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As happens every month, new diversity releases for the month are list here, at Diversity in YA and at Rich in Color. And each month, we all manage to have different lists. I only list books written by authors of color. Rich In Color “is dedicated to reading, reviewing, talking about, and otherwise promoting young adult fiction starring people of color or written by people of color” and Diversity in YA celebrates “young adult books about all kinds of diversity, from race to sexual orientation to gender identity and disability.”I hope to provide a similar post each month.

Subtle differences which gives us lists that feature marginalized American teens. For all of May’s listings please use the following links. Do you know of other YA blogs we should include? Do tell!

Diversity in YA

Rich In Color

CrazyQuiltsEdi

Filed under: New Books Tagged: diversity in YA, may, Rich In Color

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National Bike Month is upon us! So if you haven't already, hop on a pair of wheels and go for a spin--and don't forget to bring the kids. When you're finished, rest your saddle-sore rear in a comfy chair and share some of the following books with the training-wheels set.

Chris Raschke's latest picture book breaks down the steps involved in mastering how to ride a bike. The young girl starts with training wheels, then raises them a "smidge" and finally they're off completely. A few spills and a lot of tries later and she's a bona fide rider. Yay!
Everyone Can Learn to Ride a Bike
by Chris Raschke
Schwartz & Wade, 32 pages
Published: 2013

A boy takes his new bike to his friend's house, where it disappears. The mystery is soon solved with no hard feelings. Although skimpy on story, the appealing illustrations make this picture book.
New Red Bike!
by James E. Ransome
Holiday House, 32 pages
Published: 2011

When Sally Jean outgrows Flash, her bicycle, her family can't afford to buy her another right away. Ever resourceful, Sally Jean repairs the bike and eventually builds herself a new one from spare parts. And her beloved Flash is gifted to another rider who's outgrown his bike. A happy ending for all!
Sally Jean, the Bicycle Queen
by Cari Best
illustrations by Christine Davenier
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 32 pages
Published: 2010

Visually stunning, this deceptively simple picture book features a cyclist as he pedals through town and country along a long road. Viva uses simple text and just five colors to create this contemporary masterpiece.  
Along a Long Road
by Frank Viva
Little, Brown, 40 pages
Published: 2011

And if you would like more choices, check out my previous post, Animals Riding Bikes. Happy pedaling and happy reading!

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Make your coins count!  During the month of May you can magically turns your spare change into books for kids in need!

Coinstar’s partner, Change Making Change, is featuring First Book as their “charity of choice” throughout the month of May.

Have a coin jar or a jumble of noisy pennies in your pocket? Have your kids been filling their piggy banks? Drop off those coins and help a child from a low income family receive new books!  It’s a great way to encourage your kids to help other children – which is what Change Making Change is all about.

To participate, go to a Coinstar kiosk, select the Coins that Count donation option and then pick Change Making Change as the recipient. Just empty those jars and piggy banks right into the hopper. All donations to Change Making Change throughout May will benefit First Book (and all donations are fully tax deductible).

Coinstar machines can be found at most local grocery stores. To find the Coinstar nearest you, click here.

After you make your donation, follow us on Facebook and Twitter to watch the First Book magic in action!

The post Coinstar + Spare Change = Books for Kids! appeared first on First Book Blog.

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Obviously this is the last day of May, but it’s also the day before the launch of a new website called “Two Voices, One Song.” My friend, Meena Rose, and I have created a new joint venture. It’s a blending of philosophies, perspectives, and visions, which I hope all of our regular readers will enjoy.

We’re inviting our readers to take a peek inside this new space before the rush of tomorrow, to have a look at the rooms within our freshly built abode.

Does this mean that Claudsy’s Blog will cease to exist or be abandoned like an old toy in favor of a new one? Not for a long while yet, is the only answer I can honestly give. It does mean that I’ll only be posting here every other day, instead of daily, as is now the case.

Meena and I are blending as much as we can of who we are as people and writers to give readers a far better look into our minds. Among the rooms at “Two Voices, One Song,” you’ll find regular brainstorming sessions between us while we work out problems with pieces of fiction, non-fiction, or poetry. You’ll find regular pieces of finished fiction/non-fiction, as well.

Memoir entries centered on travels we’ve made, and understandings or thoughts we’ve taken away from those travels, will show up in the garage each week. Discussions of philosophy will take place in the Library, even while meditation is offered in the Garden. For those in need of writing prompts, there is a large selection from which to find just the one to stir the imagination and the Muse.

Along the way, we’ll have links to places we find worthwhile, engaging, or instructive. We urge every visitor to take advantage of these offerings and to offer feedback in return.

Profiles and interviews, stories and articles, poems and projections all come together there for savoring by the reader.

In the meantime, I’ll be having regular posts here as well. If I do fiction there, it will show up here. The same holds true for poetry and questioning pieces.

And while Claudsy’s Blog will migrate much of its content to the new site, Claudsy’s Calliope will do the same; as will Trailing Inspirations. This co-mingling of content and perspective feels like the proper thing to do right now, in this surge of creativity that was fostered at the beginning of May.

Please enjoy a tour of “Two Voices, One Song” and see if what you’ll find there will be as suitable to you as my offerings her

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Read Around the World Challenge

May Link-Up

The Details:

• Make sure that before you link-up your reviews, you sign up for the challenge on the challenge post

.

