| Hi All & Happy June!
This week, I was enjoying one of my favorite late spring reads, Stuck by Oliver Jeffers! This author-illustrator is probably best known for being half the team behind the incredibly popular The Day The Crayons Quit series! This book has a lovely green and yellow springtime color palette! And it is a story fun for the reader and the child being read to alike, since it is full of visual puns and unusual plot twists, as Floyd tries to rescue his kite from a tall, tall tree! Even the fire fighters end up getting stuck when they come to help!
Although not everyone has managed to climb out of the tree by nightfall, Floyd does manage to retrieve his kite, in an unexpected way! f you and your family enjoy this book, you can also enjoy Jeffer's first book, which also features a very patient boy on a magical and surprisingly successful quest How To Catch A Star on Hoopla!
For my teen book this week, I have been feeling a lot of what they call Fernweh in German lately, a longing to travel, and when I heard that the wildly popular teen novel Darius The Great Is Not Okay (which is on our library's 2019 & 2020 Teen Greatest Hits Collection list) was getting a sequel this fall, I decided to take a mental summer vacation with Darius and his family to visit his mom's extended family in Iran!
Darius is a Persian-American teen from the Midwest, and this is his first visit to the country where his mother grew up! Darius struggles with depression, and he's not anticipating having a particularly good summer away from his hometown. With his nerdy, niche interests, Darius also certainly wasn't expecting to make a new best friend, his grandparents' teenage neighbor, Sohrab! Ironically, halfway around the world, Darius feels he finally has a friend who understands him. But what does that mean when it's time for Darius's newfound self-confidence when it's time to return home to the US? I have been listening to the audiobook version of this title on Hoopla, and I highly recommend it! It's also available as an e-book. If you have a teen at home who is a fan of the current trend of gritty, "real" YA (like John Green or Rachael Lippincott), this would be a more uplifting addition to their summer reading list!
Take care, everyone! Talk to you again soon. | |
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