It's That Time of the Year Again - That's Right! It's CYBILS Time!

I am just so excited because tomorrow TODAY October 1, 2016, nominations open in a variety of categories for this very prestigious award.  Surely, among these categories there are books that left you with winning memories.  I know I can think of more than a few.  So head on over to the Cybils Nominations and let the fun begin!

Board Books
Fiction Picture Books
Easy Reader/Early Chapter Books

Middle Grade Fiction
Young Adult Fiction

Elementary and Middle Grade Speculative Fiction
Young Adult Speculative Fiction

Elementary and Juvenile Non-Fiction
Middle Grade/Young Adult Non-Fiction

Audiobooks
Graphic Novels
Poetry

Of course, there are a few simple rules for nominating your favorites books.  These are

1- You (and you can be anybody, even you) may nominate any book published in the contest year in
     English.  However, this does include bilingual books, as well;
2- The book must be published in the US or Canada.  It's just more aggravation and expense than we
     can stand to wheedle free copies from foreign publisher;
3- Only one book nomination per category.  Get your friends and co-workers in on the act if you can't      make up your mind;
4- Nominations open October 1 and close October 15;
5- Please see the frequently asked question for more eligibility information.

Once again, I am delighted to be a Cybils 2nd Round judge in the category of Middle Grade Fiction for the fourth year in a row and I am looking forward to reading some wonderful novels.

So, get your thinking caps on and revisit the past year to see what books you think are Cybils winner.

A Boy Named Queen by Sara Cassidy

A Boy Named Queen is an ideal book for kids just starting middle school, where everything is different, but being different isn't always welcomed.  Free-spirited Queen is unlike anyone Evelyn, 10, has ever known and she is fascinated with him.  Queen and his loving, free spirited family represent everything Evelyn's life is not supposed to be according to her conventional mother. But underneath the ordinary exterior her mother has created for her, Evelyn is a girl with a lively imagination, a girl who just wants to be liberated from the conventions of her life.

Evelyn's mother is a person who loves order and routine (Evelyn not so much).  But when it comes time to buy new school shoes for beginning fifth grade, Evelyn's mother is dismayed to find that their regular shoe store has been sold to a franchise called Budget Shoes.  What it means for Evelyn is that she can get something other than the loafers her mother routinely buys her, something like a pair of blue canvas shoes. So what if they are a little tight, they're different.

On the first day of school, there is a new kid in Evelyn's class, a boy with long hair, wearing jeans with holey, stringy tears and a faded pink t-shirt accented with several bead necklaces.  Introduced as Queen, he is assigned to a seat next the Evelyn. And it doesn't take long for the bullying and the sarcastic, snide comments to begin, especially among the boys in the class.  When Evelyn sees Queen trying to shoot hoops during lunch, she goes over and shows him how to do it right.  It doesn't take long before the two are friends with each other.

At first, Evelyn thinks Queen should give in and become more like everyone else, so the other kids would leave him alone.  But when she says something to him about it, he teaches her how he deals with all the negativity directed his way.  Queen simply creates a colorful force field in him mind, allowing only the good things that come his way into it, while bad things are left outside of it.  To her surprise, Evelyn discovers it really works.

By the time, Evelyn is invited to Queen's birthday party, Queen's influence has been working on her little by little.  And even though her mother insists that they buy a present, even though Queen doesn't want any, and that she dress up, even though that isn't necessary for this party, Evelyn goes along with it, knowing this was going to be a different kind of party.  And it is, one that will change her in wonderful way so that she will never be the same afterward.  

A Boy Named Queen is a short, but powerful book, more novella than novel.  And it should be remembered that this is Evelyn's story, not Queen's.  It is about Evelyn learning to embrace her individuality, her uniqueness, and discovering ways to express it.  Queen can be seen as both a friend and a mentor, and he is a wonderful mentor.  Evelyn already has a vivid inner life, but it takes Queen to show her how to release it and still get along in the world with confidence.  And those too tight new blue canvas shoes are symbolic of the changes Evelyn is about to undergo, breaking with her mother's control on her life, and becoming more of an independent individual.

I think the writing in A Boy Named Queen is just beautiful: fluid, expressive and Sara Cassidy is really spot on in her descriptions. Using few words, she creates a full picture of both characters and settings, not an easy thing to do in a book with only 77 pages.  This is a book I would give to every fifth-grader to read before beginning middle school, but don't get me wrong, it is perfect for any young reader.  I have to be honest and say I wish I had this beautifully written book to give to my Kiddo when she was 10 years old.

