It’s Monday and I Remembered I Used to Blog about Reading!

It has been ages since I wrote anything really about what I have been reading, but I have missed reading other blog posts, so I felt it was important to write something. Also, I actually seem to have time. Sundays and Mondays have seemed just too busy over the last month or so. I am happy to link this post up with other posts using Kellee and Ricki’s unleashingreaders site. Head other there or to teachmentortexts.com, hsoted by Jen to see the other posts. Thanks to these three for hosting our posts.

Books I Recently Finished

This is a western with a healthy dose of the supernatural thrown in. It gets into the action immediately and like the western movies I watched when I was a kid, there are quite clearly good guys and bad guys here and a lot of chase and fight scenes. I think kids will quite drawn to the action here and I was initially but thought the road to the final conclusion was drawn out a bit long but overall it is a popcorn movie style action ride that is the first of four planned books.

I chose this book because the cover looks excellent, and I recognized the name of the author from my daughter’s copies of Kate O’Hearn’s Valkyrie books. I enjoyed the book but wished I had known more about O’Hearn’s Pegasus series. I think this book is a spin-off of that series from what I found out later. Not having read any of the Pegasus books, I found this a little hard to follow with the high number of characters and species. A little backstory, like a prologue or a hint that this is a spin-off would have helped.

As for the book itself the plot is detailed and interesting but I really wanted more world building or backstory on this world to be more engaged. For fans of Kate O’Hearn’s previous works, I think this would be a really good book as they would have that backstory from past volumes. For me, it was kind of average. This is clearly the first of a series, and I expected a non-ending but this one did not really have the cliffhanger I would expect in the first of a series. This book is released this week.

I had read several Eric Walters novels but until recently I didn’t really know him as a picture book writer. He is visiting my school next year so I have been checking some of them out and this is his newest. It’s the story of how a grandfather stays in touch with his granddaughter after his death through letters and gifts that come during milestone moments in her life. It’s very sweet story about grief and growing up.

This is a very real, YA book about an MG boy who is homeless. I actually flip-flop on whether this one is YA or MG. This is because I teach grade 6. Certainly, many of my students could read this, but if I nominated it for my district’s Battle of the Books, I know some would take feel parts of it are too mature. I really enjoyed this book and it’s main character Felix who struggles to deal with the his single mother’s inability to put a real roof over his head. I loved that it took place in Vancouver and had so many places that were familiar to me as a resident of BC. I really loved Susin Nielsen’s writing as well. This would go well with The Benefits of Being an Octopus.

I just finished this ARC that I requested from my ARC sharing group, Book Portage. I have been reading a tonne of books that deal with poverty and foster families over the last few months, and this is another. The main character Lucky lives with her grandparents and has a happy home until things start to unravel in the worst of ways for her. She enters the system and has many ups and downs within the system. This is a YA read, although it is not too graphic. The chapters are very short and it is a book that reads very quickly. I think readers will feel for Lucky’s misfortune, and want to see if and how she will get the support she needs to make it through. This book comes out in September.

Currently Reading

The Mark of Athena is our current family read aloud. The third book of Rick Riordan’s Heroes of Olympus series, it was picked by my 12 year old. We have both read it but my nine year old is eager to rip through the whole series, so we are re-reading. My nine year old selected Mortal Engines as her “daddy read aloud” but we have only just started. I also just started A World Below by Wesley King. I really enjoyed reading OCDaniel several times over the last year as I selected it for our Battle of the Books and Literature Circles and pledged to read more of his work when the school year ended.

On Deck

I have an ARC from Book Portage that needs to get moved to the next reader soon, so I am hoping to pick up Hazel’s Theory of Evolution later in the week, and also get to read more of the picture books I acquired for my library at the end of the school year. Happy Summer Reading to everyone!