Posted in Uncategorized

Sleepy Hollow

0000416_the-legend-of-sleepy-hollow

 

I listened to this story. I’ve seen and heard things related to this story but I never actually read the original. This is narrated by Tom Mison, the star of the Sleepy Hollow tv show (which I love). His voice is perfect and I found myself picturing his tv character at times while listening.

This was a bit funny and not very spooky, but I am glad I can finally check this off the list.

Posted in Book Review, Grades 3-5, Realistic Fiction, Sunshine State 16-17

Sweet Realistic Fiction Story

book_prairie

 

Prairie Evers by Ellen Airgood

owlowlowl

This is a sweet story about a young girl whose family moves from North Carolina to New York state. She has been home-schooled for her whole life so far and when her parents decide she should go to school, she is scared. She doesn’t want to go. She dreads the bus, the other students, sitting in school all day… But, she finds something at school that she never had before… a best friend.

Young girls will love this sweet story about friendship, dealing with change, and discovering who you are.

Recommended to:

Grades 3 – 5, fans of realistic fiction.

Posted in Book Review, Horror, Middle Grade

Scary Squirrels at Summer Camp

51au-hrqmbl

Frenzy by Robert Lettrick

owlowlowlowl

 

Wow. I honestly did not expect to like this as much as I did. This book is scary, nail-biting, compassionate and somewhat realistic. But I am glad that my summer camp experiences were never this intense.

I don’t want to give anything away, but I will say this is not for the faint of heart. There is a lot of death. There are a lot of crazy “rabid” animals. There are good kids and bad, brave kids and cowards, and there are a lot of slow revelations about the kids’ backgrounds.

This book is fantastic if you like a realistic story with a heavy dose of fright.

This is on the 2016-2017 Sunshine State Nomination list of books for grades 6-8. And it is good for those grades and above, but I will suggest to our elementary librarian that we leave it out of our collection. As I always say, you know your kids. This book is intense, but if you have a budding horror fan (as I was as a preteen), they will probably love it.

Think:

Cujo (King) + Zoo (Patterson) + summer camp – adults = a fantasticly frightening experience

Recommended to:
Budding horror fans in grades 6 and up. (Avoid if you are sensitive to animal death or are squeamish in general).

 

Posted in Book Review, Fantasy, Middle Grade

Eighth Day Series

Book 1: The Eighth Day, by Diane K. Salerni

Book 2: The Inquisitor’s Mark, by Diane K. Salerni

Book 3: The Morrigan’s Curse, by Diane K. Salerni

owlowlowlowl

I loved this series. Unknown to “normals,” there is an eighth day between Wednesday and Thursday called Grunsday. The people that know about this day are descended from King Arthur, Merlin and others from that time. Some of them are “transitioners” who are able to live in normal days as well as Grunsday. Some are “kin” and are stuck only living on Grunsday. Merlin created the eighth day to trap the kin and Merlin’s descendants are the ones keeping the magic of Grunsday alive. There are only two descendants of Merlin left and everyone wants to protect or control them.

That’s the idea, without giving too much away. Basically, if you like fantasy or adventure, read this series. I loved it!!

Posted in Book Review, Fantasy, Middle Grade

Where do stories come from?

Storybound by Marissa Burt

When Una Fairchild stumbles upon a mysterious book buried deep in the basement of her school library, she thinks nothing of opening the cover and diving in. But instead of paging through a regular novel, Una suddenly finds herself Written In to the land of Story — a world filled with Heroes and Villains and fairy tale characters.

But not everything in Story is as magical as it seems. Una must figure out why she has been Written In – and fast – before anyone else discovers her secret. Together with her new friend Peter and a talking cat named Sam, Una digs deep into Story’s shadowy past. She quickly realizes that she is tied to the world in ways she never could have imagined — and it might be up to her to save it.

Fabulous story, great characters – loved this!! Una is a terrific example of a strong female heroine.

Una finds an old book with the title: The Tale of Una Fairchild. She starts to read and next thing she knows, she is in the middle of the story. She is actually in the middle of an exam for students studying to be characters in a fairy tale. She meets Peter who is the hero-in-training and Snow, the Lady he is rescuing. Peter figures out Una has been Written In, which hasn’t happened since the Muses were defeated. But, why is Una here now and who wrote her in?? And what really happened to the Muses?

This story is full of adventure and excitement and twists and turns. If you like fairy tales or twists on fairy tales, this book is for you. It reminded me a bit of The Accidental Hero, which I loved too.

Recommended to:

Grades 6 and up; anyone who likes fairy tales or fractured fairy tales!
https://readingismyescape.com/
readingismyescape.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-26
98474
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:HXQJAWKPTRAMCPYR3I5H4RYRTENAD6Z5
<urn:uuid:554da434-652a-4ae2-aa93-153881dca4f9>
2017-06-24T10:28:17Z
192.0.78.24
text/html
sha1:BX7736K3NIWGOFSDYF7OPP2BRLPMZMM7
<urn:uuid:48fcff5b-f4d0-4ada-b788-ffbc48855079>
https://readingismyescape.com/
length
response
<urn:uuid:be4f75b4-5829-4dff-9fb0-8ddfa5ad8d80>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-166-26-198.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-26
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for June 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf