Thirteen-year-old Clare Silver is stuck. Stuck in denial about her mother’s
recent death. Stuck in the African jungle for sixty-four days without phone
reception. Stuck with her father, a doctor who seems able to heal everyone but
Clare. Clare feels like a fish out of water at Mzanga Full Primary School,
where she must learn a new language. Soon, though, she becomes immersed in her
new surroundings and impressed with her fellow students, who are crowded into a
tiny space, working on the floor among roosters and centipedes. When
Clare’s new friends take her on an outing to see the country, the trip goes
horribly wrong, and Clare must face another heartbreak head-on. Only an orphan
named Memory, who knows about love and loss, can teach Clare how to laugh with
the moon. Told from an American girl’s perspective, this story about how
death teaches us to live and how love endures through our memories will capture
the hearts of readers everywhere.
I won't describe what I look like. Whatever you're thinking, it's probably
worse. August Pullman was born with a facial deformity that, up
until now, has prevented him from going to a mainstream school. Starting 5th
grade at Beecher Prep, he wants nothing more than to be treated as an ordinary
kid—but his new classmates can’t get past Auggie’s extraordinary face.
WONDER, now a New York Times bestseller and included on the Texas
Bluebonnet Award master list, begins from Auggie’s point of view, but soon
switches to include his classmates, his sister, her boyfriend, and others. These
perspectives converge in a portrait of one community’s struggle with empathy,
compassion, and acceptance.
In a world where bullying among young
people is an epidemic, this is a refreshing new narrative full of heart and
hope. R.J. Palacio has called her debut novel “a meditation on kindness”
—indeed, every reader will come away with a greater appreciation for the simple
courage of friendship. Auggie is a hero to root for, a diamond in the rough who
proves that you can’t blend in when you were born to stand out.
Walls Within Walls is an appealing mystery novel. You will need to find a
comfortable place to begin reading this novel because chances are, you will
become completely absorbed in the storyline, you will be compelled to finish it
without putting it down!
This is a children's novel written for 3rd - 6th
graders, but as an adult (and teacher) I found it captivating! Walls within
Walls is on the Bluebonnet list for the 2013-2014 school year.
I highly suggest
you read this nail-bitting mystery.
There’s “once upon a time” and “happily ever after,” but what happens when the
story “gets all tangled up” in the middle? That question is at the heart of this
debut title in a new fairy-tale-themed series. Ten-year-old Abby and her
seven-year-old brother, Jonah, are living a normal life in a new town until they
discover the mirror in the basement. When they knock on its surface three times,
they’re whizzed away to fairy-tale land and find themselves at the home of Snow
(yes, White). Just as Evil Evelyn, her wicked stepmother, is about to hand over
the infamous poison apple, Jonah intervenes. But if Snow doesn’t eat the poison
apple, then the prince can’t save her, and that means Snow’s love life is
ruined, not to mention Disney’s whole movie. There’s lots of hilarious artistic
license here (three of the seven dwarfs are women; one has pink hair), along
with unexpected plot twists and plenty of girl power. Tween girls who may not be
quite ready for Donna Jo Napoli and Gail Carson Levine’s fractured-fairy-tale
novels will find this title is just right. Grades 4-6.
A Mississippi town in 1964 gets riled when tempers flare at the segregated
public pool.As much as Gloriana June Hemphill, or Glory as everyone knows her,
wants to turn twelve, there are times when Glory wishes she could turn back the
clock a year. Jesslyn, her sister and former confidante, no longer has the time
of day for her now that she’ll be entering high school. Then there’s her best
friend, Frankie. Things have always been so easy with Frankie, and now suddenly
they aren’t. Maybe it’s the new girl from the North that’s got everyone out of
sorts. Or maybe it’s the debate about whether or not the town should keep the
segregated public pool open. Augusta Scattergood has drawn on real-life events
to create a memorable novel about family, friendship, and choices that aren’t
always easy.
