YA Novel Review

The Language of Love

On November 2nd, I had the opportunity to attend the Vegas Valley Book Festival and sit on a wonderful panel called The Language of Love moderated by the fabulous librarian Nikki Bylina-Streets. First of all, I want to send out a huge thank you to Crystal Perkins for the invitation to the festival. I sat on the panel with eight other authors who write contemporary love stories, and while each of our books features an element of romantic love, the conversation of the day very much focused on how love in a broader sense provides the driving force behind what we write. To paraphrase Terra Elan McVoy, we write about relationships. And love, whether between a parent and child, or between siblings or friends, fuels the exploration of these relationships in our work. Sitting there, I listened to these incredible women discuss the reason they write, share stories of love in their own lives, and talk about their excitement for future projects, and it struck me: I’m so freakin’ lucky to be sitting here with these authors! Sitting in my folding chair, a warm desert breeze on my face, I realized: I love these people. I love that they write books about love. I felt drenched in a deep sense of gratitude for what they do, what they share in their books, for their individual voices all coming together to write about the power of love.

And since it’s the holidays – a time for reflection and gratitude, and, let’s face it, buying stuff – I thought I’d give you a list of these amazing authors and their books so you could check them out too and maybe find one or two that you want to stuff into some stockings. This holiday season, give the language of love.

Amy Plum (Die for Me series, HarperCollins)

Lauren Morrill (Meant to Be, Random House)

Katie McGarry (Pushing the Limits, Harlequin Teen)

Stephanie Strohm (Pilgrims Don’t Wear Pink, Graphia/HMH)

Terra Elan McVoy (Being Friends With Boys, Simon Pulse)

Robin Mellom (Ditched: A Love Story, Disney Press)

Jennifer E. Smith (This Is What Happy Looks Like, Poppy)

Leila Howland (Nantucket Blues, Disney-Hyperion)

Writing Exercise

Write a poem called “The Language of Love.”  What specific, sensory language do you use to describe love?  For me, love smells like wet autumn leaves and sounds like my daughter and husband laughing at something unknown in the next room.  Think about all the language we can use to describe love.  Write, write, write.

Outside Reading School Project

Create a holiday book list with books that show the language of love.  For each entry, chose one or two lines from the book to show how this author showcases love.

YA Novel Review

I took the summer off from writing this newsletter but I didn’t take time off from reading.  I read wonderful novels this summer (Matt Haig’s The Humans, Karen Thompson Walker’s The Age of Miracles, J Courtney Sullivan’s The Engagements to name a few).

Perhaps my favorite YA of the summer was Jessi Kirby’s GOLDEN (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers).  I’ve loved Jessi’s other books and this one just proves she keeps getting better and better.  The story follows “golden” girl Parker Frost (she has that famous last name for a reason), who, at the end of her senior year realizes she’s always taken the road most expected. When she uncovers the secret journal of a former golden girl of her small town (a girl with a tragic story), Parker has to decide if the road less traveled truly is worth exploring.  Jessi weaves lovely Frost references throughout this sweet coming of age tale as Parker picks her path and takes her chosen journey (with the help of her best friend and a darling boy, of course).

Writing Exercise

In the novel, Parker’s English teacher asks them to keep a journal at the end of their senior year detailing their dreams, wishes, hopes, fears, etc.  Then, at the end of the year, they turn the journal into him and he’ll mail them back ten years later.  I’m not sure I’d love to get a time capsule from my senior year (oh, the bad poetry!) but it’s a clever idea.

For this writing project, have students write a “Letter to Future Me”
They can write it as a list poem or as an actual letter.  Most importantly, encourage them to focus on what it is they hope for themselves; not just the normal practical things (I hope to have a job) but also the little, specific things they love (I hope to still be eating mint ice cream while watching the stars).

Outside Reading School Project

Jessi peppers the novel with snippets of Frost’s poetry.  Have students look up three or four of the complete poems she uses and discuss the way they relate to Parker’s character throughout the novel using specific examples from both the poems and the novel to support the argument.

YA Novel Review

I can smell summer…
We hit the eighties this week in Nevada County and we’re all starting to walk around in summer clothes.  Of course, while everyone is dreaming of swimming or BBQs or stargazing, I’m dreaming of summer reading lists.  I know, I know…I’m getting professional help, I promise.