This book is recommended for readers age 9+
This book was sent to me by the publisher, Groundwood Books

Marvelous Middle Grade Monday is a weekly event hosted by Shannon Messenger at Book Ramblings, and Plenty of Shenanigans

Tiny Stitches: The Life of Medical Pioneer Vivien Thomas by Gwendolyn Hooks, illustrated by Colin Bootman

Tiny Stitches is an excellent picture book for older readers about this fascinating life-saving pioneer in heart surgery.

When Vivien Thomas was a young boy, his dream was to enter the medical field.  As a teen, Vivien helped his father, a master carpenter in Nashville, Tennessee, who taught him the value of patient measuring, cutting and fitting together pieces of wood, skills that would definitely be valuable to Vivien later on.

Vivien saved his money for medical school, but by the time he was ready to go, the stock market had crashed and he lost all his savings. Luckily, he was able to get a job as a lab assistant working in Dr. Alfred Blalock's Vanderbilt University laboratory.

Thanks to Dr. Blalock, Vivien learned how to write lab reports and conduct experiments with the same kind of meticulous care he had used while working for his father, so it wasn't long before he was doing his own experiments.  But when he learned that his official job title was janitor because he was African American, he was insulted.  He confronted Dr. Blalock, asking for and receiving the same paid as white technicians.

When Dr. Blalock moved to Johns Hopkins in Maryland, Vivien and his wife and two daughters went with him.  Maryland is a southern state, and Johns Hopkins was more segregated that Vanderbilt was, so Vivien faced a more strident racism than he was used to.

But it was there that Vivien got involved in the research Dr. Helen Taussig's research on "blue babies," patients born with a heart defect that made their skin appear bluish because they did not get enough oxygen and usually died.

Thanks to his patient and meticulous research and experiments, Vivien was able to develop a procedure for delivering blood directly to the lungs to provide oxygen to a baby's body, using the tiny needle Vivien invented to make the tiny stitches needed to suture the arteries involved.

Was Vivien's procedure a success?  Yes, it was, with articles about it in Time and Life magazines, and eventually a Nobel Prize nomination.  Was Vivien given credit along with Dr. Blalock and Dr. Taussig?  No, not until 26 years after the first successful blue baby surgery.

It remained up to the doctors he has subsequently trained in his procedure to do that in 1971, and finally, in 1976, Johns Hopkins awarded Vivien an honorary doctorate and appointed him to the faculty as Instructor of Surgery (with the appropriate salary, hopefully).

I thought that Gwendolyn Hooks presented the obstacles Vivien Thomas faced because of his race with clarity and dignity.  I have to admit I was disappointed that there was no indication (and I'm sure that is because it didn't happen) that the two doctors Vivien had worked so closely with and whose life saving surgery was successful because of his experiments never insisted that he also be given credit.

I found this to be an excellent and inspiring story.  Colin Bootman's soft, realistic watercolor illustrations add depth and respect to a man who had to give up his dream of medical school and deal with the racism he faced at every turn, but who accomplished so much despite the obstacles in his way.

Hooks has included some interesting back matter, namely more about blue babies and Vivien Thomas, a useful glossary, and the source's she used to write this book.

Tiny Stitches is an excellent addition to any STEM library.  It is also the kind of book I never would have read as a young reader simply because it probably wouldn't have existed.  But, thankfully, that's beginning to change now so that more and more we are being introduced to heroes of color that we never would have known about otherwise.

This book is recommended for readers age 7+
This book was iBook received from Edelweiss/Above the Treeline and the publisher, Lee & Low Books

Nonfiction Picture Book Challenge is a weekly celebration of 

nonfiction books hosted by Alyson Beecher at Kid Lit Frenzy 

It's Monday! What are you reading?

