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If you like The Westing Game, you’re sure to like Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett and illustrated by Brett Helquist (illustrator of Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events).   The book jacket says Chasing Vermeer “is a puzzle, wrapped in a mystery, disguised as an adventure, and delivered as a work of art.” A famous painting by Jan Vermeer known as A Woman Writing has disappeared and its mysterious thief has threatened to destroy it. Sixth-graders Petra Andalee and Calder Pillay start out as classmates but soon become friends and fellow sleuths as they boldly venture to follow a trail of clues and track down the missing painting.  Using their wits and intuition, they solve the puzzle of the painting’s disappearance and its mysterious thief  . Chasing Vermeer reminds me a bit of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. Petra finds an old used book called Lo! that tells of coincidences throughout time.  As Petra thinks, “Why wasn’t more time . . .  spent studying things that were unknown or not understood .  . . ?  . . . To try to piece together a meaning behind events that didn’t seem to fit?” Perhaps there are no coincidences–perhaps life is really full of patterns and cosmic synchronicity.  Petra dreams of [...]

If you like The Westing Game, you’re sure to like Chasing Vermeer by Blue Balliett and illustrated by Brett Helquist (illustrator of Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events).   The book jacket says Chasing Vermeer “is a puzzle, wrapped in a mystery, disguised as an adventure, and delivered as a work of art.” A famous painting by Jan Vermeer known as A Woman Writing has disappeared and its mysterious thief has threatened to destroy it. Sixth-graders Petra Andalee and Calder Pillay start out as classmates but soon become friends and fellow sleuths as they boldly venture to follow a trail of clues and track down the missing painting.  Using their wits and intuition, they solve the puzzle of the painting’s disappearance and its mysterious thief  . Chasing Vermeer reminds me a bit of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. Petra finds an old used book called Lo! that tells of coincidences throughout time.  As Petra thinks, “Why wasn’t more time . . .  spent studying things that were unknown or not understood .  . . ?  . . . To try to piece together a meaning behind events that didn’t seem to fit?” Perhaps there are no coincidences–perhaps life is really full of patterns and cosmic synchronicity.  Petra dreams of [...]

Love, love, love this poster I got from Burning Through Pages!  Iconic poster + worthy cause=awesome. More about Burning Through Pages (from their website): “Burning Through Pages is a Denver-based non-profit organization that helps kids join book clubs in their communities (run by our volunteers and other kids), launch new book clubs in their communities, or interact one-on-one with a BTP volunteer.  We want to help kids experience literature on whatever level makes them comfortable, excited and reading, reading, reading!  We actually buy the books for the kids and if they love them, they keep them – and no, we are not joking.”  

Take Charlotte’s Web, Carl Hiassen’s Hoot, and toss in a dash of The Frog Prince, and what do you get?  The charming middle grade novel The Hop (Disney Hyperion 2012) by Sharelle Byars Moranville. The story begins with young Tad the toad:  The loamy tunnel had fallen around Tad during the long night of winter and padded him like a brown blanket.  But now the earth was stirring.  And even three feet down, the young hopper felt it.  Maybe it was the footsteps of people in the garden, or the deep, seepy drip of warm rain.  Maybe it was the chorus of spring peepers. But Tad’s winter slumber has been troubled by strange dreams, dreams that foretell the potential doom of his home, Toadville-by-Tumbledown.  He learns he must kiss the Queen of the Hop in order to save his home and his people.  But how can he find this Queen.  Tad reminds me a bit of Frodo–humble, fearful of the big wide world, and destined to go on a perilous quest. Enter Taylor, a girl who’s life has been turned upside down by her grandma’s chemotherapy and by the sale of the pond and acreage next to her grandma’s house.  Gone are her regular afternoons at grandma’s [...]

Maile Meloy’s (pronounced MY-lee like Miley Cyrus) middle-grade novel The Apothecary is a bit like Harry Potter meets the pharmacy meets the Cold War.  Instead of wizards and spells you have apothecaries and magical elixirs, and instead of evil Voldemort you have governments bent on nuclear domination. The year is 1952.  The place is London.  Janie Scott has been forced to move from Los Angeles with her screenwriter parents who have been blacklisted.  Soon she meets and makes friend with the daring and adventurous Benjamin Burrows, a classmate who is practicing his espionage skills in the hopes of one-day being a spy for Great Britain.  Heaven knows, he’d never like to be like his dull apothecary father who runs a boring pharmacy that has been in the family for generations. But boring old dad isn’t just a pharmacist–he’s a chemist, a scientist with an ancient book called the Pharmacopoeia that is full of directions for elixirs, potions, and chemical reactions.   Benjamin’s father is also involved in a plot to save the world from the devastating effects of the atom bomb.  Soon Janie and Benjamin are running from Russian spies, double-agents, and truancy officers as they race to save Benjamin’s father and prevent nuclear disaster.  The Apothecary is [...]

Who is the sage of the universe?  Who can you go to for wisdom when all around you is confusion?  Who can you trust?  Yoda, of course.  Tommy knows it, and his fellow sixth graders know it.  Maybe Yoda appears as an origami puppet on the finger of uber-nerd Dwight, maybe Yoda talks in a [...]

What do you do if you’re the new girl at school and no one smiles at you or talks to you or sits by you at lunch?  Well, if you’re Lissy, you make a friend.  You make an origami crane to be your new friend at your new school.

Author/illustrator Grace Lin uses wonderfully vibrant patterns and colors to tell the story Lissy’s Friends (Viking 2007).  As the new girl, Lissy hasn’t made friends yet, so she makes a paper crane to be her friend. 

After school Lissy’s mother asks her, “Did you make any friends in school today?”  She answers, “Well . . . I did make one friend.” 

Lissy makes herself more and more origami animals.  Soon she has a whole flock of origami friends.  And these paper friends keep her company and help her . . . until she can make people friends of her own.

I’m a big fan of Sharon Creech and have read almost everything she’s ever written.  I love her lyrical, creative use of language and her endearing characters.  Her new book The Unfinished Angel  (HarperCollins, 2009) is a short masterpiece with characters that you can’t help but love.

There is an angel that lives in the tower of the Casa Rosa in a tiny village in the Swiss Alp.  She flishes, and flooshes, beaming warm thoughts on “peoples.”  But she’s uncertain what her mission is.  Is she an unfinished angel?

In moves Zola Pomodoro.  Zola is “skinny like a twig-tree, with hair chip-chopped in a startling way” and her eyes are “gray with large black poppils in the middle.”  And as you can see from this quote, one of the charms of this book is its delightful coined words, words like “attractiful,”  ”impressifies,” and “explaterate.”

Zola is a happy gypsy of a girl with a spirit as bright as the peacock-colored skirts she wears.  Zola is one of the few people that can actually see the angel, and, chippy-choppy quick, Zola gets that angel hopping to help solve some of the town’s problems. 

The angel doesn’t much like being bossed around: “I do not like it when peoples tell me I have to do something.  It makes me want to not do the something.”  The angel worries when Zola tells her that the angel is supposed to know everything:  “I am?  This is a little shock to me.  No, it is a big shock.  Because I am not knowing many, many things.”

But in the end the angel says, “Zola, she is intrigueful to me.  In her many-layered clothings, with her chippy-choppy hair and the eyes with the big black poppils, in her sometimes bossy way, she has also the soft heart of a bunny.  The soft heart is also a smart heart because it is not soft for every puny silly thing, but over the things that are matterful.” 

Zola is an unfinished angel.  Aren’t we all?