The book I’d like to recommend for your summer reading  (it makes an especially good read-aloud to discuss with your kids) is Remarkable by Lizzie K. Foley.

REMARKABLE by Lizzie K. Foley ( Puffin Books, ages 8+)
Jane is just a regular kid.  This should be fine, except she lives in the town of Remarkable.  Where everyone is, well, remarkable.  Except Jane.  She’s ordinary.  In fact, she’s so ordinary, she’s the only one who goes to the regular public school.  Everyone else goes to Remarkable’s School for the Remarkably Gifted.  Her brother’s a remarkable painter.  Her sister’s a math-whiz.  And, Jane – she’s not sure she’s remarkable at anything.  Of course, though, she is.  It’s just not so obvious and doesn’t need the label. Or the attention.

Foley’s book is sweet and whimsical (there are pirates and a sea monster named Lucky!), but simmering beneath its playful surface is a strong commentary on a society that seems to need all of our kids to be….well, remarkable.  Exceptional.  What about the plain Jane’s of the world?  In a school system obsessed with rankings, test scores, competitions, and levels, what about a kid who doesn’t quite know yet what she wants from her life, what she wants to put into the world, or even doubts that she really wants much attention at all?  In her meanderings about town where no one notices her, Jane meets Captain Rojo Herring and when he asks her about her talent, she replies, “I’m not good at anything and I probably never will be.”  He tells her, however, what a gift it is to be ordinary.  He had a chance to be ordinary once, but laments, “no, I had to run off to do something special.”

Jane has an opportunity, too, to find out that being ordinary can be its own brand of specialness.  Anabella and I laughed out loud while reading this book, but we also talked about what it means to be “remarkable” and why people seem to not only need it, but also to figure it out so young.  It’s tuned my ear to how often we pre-professionalize our kids.  “Oh, maybe he’ll be a scientist” or “Maybe she’ll be a party planner!” as if childhood is just one big try-out for future economic security.

While Anabella and I read Remarkable, I was also reading The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer, which is a grown-up novel that asks the same sorts of questions as Foley’s book (in fact, I’m paraphrasing one of Wolitzer’s observations about how we often treat the joys of childhood as a sort of pre-professional program).  Both books have stuck with me and made me ponder this need with my own child and with my students.  Heck, it’s made me ponder it for myself.

Perhaps, they both seem to be arguing that joy is simply enough without the need to parlay it into something.  That seems to me the essence of summer.

Writing Exercise

Foley’s book is essentially about seeing the remarkable in the ordinary.  I think in many ways this is what writing does; it’s what an individual author’s voice does. Whether we’re writing poetry or prose or scripts or keeping a scrapbook or journal, it’s the individual quality of our lens that makes our subject remarkable.

1.  Take out a piece of paper and make a list of the ordinary things in your world that you find remarkable.  2.  When you’re list is long, start to think of each of these things as a poem, as a possible story, or as a jumping off place for your novel writing. 3.  Choose one and expand.  Create something remarkable out of your ordinary observation.

Outside Reading School Project

My Remarkable Journal of Ordinary Things.
While students read REMARKABLE, have them keep a journal.  Each entry should be an ordinary thing (their dog, their swim lesson, the night sky) but for each entry have them explain what makes this ordinary thing remarkable in their lives.  Have them write using descriptive, specific language to showcase their choices and have them concentrate on using their own voice.

YA Novel Review

First, sorry to everyone for sending the newsletter from last time!  Clearly, I’m spending too much time gazing out the window. Here’s the one I meant to send:

The Earth is Painted Green:  A Garden of Poems About Our Planet edited by Barbara Brenner (Scholastic)

So in case you haven’t heard yet (you know, from my shouts on Twitter, Facebook, or from my rooftop to the wide sky), my next YA novel CATCH A FALLING STAR will be published by Scholastic in Summer of 2014.  You can’t quite hear the cartwheels in my voice from where you’re reading, but, needless to say, I’m thrilled.  So, my family and I have been playing our own sort of springtime egg hunt:  We’ve been searching the house for the red SCHOLASTIC bands on our books.  “Look, that one’s Scholastic,” my husband will point out. “So is that one!” Anabella loves to shout, “Scholastic!” when she spies one and I imagine it’s much how the miners sounded when they said, “Eureka!”

