book is removed from her school library, she becomes a reluctant activist against censorship.

Sometimes you just need an absurd, silly book!

Our unnamed narrator argues (in great and hilarious depth) that fish are untrustworthy. 

I happened across this book while putting together a poetry project and it blew me away. All of these poems are reverso poems, which can be read forward or backward to create two different poems. Each poem is a greek myth, told from two different perspectives. It's extremely cool! 

Like many folktales from the Brothers Grimm, this is a dark story. The moral? No one can cheat death. 

I highly recommend this anthology to fans of Shel Silverstein and other comedic poets! 

This is another book that has been on "must read" lists since I was a kid, and I finally read it. The story is told through a series of poems written by a reluctant poet for a school assignment. As he writes, we get to understand him (and his resistance to writing). It's definitely a tearjerker!

I have a habit of reading the first book in a series and then not reading the sequels -- this book was so good and ended on such a cliffhanger, I had no choice but to continue!

A group of kids start to suspect that life in their small idyllic town isn't as perfect as it seems. Something sinister is going on... and their parents might be in on it.

This was a childhood favorite I revisited this year, just to make sure it holds up. It does! 

I've been getting into scary stories recently, and this book grabbed me from the first chapter.

Levi and Kat are the only two people who seem to realize that kids in their small town are going missing. They have to work together to solve the mystery before they disappear too!

Sometimes students will ask me: what's the scariest book in the school library? 

It's this one. 

It's also a heartfelt story about perseverance and coming of age.

This picture book not only has beautiful illustrations, but deals with an interesting and complex theme -- how do we react when we feel taken advantage of by our friends?