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Just a friendly reminder to toss your hat in the ring before 11:59pm tonight to win a copy of David Small’s Stitches. You can send me an email at scopenotes@gmail.com, or you can make you interest known through Twitter by clicking here.
Click here to read the original giveaway post.
Best of luck!
I have been told that after a week of strict radio silence (due to Northern Michigan travels), it’s best to come back with a bang. I’m doing my best to please with the latest 100 Scope Notes Book Giveaway:
Stitches: A Memoir by David Small. ARC.
It arrived, I started reading, I couldn’t stop reading. Disturbing, haunting, exceptional (100 Scope Notes review to come soon). I won this myself in a no-holds-barred giveaway on the blog EarlyWord, so it’s only proper etiquette to pass it along, right?
If you are interested in finding Stitches in your mailbox, send me an email at scopenotes@gmail.com or contact me via Twitter. If I get your entry before 11:59pm on Tuesday night, your name will get tossed into my generously-sized, homemade, occasionally used for Abe Lincoln impersonation, black stovepipe hat. The winner will be fished out soon thereafter.
A related side note: this book ain’t for kids! Not even close. What we have here is a fine example of grown-up readin’ (or at least high school). Enter at your own risk.
Best of luck!
Due to summer travels, 100 Scope Notes will be up on the shelf until Monday.
See you back here then.
(Top Image: ‘water slide‘
www.flickr.com/photos/77482236@N00/369387948)
I usually talk about new books in these pages. It’s fun to hold up your hand, shield your eyes from the sun, and squint into the horizon to see what’s coming. Then a teacher comes and asks if you can drum up 20 copies of Mickey’s Magnet for her second grade students.
As a school librarian, it helps to have a source for out-of-print and hard-to-find titles. If for no other reason than for people to think you have the amazing ability to find any book, at any time.
Add Biblio.com to your arsenal of book finding tools. The site allows you to track down and purchase books that have been put out to pasture. Click the image below to start looking.
Since the upcoming American Library Association Annual Conference will be my first, I want to let everyone know I mean business. The programs, the meetings, the exhibits, the people – I’m intending to dabble in every arena. While I briefly toyed with the idea of rolling into Chicago sporting an all tweed suit with leather elbow and knee patches (for durability), I settled on the decidedly more practical business card:
(This image has been tinkered with)
Nope, I am not messing around. Not one bit.
So different, yet so similar. This could be called the first Bizarro cover controversy. If you are familiar with Superman (or the television show Seinfeld), then you know that a Bizarro version of something is closely related, yet completely opposite in many ways. Let’s take a look at the book covers in question and I think you’ll see what I mean.
First up:
Kendra by Coe Booth.
And now, its Bizarro counterpart:
Hattie Big Sky by Kirby Larson.
Side by side:
While the positioning and perspective are the same, the setting is decidedly dissimilar.
A side note: Is it just me, or does there seem to be a lot of sky on book covers these days? Further investigation my be needed…
In the school library circles where I run, Wikipedia is a downright hot-button issue. Should students access it from school? Should teachers allow students to use it for school research projects? My take? A nice overview, but not an ending place – you gotta use a variety of sources.
Anyway, when I saw that artist Rob Matthews went and took all of Wikipedia’s featured articles (all 5000 pages worth) and created an actual book, my eyes said, “that’s pretty wild”.
You know, you can break that into volumes:
(Thanks to BuzzFeed for the link)
Remember when you were in school and the cafeteria was serving pizza for lunch? There was always a bit of excitement on those days. Sure, it wasn’t the best pizza in the world, but it was still pizza. The allure of the food outweighed the fact that it wasn’t always stellar eatin’. Such is the feeling I got while reading Lunch Lady and the Cyborg Substitute, the first installment of Jarrett J. Krosoczka’s graphic novel series for young readers. What it lacks in character development, it makes up for with a large dose of appeal.