For this Point of View newsletter (in honor of  my new publisher, national poetry month, and also Earth Day) I wanted to talk about one such gem from Scholastic that my family and I return to year after year called The Earth is Painted Green: A Garden of Poems about Our Planet edited by Barbara Brenner and Illustrated by S.D. Schindler.  Here’s an example from the collection:

The Garden Hose
In the gray evening
I see a long serpent
With its tail in the dahlias.

It lies in loops across the grass
And drinks softly at the faucet.

I can hear it swallow.

— Beatrice Janosco

The book is full of these earthy meditations and Anabella and I love to open it at random, read a poem, and then write whatever that poem inspires.  Schindler’s illustrations are both lush and watercolor-washed, cradling the poems on each page.  With our neighbor’s tree bursting with color, with the daffodils poking up through the brown ground, (and with my gaze clearly out the window), now is the perfect time for a garden of poems.

Writing Exercise

Look out your window.  What do you see bursting there?  The light comes later now, is sharper somehow in the evening, and everywhere there is suddenly color – white, pale pink, red.  Find one slim piece of the blooming world and choose it.

Title a poem with the name of this bit of the spring world you found.  Using “The Garden Hose” as a guide, write your own addition to the garden of poems, giving a simple thing a singular life.

Outside Reading School Project

Mary Oliver wrote:
“Instructions for living a life.
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.”

What is in your garden of poems?  What about the world astonishes you?  Write a series of poems about your earth, your outside places.  Then, include photographs, create art, find illustrations to support your poems.  Be astonished.  Tell us about it.

YA Novel Review

Book Love

My students and I have been having a lot of talks lately about books.  About reading them, liking them, hating them, being indifferent to them.  We’ve agreed that some books just connect and others are a slog (but that both have their place in reading).  The other night, I watched a movie by Josh Radnor called Liberal Arts.  In it, the main character Jessie comes to the aid of a young man in crisis, and when asked why, Jessie responds, “I have a soft spot for good readers.  They’re hard to find these days.”  I loved the line, but thought, is that true?  Are readers becoming harder and harder to find?  So (with Valentine’s Day looming, all that red foil and chocolate-dipped love around us) I thought I’d ask my students about book love:  do we still love books?  And if so, which ones?  Here are some of their answers:

“I love The GIver by Lois Lowry because of the theme and idea of it; it was one of the first books that I drew inspiration from…” –Aliyah

“I love the book Ferdinand.  Every time I read it, it brings me back to my childhood.  Ferdinand doesn’t like to fight and compete; he likes to sit quietly and smell the flowers.  I love how simple yet full of feeling this book is.  I can read it over and over.” — Quinna

“I love Maximum Ride by James Patterson because it let me escape. I have always imagined what it would be like to fly and this book let me live this.”  — Annie

“I love Paper Towns by John Green because I could identify with both of the main characters.  John Green manages to be funny, yet still deeply reflective, which I love.”  — Autumn

“I love the Game of Sunken Places by M.T. Anderson because it has interesting, imaginative, genuinely dark aesthetics and imagery.  It’s evocative.”  — Simon

“I love Hard Contact by Karen Traviss because it has everything I want in a book – Star Wars, complex plotting, varying personalities, action, and suspense!”  — Owen

“I love Harry Potter because the world is vivid and I grew up with the characters.”  — Luna

(And this following student obviously has fabulous taste)  🙂  “I love Songs for a Teenage Nomad because I could see the whole story through my own eyes.”  –Kristy

Writing Exercise

Make a list of all the books you love (or as many as you can in ten minutes).

Outside Reading School Project

In my last newsletter I wrote about our “What We’re Reading” wall in the classroom I share.  It’s a place for students to write reviews and showcase the books they have read throughout the year.  As I said last time, for me, reading should be about building a life-long romance with stories, with different worlds and characters.  Mostly, though, as C.S. Lewis said, “We read to know we’re not alone.”

I’m finding the wall slow going.  We’re busy.  We forget to hang things up.  We forget to ask questions of each other about what we’re reading.  But I’m not going to give up on it.  I looked up the other day at the diversity of titles on the wall, as diverse as these wonderful teenagers I teach, and it made me smile.