Anyone, even non-bloggers can participate. Open worldwide. If you don’t have a blog, just link to your Amazon, Good Reads or other review posting.

Link as many reviews as you’d like throughout the month. Each link to an actual review will earn you an entry in the drawing.

April’s Winner: I’m thrilled to tell you that Amy from Delightful Children’s Books

won the April contest and won a copy of Lucky’s Little Feather.

This month’s prize drawing will be done at 11:59 pm EST on May 31st so you have until that time to make entry/reviews counting for March’s prize drawing.

May’s prize: An assortment of ARCs (at least 3 books)

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Perchance to Dream Winners


Kelsey Oertwich

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May:

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Since about May of this year I've discovered a love for abstracts and have been cranking them out like crazy since then. So far I've got about 64 of them. (More if you count the different versions of one image) You can check out more of them and purchase if you like here: http://www.imagekind.com/GalleryProfile.aspx?gid=97e5fe65-5006-4c0e-9745-c778120eb248
Enjoy the rest of the summer.
MC

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Megan Branch, Intern

Patrick Wright a Professor at the Institute for Cultural Analysis at Nottingham Trent University and a fellow of the London Consortium.  Wright wrote On Living in An Old Country and its companion, A Journey Through Ruins: The Last Days of London (read an excerpt here). On Living in an Old Country looks at history’s role in shaping identity and everyday life in England. Below is an excerpt about the house of Miss May Alice Savidge. Upon finding out that her pre-Tudor house was scheduled for demolition to make way for road work, Savidge dismantled it, shipped it 100 miles away, and began reassembling the house piece-by-piece.

On Camping out in the Modern World

“History appears as the derailment, the disruption of the everyday…” - Karel Kosik

So far I have not identified the political complexion of the local authority in Ware, not for that matter of the national government when the decision to redevelop Miss Savidge’s home was made. This has not been the result of any reluctance to deal with the political implications of Miss Savidge’s story. On the contrary, my point is that these implications will not be appreciable unless one also grasps the extent to which politics, at least in the traditional frame of the major electoral parties, have become irrelevant to the issues finding expression in this affair.

In a phrase of Habermas’s, the political system is increasingly ‘decoupled’ from the traditional measures of everyday life, and Miss Savidge cannot be adequately defined as the victim of one party as opposed to another. She fell instead (and, of course, rose again) on the common ground of the post-war settlement, a ground which is made up of rationalised procedures and methods of administration as much as of any shared policies about, say, the efficacy of the mixed economy or the legitimacy of the welfare state. Miss Savidge’s house stood in the way of an ethos of development and a practice of social planning and calculation which have formed the procedural basis of the welfare state under both Conservative and Labour administrations. Governments have come and gone (at the behest of an electorate oscillating at a rate which itself reflects the situation), but a professionalised conduct of social administration has persisted throughout.

The professionals of this world are almost bound to see the more traditional forms of self-understanding persisting among the citizenry as merely quaint and eccentric, if not more dismissively as obstructive and inadequate to modern reality. While there is always room for an arrogant contempt to develop here, the most frequent manifestation consists of a resigned and pragmatic realism (the bureaucratic sigh which responds to people’s demands by saying that things are always more complicated than that) with which officials draw out and exhaust the discussion and patience of residents’ associations around the country. That this system of planning is less than perfect goes without saying, and Miss Savidge is well stocked with complaints on this score. For anyone who stops to ask she will talk about the callousness of the officials who turned up the Saturday before Christmas (1953) to look at the buildings which they had already decided to pull down—even though this was the first the residents had heard of it. She will mention inconsiderate rules applying to council tenants (no cat or dog unless you have a family, and so on). She will also talk about a general bureaucratic incompetence which, in her experience, made it possible to get a council grant towards the cost of installing a bathroom in a house which was already up for demolition, and which was also evident in the many changes of plan regarding the road development itself. Is it to be a new road with a roundabout, or can the old road be widened, and which local authority (town or country) is to be responsible?

Bureaucratic procedure may indeed be conducted as if its rationality were contained entirely within its own calculations, and in this respect it may well seem to stand impervious: free from any responsibility to the world in which its works eventually materialise. But whatever the appearance, this is obviously not a matter of rationality alone. The system of planning into which Miss Savidge was well caught up by 1969 is characteristic of a welfare state that was both corporatist in character (public discussion and political negotiation simulated in thoroughly institutionalised forms), and caught in the contradictions of its commodifying pact with private capital. More than this, the welfare state has developed through a period of extensive cultural upheaval, and Miss Savidge’s is therefore a story of the times in its discovery of tradition not just in the lifeworld but also in an apparently hopeless contest with modernity. While the dislocation of traditional self-understanding could indeed prepare the way for better possibilities, Miss Savidge stands there as a testimony to another scenario in which the prevailing atmosphere is one of insecurity which develops when extensive cultural dislocation has occurred without any better, or even reasonably meaningful, future coming into view.

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Over at The Green Knight's Chapel last week, Nick Green, the author of The Cat Kin, had this to say about patience: If there is one quality or trait that I think all writers should have, it is not word power or wisdom or soul or wit. It is patience. Patience in abundance. Oceans of it. Great galactic nebula-spanning clouds of patience.And Nick's right on the mark. We do need to learn patience ... Read the rest of this post

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