Take a bite out of this deliciously funny original fairy tale, which received four starred reviews and was named a Best Book of the Year by Booklist, School Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews, and the Bank Street College of Education.
What would you do if you were invited to the princess’s tenth birthday party but didn’t have money for a gift? Well, clever Jack decides to bake the princess a cake.
Now he just has to get it to the castle in one piece. What could possibly go wrong?
From Roman Holiday to Breakfast at Tiffany's, when Audrey
Hepburn starred in a movie, she lit up the screen. Her unique sense of fashion,
her grace, and, most important, her spirit made her beloved by generations. But
her life offscreen was even more luminous. As a little girl growing up in
Nazi-occupied Europe, she learned early on that true kindness is the greatest
measure of a person—and it was a lesson she embodied as she became one of the
first actresses to use her celebrity to shine a light on the impoverished
children of the world through her work with UNICEF.
This is Audrey Hepburn as a little girl, an actress, an icon, an inspiration;
this is Audrey just being Audrey.
I thought this book was a great book to assign your class to sum up the World
War II lesson. The book, Someone Named Eva, is by Joan M. Wolf. The main setting
is in Poland. The family of six this story is about there is Milada, Babichka,
Mama, Papa, Anechka, and Jaroslav. One day the Nazis busted in and arrested them
and separated the boys and the girls.
Then the girls were taken to a school gym and all the young girls with blonde
hair were inspected and taken away from their family. The girls that were
inspected and taken away were trained to be young German girls, or Aryans, and
they were given new names, I bet you are wondering what Milada's new name is ,
but to find that out you will have to buy this book. When her training was
finished she was taken to Germany and she got to see what her new life would be
like. The next day was the day the adoption day was starting. The next day was
the day she was adopted. To find out more on her life and the struggles she went
through you will have to buy this great book which I highly recommend you do.
I love to read David Shannon's books because they are always fun, but also often
have a good lesson to teach. In this book, Camilla loves lima beans, but won't
admit it because she is afraid of what the other kids will think of her. So, she
breaks into a bad case of stripes; changing her appearance every time the people
around her change. At the end of the story, she learns that it is okay to be
different and it doesn't matter what other people think of you.
Here is a funny middle-grade mystery from a bright new fiction talent.Things in
the New England town of Ashcrumb are getting weird. Or just weirder. Misty
Gordon, whose antique-dealing parents drive a van that says “D.E.A.D.” on the
side (for “Deceased’s Estate and Antique Dealer”), is accustomed to weird.One
day, when accompanying her father to the estate of a recently departed
clairvoyant, Misty discovers a notebook and a pair of eyeglasses that enable her
to see ghosts! And solve mysteries. With the help of her new powers and her best
friend, Yoshi, Misty learns that her hometown was settled not by respectable
colonists but by pirates! And the ghosts of the pirates are returning to reclaim
a dangerous, powerful treasure they lost centuries ago. Who will find it first,
Misty or the pirates?
Right now I'm reading Killing Lincoln by Bill O'Reilly.
The anchor of The O'Reilly Factor recounts one of the most dramatic
stories in American history—how one gunshot changed the country forever. In the
spring of 1865, the bloody saga of America's Civil War finally comes to an end
after a series of increasingly harrowing battles. President Abraham Lincoln's
generous terms for Robert E. Lee's surrender are devised to fulfill Lincoln's
dream of healing a divided nation, with the former Confederates allowed to
reintegrate into American society. But one man and his band of murderous
accomplices, perhaps reaching into the highest ranks of the U.S. government, are
not appeased.
In the midst of the patriotic celebrations in Washington D.C., John Wilkes
Booth—charismatic ladies' man and impenitent racist—murders Abraham Lincoln at
Ford's Theatre. A furious manhunt ensues and Booth immediately becomes the
country's most wanted fugitive. Lafayette C. Baker, a smart but shifty New York
detective and former Union spy, unravels the string of clues leading to Booth,
while federal forces track his accomplices. The thrilling chase ends in a fiery
shootout and a series of court-ordered executions—including that of the first
woman ever executed by the U.S. government, Mary Surratt. Featuring some of
history's most remarkable figures, vivid detail, and page-turning action,
Killing Lincoln is history that reads like a thriller.