YA Novel Review

10 Grateful Gifts

I like to give books for presents.  I know, shocking, right?  So this year I chose ten books I’m grateful to be able to give as gifts  (see what I did there – grateful and giving for the Nov./Dec. combined newsletter?  I know, I know, so clever.)  Okay, here are my ten grateful gifts:

For the Little Ones: 
The North Star by Peter Reynolds (Candlewick).  A whimsical tale about asking yourself where it is you want to go…  I actually read this one to my high school students, especially when we discuss the role of guides in our lives, but it’s a magical journey for the little ones too (who, as children, are much more certain of their stars).

The Lighthouse Family series by Cynthia Rylant (Simon and Shuster).  My daughter has been reading and re-reading this series since she was in Kindergarten.  The writing is  lush and we instantly connected to the characters.  Plus, I just have something about lighthouses.  I love them – all that craggy coastline and sea-swept imagery.  Yes, please.

Don’t Let the Pigeon Finish this Activity Book by Mo Willems (Hyperion).  My eight year old spent three full days with this book.  She was obsessed! And I’m grateful for any book that absorbs my child like this one did.  Perhaps it should be your “Happy December 10th Mom Needs to Get Some Work Done” present. 

For Middle/YA Readers:
Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo (Candlewick).  We read this as a family read this year and it captured  my eight year old and my husband and I with its rich writing, emotive story, and its general sweetness.  I would give this to any little animal lover on your list.

Accomplice by Eireann Corrigan (Scholastic).  I teach this absorbing novel in my combined junior/senior lit class and it never fails to grab my students.  Especially around college application season, this is a fascinating look at morals, pressure, and friendship.

The Fault in our Stars by John Green (Dutton).  I have a longer review of this in a past newsletter, but the gist of it is this:  Just so good at getting to the heart of what it means to be alive.  Oh, and it’s a super funny book about cancer.  John Green: you’re the Daniel Day Lewis of contemporary YA novels – you make the rest of us look like hacks but we can’t help but love you. 🙂

For Grown-Ups:
The following three books have what I look for in a mature read – heart, wit, and a childlike awareness of how damn beautiful this world is:

My American UnHappiness by Dean Bakopoulos (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
How to Buy A Love of Reading by Tanya Egan Gibson (Dutton)
Ex Vivo: Poems by Kirsten Casey (Hip Pocket Press)

And one for the whole family:
The Three Questions by Jon Muth (Scholastic):  This gorgeous book is one for display.  Based on a story by Leo Tolstoy, Muth explores the three questions:  When is the best time to do things? Who is the most important one? What is the right thing to do?  Three questions worth discussing for all ages.

Writing Exercise

Write the description of the bookstore you’d live in if you could…build the world first, the way the bookstore would look, feel, smell.  Then, add your titles all around you.  How would they be displayed?  How would they be sorted?  Would there be anything besides books in your store?

Outside Reading School Project

In our classroom, the 9th/10th grade lit teacher and I have started a “What We’re Reading” wall.  This is a place for students to write reviews and showcase the books they have read throughout the year.  We have a lending library there as well as a place for students to tack up messages like “Help me find a book about…”  For me, reading should be about building a life-long romance with stories, with different worlds and characters.  Mostly, though, as C.S. Lewis said, “We read to know we’re not alone.”  Encourage your students to build a reading wall in your classroom.  Only rule, no judgement about readers’ choices.  Mary Oliver said we have to “let the soft animal of our body love what it loves” and that’s true for books too!

YA Novel Review

The Lost Girl by Sangu Mandanna (Balzer + Bray)

In this lush retelling of the Frankenstein concept, Mandanna tells the story of Eva, an echo who has been woven as a back-up to a human counterpart.  She has been raised only to replace Amarra, a far away girl she’s never met, just in case something happens to her.  She isn’t meant to have a life of her own; she’s a replica, a copy – an echo.  In this odd sort of prison, Eva must wrestle with her place in the world, with her own feelings of self, of love, of purpose – what could be more human that that?  Mandanna’s writing is rich and detailed, with an electrical emotional undercurrent.  Using the relevant topic of bioethics as her backdrop, Mandanna artfully explores not only what it means to be human on a universal level, but also what it means to have the courage to be one’s self.

