What I’ve Been Reading
Yep, it’s as good as everybody says it is.
I feel like I could stop there, but for the record: the plot is tight and compelling, the tragedy is painful but not so overwhelming you quit reading, and the characters–from Starr with her fears and doubts and struggles and courage, to her father with his anger and remorse and defiant love for his family, to Uncle Carlos, a police officer finding the line between honesty and commitment and disillusionment–are all so real you feel as if you lived in Garden Heights and walked past them every day.
Read MoreWhat I’ve Been Reading
Shadow Warrior by Tanya Lloyd Kyi
An imaginative, informative biography–of sorts–of the semi-legendary Chiyome Mochizuki, who owned and ran a school to train girls as ninjas in feudal Japan. Tanya Lloyd Kyi fills in much of the background of Chiyome’s life with invented scenes and characters, showing us just how a girl from Koga wound up running a powerful network of spies and assassins as the civil wars of Japan raged around her.
Chiyome is, of course, a central and formidable character in Deadly Flowers and Deadly Wish. I’m so happy to see her get a book of her own! My Chiyome is more nefarious than Tanya Lloyd Kyi’s. But you know right away that either one is not to be trifled with.
Anyone who enjoyed Deadly Flowers and Deadly Wish and who wants to know more about the historical background behind both books would do well to check out Shadow Warrior.
Read MoreWhat I’ve Been Reading
Beauty Queens by Libba Bray. One of the sharpest books I’ve ever read…a feminist outcry, a simultaneous parody of Lord of the Flies and James Bond movies, a biting critique of commercialism, all punctuated by hysterical fake commercials for beauty products (“Because there’s nothing wrong with you that can’t be fixed!”).
Anyway, you really have to like a book that starts off with a planeload of teenage beauty queen contestants crash landing on a remote desert island and ends up with a profound message about growing up female in a country that’s happy to judge you on how well you can walk in high heels while wearing a swimsuit and smiling.
Read MoreWhy Kids Read
In An American Childhood, Annie Dillard lays bare what it means to read as a child and as an adolescent. It’s not necessarily what adults, particularly parents and teachers, think.
Read MoreIt was clear the adults, including our parents, approved of children who read books, but it was not at all clear why this was so. Our reading was subversive, and we knew it. Did they think we read to improve our vocabularies? Did they want us to read and not pay the least bit of heed to what we read, as they wanted us to go to Sunday school and ignore what we heard?
I was now believing books more than I believed what I saw and heard. I was reading books about the actual, historical, moral world–in which somehow I felt I was not living.
What I sought in books was imagination. It was depth, depth of thought and feeling; some sort of extreme of subject matter; some nearness to death; some call to courage. I myself was getting wild; I wanted wildness, originality, genius, rapture, hope. I wanted strength, not tea parties. What I sought in books was a world whose surfaces, whose people and events and days lived, actually matched the exaltation of the interior life. There you could live.
Those of us who read carried around with us like martyrs a secret knowledge, a secret joy, and a secret hope. There is a life worth living where history is still taking place; there are ideas worth dying for, and circumstances where courage is still prized. This life could be found and joined, like the Resistance. I kept this exhilarating faith alive in myself, concealed under my uniform shirt like an oblate’s ribbon; I would not be parted from it.
Sarah L. Thomson
A children’s book author publishing award-winning nonfiction, poetry, picture books and novels including…
“Readers will treasure the blossoming friendship between opposites in this whimsically illustrated tale. Short chapters and plenty of action make for an accessible and appealing reading experience. . . . Touching and inspiring.”
—Kirkus Reviews