It's Monday! What are you reading? is the original weekly meme hosted by Sheila at Book Journey, but is now hosted by Kathryn at Book Date.  It's Monday! What are you reading? - from Picture Books to YA is a kidlit focused meme just like the original and is hosted weekly by Jen at Teach Mentor Texts and Kellee at Unleashing Readers .  The purpose is the same: to recap what you have read and/or reviewed and to plan out your reading and reviews for the upcoming week. Twitter for #IMWAYR

Last week was a really busy week for me and, with the exception of Dear Mr. Henshaw, I didn't get to post as many reviews as I wanted to, but here are the books I did read (reviews to follow shortly):

1- Dear Mr. Henshaw by Beverly Cleary

2- Sachiko: A Nagasaki Bomb Survivor's Story by Caren Stelson

3- A Boy Named Queen by Sara Cassidy

4- Aim by Joyce Moyer Hostetter

5- Liberty by Kirby Larson

This week, I would like to catch up on my picture books, my favorite to read after middle grade fiction, and some chapter books.  Among our choices for the week:

1- Mercy Watson to the Rescue by Kate DiCamillo
2- Junie B., First Grader (at last) by Barbara Park
3- The Year of the Book by Andrea Cheng
4- The Kid Who Ran for President by Dan Gutman (timely)

What are you reading this week?

Dear Mr. Henshaw by Beverly Cleary, illustrated by Paul O. Zelinsky

Six-grader Leigh Botts hasn't been a very happy boy since his parents got divorced, and so he has decided to pick up where he left off in his correspondence with author Boyd Henshaw.  Leigh has been sending Mr. Henshaw one or two letters year since first grade, but now his sixth grade teacher has assigned the class an author report to improve their writing skills.

And so, Leigh decides to write to Mr. Henshaw again with a list of questions for his report, including any writing tips since Leigh would also like to be a famous author someday.  Although he gets a reply to his questions, Mr. Henshaw's answers are sometimes funny, other times snarky, but Leigh does think his writing tips are OK.  Oh yes, and Mr. Henshaw sends back a list of questions for Leigh to answer.  He has no intention of doing this until his mother finds the questions and tells him that since Mr. Henshaw answered his questions, Leigh needs to do the same.

As Leigh writes his answers to Mr. Henshaw's questions in a series of letters, it becomes clear that he is not handling his parents divorce well.  He misses his father, who keeps making promises to visit, promises which are broken.  And because of the divorce, Leigh and his mother have moved into a small apartment next to a gas station.  She has had taken two jobs to help make ends meet, but that means that Leigh is often home alone.  And to make matters worse, Leigh is the new kid in his class, so he has no friends yet, except for Mr. Fridley, the school janitor.  One positive aspect to his life is that his mother's second job is with a caterer, so there is often special treats in his lunch bag.  On the negative, someone is stealing these special treats out of his lunch bag almost every day.

Annoyed about this, Leigh decides to build an alarm to try and catch the person stealing his treats. When the alarm works, the kids in his class are totally impressed and Leigh finally makes a friend in school, though he doesn't catch the lunch bag thief.

And when he is encouraged by his teacher to write a story for the Young Writers' Yearbook, he decides to write about riding in his dad's rig, a story that gets him an honorable mention and a chance to meet a famous author.  Things begin to look up for Leigh, though he does learn that some things in his life won't change, but he slowly begins to accept that and more forward.

Dear Mr. Henshaw is an interesting epistolary novel.  Although the reader never gets to read any of Mr. Henshaw's replies to Leigh, what he writes can be surmised from Leigh's references to them. And since the story is told in the first person by Leigh, the reader has only his interpretation of Mr. Henshaw's letters, so the story's perspective is very limited.  Fortunately, for all his complaining, Leigh wants to be a writer, and so the things his writes are very informative as far as what is going on in his life.

I have to admit that at the beginning of the novel, I found Leigh to be a rather cranky, irksome protagonist, but as the novel progressed, and the problems he was trying to cope with became more and more apparent, I found him a much more sympathetic character.  There is a lot on Leigh's plate and Cleary handles it just right given the age of the intended readers.  Although, at times, I found the loneliness Leigh feels at school and at home is so palpable, it was difficult to read about it, even when I wasn't feeling very empathic towards him.

Beverly Cleary has crafted a beautifully plotted story that may feel a little dated (no cell phones, no computers - would his life have been different if these were available?), but the kinds of things Leigh must deal with are still very much relatable in today's world.  It is no surprise she won the Newbery in 1984 for Dear Mr. Henshaw.  

Cleary wrote what sounds like a great coming of age sequel to Dear Mr. Henshaw called Strider, and I am really looking forward to reading it and finding out how Leigh manages.

This book is recommended for readers age 9+
This book was purchased for my personal library