Writing Exercise

I loved the world Mandanna built behind Eva, the idea of the weavers, of her life as an “echo.”  Take this word, echo, and build a new definition of it through a character you create, a poem you write, or a story that features an “echo” in a fresh way.

Outside Reading School Project

This fall, I’m teaching a unit called Legend, Fairytale, Myth and Monster where my students are exploring the driving question:  As humans, what story do we continue to tell over and over throughout time?  The Lost Girl is one of these retellings, a book that explores this idea of “monster” in a thoroughly fresh way.  The Lost Girl makes a wonderful companion book to the study of Frankenstein.  Encourage  students to look for the connection between Eva and Frankenstein’s monster.  Have students create a poster, a Venn Diagram, or some other visual way of showcasing the way these two books overlap.

YA Novel Review

Clean by Amy Reed (SimonPulse)

Back in June, I had the honor of being nominated for the Northern California Book Award with Amy Reed and Daniel Handler.  I was a bit star struck by this honor and nothing short of astonished to be named the winner.  But, cliche as it is, there really isn’t a “winner” when it comes to being nominated with two such amazing authors who contribute so much to the YA landscape.

Perhaps the best part of the event in San Francisco last June was getting the chance to hang out with Amy Reed, author of CLEAN.  I had read Amy’s book after speaking with her at the Sonoma Book Festival last fall and loved it and had been meaning to write about it for Point of View.  The Northern California Book Awards proved the perfect opportunity.

CLEAN recounts the time five diverse teen addicts –  wealthy, perfectionist Olivia, party girl Kelly, church-going Christopher, bad boy Jason, and goth girl Eva – spend in a private Seattle rehab center.  In the book, Amy gives a nod to The Breakfast Club– type construct of her novel, an automatic hook for me as TBC is one of my favorite teen movies.  I love the notion of unlike people coming together under confined circumstances, especially when they shift into individuals along the way who grow to respect the power of differences within a community.

It takes a top-notch writer to handle addiction books, and Amy’s one of the best I’ve read.  Her prose is crisp, detailed, exact, and her five distinct voices give insight into the heartaches and struggles of these five very real teens as they begin to investigate their path to recovery.   Amy’s themes (accountability, recovery, choices) are rich and well-developed, and while this book contains some very difficult content, Amy handles it with grace, optimism and love.  These teens have been given an opportunity – to make good choices, to understand their roles in the world, and, ultimately, to live.

Writing Exercise

When I taught high school drama, I had a project called “Trapped” where I would show my students The Breakfast Club, we would talk about the construct of confining unlike people in a certain environment, and then I’d have them work in groups to write a play where they created another version of that construct.  (My students always wowed me, setting their plays in a closed Costco, a rooftop, an island, a bomb shelter…the list went on and on).

Use this construct as a basis for a piece of writing.  Start by creating five distinctly different characters who might not normally choose to be in the same space.  Next, choose a setting where the characters would not be allowed to leave, some place that would naturally lead to discussion.  Give them each a problem they must overcome individually, and also a collective one (we have to get off this rooftop!).  See where this takes you.  I loved in class that, after watching the student plays, our discussions always centered around how much we assume about people (stereotyping) and how so many of us really all want the same things.

Outside Reading School Project

Have students compare and contrast The Breakfast Club with CLEAN, and then perhaps find one other book or film where they feel like the author/filmmaker uses a similar construct. Have them show their information as a poster, webpage, or essay.

YA Novel Review

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

“The marks humans leave are too often scars.” –Augustus in TFIOS

I avoided this one for awhile only because I thought it would just wreck me.  A love story about two teen cancer patients in the hands of the masterful John Green?  A wreck, I tell you.  Turns out, while I cried wildly and often throughout this book, it didn’t wreck me.  It made me feel a deep, profound gratitude for John Green.   Thanks, John.  Thanks for writing a book about cancer that made me laugh far more than it made me cry, but that was also an unapologetic  love song heralding gratitude and joy.  Thanks for writing a book whose main focus was life, rather than death.  I love Hazel and Augustus – and the complete cast of characters – all whole and wonderfully drawn.   This book doesn’t have a villain (even cancer, Green submits, is just trying to stay alive).  This book is a meditation on the power of life, on how special each day is, but  in a fresh, wry way – a John Green way.  How brave to tackle this subject with such originality, humor, and unabashed love.  How  optimistic.  The Fault in Our Stars shows a tremendous understanding of how precious life is, how noticing things in this world matters, and how we have an opportunity each day to choose love over all else.  In each of his books, (and especially in this one), the mark that John Green leaves is the literary equivalent of a bear hug.