This is not my review. However, this book was very informative. I would recommend this book. Here is the book's description as written on Amazon.
Auschwitz was one of the first books to bring the full horror
of the Nazi death camps to the American public; this is, as the New York Review
of Books said, "the best brief account of the Auschwitz experience
available."When the Nazis invaded Hungary in 1944, they sent virtually the
entire Jewish population to Auschwitz. A Jew and a medical doctor, the prisoner
Dr. Miklos Nyiszli was spared death for a grimmer fate: to perform "scientific
research" on his fellow inmates under the supervision of the man who became
known as the infamous "Angel of Death"--Dr. Josef Mengele. Nyiszli was named
Mengele's personal research pathologist. In that capactity he also served as
physician to the Sonderkommando, the Jewish prisoners who worked exclusively in
the crematoriums and were routinely executed after four months. Miraculously,
Nyiszli survived to give this horrifying and sobering account.Auschwitz was one
of the first books to bring the full horror of the Nazi death camps to the
American public. Although much has since been written about the Holocaust, this
eyewitness account remains, as the New York Review of Bookssaid in 1987, "the
best brief account of the Auschwitz experience available." Of Bruno Bettelheim’s
famous foreword Neal Ascherson has written, "Its eloquence and outrage must
guarantee it a permanent place in Jewish historiography."
I read this book in one day. I could not put it down! It was very entertaining. I would recommend this story!
The book is about a little three year old boy who gets sick and has to undergo an emergency appendectomy. He survives the surgery, and his parents give the Lord praise for his survival!
Overtime, his parents realize he went to heaven while on the operating table. He was able to authenticate that claim by describing what his parents were doing in the hospital while he was having surgery. With the innocence of a child, he tells of seeing "Pops," his parents' lost child, and seeing Jesus' beautiful face and shining eyes.
Colton's words and the purity of his heart makes his story very convincing. It made me smile. =)
A powerful, blazingly honest memoir: the story of an eleven-hundred-mile solo
hike that broke down a young woman reeling from catastrophe “and built her back
up again." I would recommend this memoir.
At twenty-two, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything.
In the wake of her mother’s death, her family scattered and her own marriage was
soon destroyed. Four years later, with nothing more to lose, she made the most
impulsive decision of her life: to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave
Desert through California and Oregon to Washington State “and to do it alone."
She had no experience as a long-distance hiker, and the trail was little more
than an idea, vague and outlandish and full of promise. But it was a promise of
piecing back together a life that had come undone.
Strayed faces down
rattlesnakes and black bears, intense heat and record snowfalls, and both the
beauty and loneliness of the trail. Told with great suspense and style,
sparkling with warmth and humor, Wild vividly captures the terrors and
pleasures of one young woman forging ahead against all odds on a journey that
maddened, strengthened, and ultimately healed her.
Within days of Rielle Hunter promoting her book coming out -- and her finally, freely, spouting her truth, her version of their journey together -- it's o-v-e-r? Now on so many levels I don't care one bit, one way or the other. Their lives, their movie... But as I sat watching her field hard questions (and feeling that human penchant to think she, of course on some level, deserved to be a wee bit raked over the coals) a few things came to mind. First of all, in the interviews I saw with her -- both before the weekend, and after -- it was so palpable how Rielle loved this man. Wholeheartedly, unconditionally -- almost blindly. Part of her motivation for writing her book it seems, besides money of course, was to defend him to anyone who would listen. As I watched her try and hold back her emotion as she tried to explain to Barbara Walters what had possibly happened between Friday and Monday to have caused them to break up, I felt for her. She had lost the one thing she had believed in the most--through all the madness and lies and deception -- him. And you could tell, she couldn't quite believe it, or understand it, herself. Hadn't it been her turn to defend and redeem herself, to tell her version... to, finally, wipe the egg off of her face by shouting from the roof tops what she believed would explain everything?