There has possibly never been a hero with a more wildly contrasting alter ego than the lunch lady at Thompson Brook School. With the help of her assistant, Betty, Lunch Lady fights crime when she’s not serving chicken nuggets and mashed potatoes. When a new substitute teacher shows up to fill in for a popular teacher, his odd behavior makes lunch lady and the “Breakfast Bunch” (a trio of friends who eat breakfast in the cafeteria) suspicious. When Lunch Lady decides to trail the sub, the Breakfast Bunch do the same to Lunch Lady. It turns out suspicions were well founded on both accounts. The result, in classic comic form, is an all-out abandoned warehouse brawl.
There are clever touches everywhere in this book. All of the gadgets are lunchroom-related. Betty has created helicopter spatulas, exploding chicken nuggets, and other tools to help Lunch Lady get the job done. You have to see the stroke of genius Betty achieves with fish sticks.
Not only will the gadgets amuse, but the dialog also has plenty of cafeteria talk. All of Lunch Lady’s exclamations are food-inspired. Instead of “oh no!” you get “good gravy!” I can already see kids cracking smiles at these.
A shortcoming I noticed was in the development of the Breakfast Bunch. I couldn’t quite pin down their personalities, making them sort of tough to distinguish. I’m hopeful this will change, however, as the series continues and the characters of Hector, Dee, and Terrance have the opportunity to become more round.
The artwork and overall design will be a draw to young readers. Krosoczka’s ink illustrations are clean and uncluttered, providing plenty of space for color. I say color singular because, as evidenced by the cover, yellow is the pigmentation of choice here. Variations on the hue appear in every panel, giving the book a nice, unified look.
One thing I realized after reading, and then had to check back in the book to confirm is that Lunch Lady does not disguise her identity when fighting crime. While the kids who witness her taking on the robots promise not to tell, the whole “absence of a mask” thing is tricky. Lunch lady will either have to rely on a lot of people to help keep her secret or she’ll have to do her crime fighting covertly. Or (I just thought of option #3!) the secret identity isn’t that important at all and it’s okay for everyone to know. I’m curious to see how this is dealt with in future installments of this series.
Not an instant home run, but sporting charm to spare, Lunch Lady and the Cyborg Substitute is a clever start to what could be a solid series.
Watch the book trailer for Lunch Lady:
Lunch Lady is being turned into a movie, click here to read more.
Find this book at your local library with WorldCat.
Tired of having to go all the way to the New York Times website to get your weekly bestseller info? Sick of having to click on “Children’s Books” to get the information you need? I’ll share the top 5 picture and chapter book bestsellers here, but if you want to see the entire lists, you’ll have to head over to Reading Radar (my favorite source for NYT bestseller info). Now let’s see which books leapt off shelves most this week.
Yep, yep, not many shockers here. Pinkalicious up at the top, continui- wait! Goldilicious? Goldilicious? Sure as shootin’. Pinkalicious and Purplicious dominated my K-2 book fair last year and this year respectively, so it comes as no big surprise that the color wheel continues to be mined in this series. In fact, three of the top five are sequels of some sort. They also all have that whole “appealing to girls and their parents” thing going on, which really can’t be underestimated. Gallop! also continues to shine in its 82nd (!) week on the list.
Let’s take a look at the chapter books:
A couple climbers on this top 5. The Graveyard Book moves back up to take the number two spot, while The Hunger Games is experiencing a popularity jump likely due to the building buzz about Catching Fire, the second book in that series, which will be released in September.
Man, folks really don’t waste much time these days making silver-screen moves on children’s lit. From THR.com:
Universal has picked up “Lunch Lady,” a children’s graphic novel series written and illustrated by Jarrett Krosoczka, with Amy Poehler attached to star. Poehler will executive produce along with the Gotham Group’s Ellen Goldsmith-Vein set to produce.
Click here to read the entire article. Let me point out that nary a book has been released yet! The series hits shelves in July. And here I’ve been holding off my review until we get closer to the release date. Look for that shortly.
A side note: How many books have debuted with a “Soon to be a Major Motion Picture!” sticker on the cover? Can’t be many – will Lunch Lady be sporting one?
(Thanks to Gawker for the link)