Writing Exercise

The idea that “some infinities are bigger than other infinities” gets repeated throughout the book.   Use this statement as a prompt and see where it takes you. The possibilities are infinite.

Outside Reading School Project

As mentioned above, Augustus says, “The marks humans leave are too often scars.”  What do you think he means by this?  How does he use Hazel Grace as an example of someone who “First, does no harm”?  Give examples from your own life, history, and/or current events where you discuss examples of people “leaving scars.”  How, instead, could people “do no harm”?

YA Novel Review

A book that helped make me a reader.    

In the last few months, I’ve been having discussions with some of my students and former students about the books we remember reading as children.  What’s interesting across the board for me as a writer and teacher is how many people, whether they consider themselves readers or not, can point to a book and say, ‘that book mattered to me.”  I have a student right now who, in his own words, “hates to read” but he loved the book The Outsiders.  I have another student who is an intense reader but really feels Harry Potter “made” her a reader.  This idea took hold and I started asking people what books helped make them a reader – could they remember them?  What was it about them that stuck with them?  I know my list is vast.  Anne of Green Gables, A Wrinkle in Time, anything by Dr. Seuss.  I thought it would make an interesting focus for Point of View.  After all, our individual point of views often draw us to a book in the first place.

To my delight, one of my former students (now a dear friend) agreed to write about a book she looks back on as one that helped make her a reader so I asked her to guest post for this newsletter.  It’s my first time having a guest writer and I’m  grateful to her for digging a bit deeper into this whole idea.

Here is the delightful Ariana Rampy writing about the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle series by Betty MacDonald.

Yesterday I went to the library for a very special book I haven’t checked out in years. At the counter the librarian’s eyes lit up – “I LOVE Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle!” Yep, me too. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle is a little old lady who always smells like cookies. She lives in an upside-down house (the chandelier is on the living room floor) and her husband was a pirate. She loves children and all the children love her. They like to use her chandelier as a campfire, or braid her very long hair, or dig for buried treasure in her backyard. She has a small hump on her back and when the children ask her about it she says it’s where she stores her magic; it’s also an ideal place for fastening fairy wings.

Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s real magic, though, is that she can turn any ordinary chore into a really fun game: don’t like washing the dishes? Now you’re a Fairy Princess and you have to sweep up every crumb before the Evil Queen comes to inspect your work! And she always knows the right way to help any parent who calls asking for advice: the Won’t-Pick-Up-Toys Cure, the Slow-Eater-Tiny-Bite-Taker Cure, the Bad-Table-Manners Cure (one of my favorites because it involves a very well-mannered pig). I remember feeling a secret glee when I read about Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and her cures. Never one to be excited about my own chores, her dramatic imagination appealed to my theatrical nature. I was so impressed with her ingenious ideas and creativity – what will she think up next! – and also with the way she understands and appreciates all these less-than-perfect children. Plus, she always has time for baking more cookies.

Reading it again today, I am as charmed as I was when I was seven. And her priorities and approach to life feel right on to me. My mom says whenever I checked out a Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle book, she loved to read it on her own, too; it seems Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s magic is enchanting no matter how old you are. Now I think I’ll go bake some cookies.

I want to thank Ariana for this incredible look at a magical book from her past.  It also happens to be a favorite series around this house!  I guess Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s magic is timeless.  Like most good books.

Writing Exercise

I love how Ariana brought up Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle’s “magic” that she stores in her hump (when, really, most of her magic is the sort that comes with just loving people for who they are and finding a fresh, imaginative way to handle situations).  Create a story in which one of your characters is “magic.”  What is his or her magical ability?  How does it impact the people with whom he or she comes into contact?  Is it real “magic” or is it “everyday magic” – the kind most of us are actually capable of given a bit of imagination (and a good helping of cookies).

Outside Reading School Project

Make a list of those books from your past that made you a reader.  For each, write a bit about what it was about that book that made it special – was it the story, the characters, the world of it?  Did you read it at a particularly special time of your life? Did you share it with your family in some way?