Apparently not. And it's so obvious where she went wrong. It's where so often times our human nature can take a bad turn by fooling ourselves into thinking we will feel better if we throw a few stones at those who have hurt us or made us look bad. Surely if we point out their faults, tell their secrets, throw them under the bus -- we will be vindicated. The truth -- our version of the truth -- will clear up everything. In reality, talking badly about others rarely fixes anything. And oh my god, talking badly about the dead is really never a good idea. There is something sacred about someone who has died, the unspoken consensus is -- let them rest in peace. Not to mention it ruffles our feathers that they can't defend themselves, it feels unfair. Remind me if I forget, it is never a good idea.
If I were writing Rielle's script, I might have had her say something like...
"We, as human beings, are very complex, it is often very different than how it seems on the outside looking in. I've had to sit by for a long time and listen to everyone talking 'about' me, about Johnny"
(No, change that -- even if she calls him that when they are together, I would only have her call him 'John' when she is speaking of him in public to strangers, 'Johnny' sounds kind of creepy.)
"... about John and I and our child together, and that's been almost unbearable. I've wanted to say a lot of things, to right some wrongs, to paint a different picture of who I am, who he is, and who we are together. We've made a lot of mistakes, but we're not the only ones. There are many sides to every story, it is hardly ever just black and white, with one side being all good and one side being all bad. I hope you can keep that in mind when you are tempted to judge us and continue to write and say unkind things. I have to take responsibility for barging into a marriage and hurting others, including their children, and I have to live with that. I am truly sorry. As we all move forward, I hope they, the children, can forgive me, because I love John and our daughter more than anything in this world and hope that peace and reconciliation can find its way to us, as we try and get on with our lives."
Or something like that. I'm viewing this lesson from Rielle Hunter as the 'Rielle reminder' which I hope serves to remind me to always take the high road. To remember that defending myself is always best when it doesn't include decimating someone else. That too much information of details I think will make me look better, rarely does, I only feel slightly dirty after. As a friend of mine said this week, "I had a revelation that I spent far too much time on my vacation gossiping and saying unkind things -- I came back exhausted." It wears us out to betray ourselves by speaking ill of others, even if we're technically right in our observations. Whenever we are mean we are losing something of the good in ourselves, and the irony is, the truth of someone's true character usually reveals itself without any help from us. And if it doesn't, so be it. I sometimes think of that line in the movie The Wizard of Oz when the evil Miss Gulch comes to take Toto away and Auntie Em is beside herself trying to talk her out of it and says something to the effect of, "I've waited 35 years to tell you just what I think of you... and now, well, being a Christian woman, I just can't say it." We should all take a hint and keep our mouths shut. Remember, in the end, the witch drowns in a half bucket of water in her own misery and sorrows.
I have no idea what happened between Rielle Hunter and John Edwards, and I don't want to know. But I do want to take away a lesson in this earth school moment, that we all weave a terrible web sometimes but it's what we do and how we behave as move on in life that really matters. Is there redemption, is there forgiveness, is there a way to be a better human being as we try and clean up our messes? I hope so. And it starts with humility and taking responsibility and choosing to act lovingly instead of justifying our actions. Or getting our point across. Even if somebody else's bad behavior came into play and may have affected the choices we made, better to just take responsibility for our sides of the street and leave it at that. Maybe, in hindsight, Rielle should have just written it as a fairy tale about their love, repented publicly for her own un-evolved, unloving behavior and just left it at that. I hate it that often times in order to supposedly get a book deal -- or sell a lot of books -- they make it seem like you have to trash somebody or tell lurid, one-sided tales that are better left alone. Rielle Hunter is not the first, and certainly won't be the last, author to discover that telling your truth that way, in the end, doesn't make you feel any better about yourself. And it certainly doesn't keep you warm at night.
