MONDAY FUNDAY – May 29, 2017

It’s Monday, What Are You Reading? is hosted by Kathryn at The Book Date, and adapted by Kellee at Unleashing Readers and Jen at Teach Mentor Texts with a children’s/YA focus. The Sunday Post is hosted by The Caffeinated Book Reviewer. These weekly roundups are a great way to discover new blogs and bloggers, share some of the titles you’ve been enjoying, and add to your ever-growing to-read list.

Be sure to check out an interview I did with our very own fearless Monday hosts with the mosts, Kellee and Ricki from Unleashing Readers! You can read the post over on The Book Wars, and a very big thank you to Kellee and Ricki for stopping by and sharing their thoughts with us. We’ve started a new monthly feature on The Book Wars where we hope to feature a different children’s book blog every month, so definitely come back at the end of June for another amazing interview.

I also did a review of Kwame Alexander’s incredible verse novel Booked  last week, and I absolutely can’t recommend it enough. If you work with young people, if you are a young person, or if you ever were a young person, Alexander’s voice just rings so incredibly true. You can check out my review here, and be sure to find a copy at your local library and experience it for yourself.

Here are a few books I’ve been reading this week!

North South East West

A little bird is ready to leave the nest, but where should she go? She travels north, south, east and west, but home is the place she loves the best. Margaret Wise Brown’s text is nice enough, but it’s Greg Pizzoli’s illustrations that really steal the show here. The simple geometric images are so colourful and fun, and really help balance out the sweet text. I honestly don’t know if I’m as much a fan of Margaret Wise Brown as I should be, being a children’s librarian and all, but I’ll eagerly read anything with Pizzoli’s name on it!

Shark in the Park

Kids love anything with cut-out pages, especially if they involve a guessing game. Timothy Pope has a new telescope, and he’s trying it out in the park when he spots a shark! Or is it….? Lots of silly fun for preschoolers, especially if you have any shark lovers in the audience, which I definitely do!

Diary of a Tokyo Teen

Christine Mari Inzer spent the summer before her sixteenth birthday with her grandparents in Tokyo, exploring the city where she was born. Christine is part-Japanese, but she spent most of her childhood in the United States, so Tokyo felt both welcoming and familiar, and strange and foreign. Diary of a Tokyo Teen is an illustrated memoir of that fateful summer, when Christine not only reconnected with her Japanese family and heritage, but also learned a great deal about herself, and grew as an independent young woman. Inzer self-published a version of Diary of a Tokyo Teen when she was still just a teenager, and this professionally published version expands on the original edition with additional colour illustrations. Inzer is an utterly charming narrator and tour guide, offering a wonderful mix of childishness and maturity that makes her story extremely relatable and enjoyable. I actually had an experience similar to Christine’s when I was about the same age – I spent several weeks with my grandmother in New Zealand, which was my first time travelling away from home by myself, and many of Christine’s musings really brought back memories, and definitely made me smile. Her descriptions of Tokyo and the surrounding areas also left me desperately longing to go back to that incredible place, and absolutely had me wallowing in some major Japan nostalgia. A sweet, funny, heartfelt and eye-opening travel memoir that’s definitely worth checking out.

Hope you have a great week, everyone, especially you lucky Americans with your long weekend! It’s been gloriously hot and sunny here in raincity, and I am loving every minute of it!