It’s Easter Monday, what have you been reading?

Hopefully, all of you are in the midst of a great holiday weekend. I am squeezing in a little time to read amongst some family time and am also happy to link up my reading post with other bloggers at teachmentortexts and unleashingreaders, great sites to get more titles for your to-read lists.

Books I Enjoyed This Week:

I re-read this in anticipation of my district’s Battle of the Books in June. To be honest, I am finding this quite, slower paced book a tough sell with the class I have this year. Once they get going with it, my students find there are wonderful characters to love and dislike here, and the satisfying conclusion with the way things come together in the last third was excellent. When I re-read it, I was even more taken by the way Erin Entrada Kelly wrote the bully, Chet Bullens.

This story had very likable characters, including the title character, whose struggles dealing with anxiety and OCD in her family as well as friendship and relationship issues felt very real. I am glad I added this to my library this year and wish I had picked it up to read sooner. I read this shortly after re-reading OCDaniel, in which a child is dealing with OCD. Kat Greene Come Clean has more of the stereotypical OCD (with obsessions being mostly about cleaning), but in both cases there are title characters that learn about mental health, something all people should be learning more about.

December is a young girl who has spent much of her life in the foster care system, and feels like she will be abandoned and mistreated by whomever is charged with her care. She also believes that she will eventually spread wings and fly away from her situation, because she is really a bird.  What she really needs is trust and support, and when she is placed with Eleanor, who volunteers for an animal rescue group and works to help injured animals to the wild, December has a lot of decisions to make as she is treated differently than she ever has before. This is a very emotional story, and there is also a subplot in which December has to deal with bullies and make friends with a girl that has a past of her own. This is a quiet, introspective book that I think would find an audience in my classroom. This book is released next week.

I also re-read this one for our Battle of the Books. I write trivia style questions for all of the books for a school vs. school competition we have in teams (kind of like the competition in Out of My Mind). I have never done so for a graphic novel before. I found it more difficult, especially when I have read all eight books in this series and fond the questions I wanted to ask required information from books further along in the series. However, I am still glad we put a graphic novel in our event, as it has pulled in more readers, and also the hard core readers that love our event sometimes don’t recognize graphic novels as much as what they normally read but are discovering great plots and characters.

Currently Reading

I read the second of Eric Walters Rule of Three trilogy and let myself hang on the cliff of that ending for longer than I would have thought, but I am taking some time to see how this exciting plot plays out before passing it to a student who just started book two. I managed to get an ARC of This Place from the publisher, I am reading it slowly as it is on my computer. I can’t seem to get it transferred to my IPAD. It is a series of graphic novels covering history from much more of an Indigenous perspective than we have seen in print. My family continues to enjoy the first in the Endling series.

Thanks for reading my blog this week, I hope everyone has a great end to their holiday weekend and an excellent reading week!