One regular feature that Biblioguides posts on social media is called Bookalikes. Their team highlights two books that are related and complementary in some way. What interested me about the pairing of Swirl by Swirl: Spirals in Nature by Joyce Sidman with Blockhead: the Life of Fibonacci by Joseph D’Agnese was that they looked like…
Author: Diane Pendergraft
Okay for Now
“Doug Swieteck once made up a list of 410 ways to get a teacher to hate you. It began with ‘Spray deodorant in all her desk drawers’ and got worse as it went along. A whole lot worse. . . . They were the kinds of things that sent kids to juvenile detention homes in…
Pay Attention, Carter Jones
I’m sure I would never have picked up Gary D. Schmidt’s The Wednesday Wars if Sara Masarik hadn’t asked me to read it. And normally, if I’m two thirds of the way through a book and still not into it, I’m not going to finish. But I said I would, so I did. And then…
Who Walks the Attic?
During a recent conversation, my husband said he remembered the first chapter book he ever read by himself. He didn’t remember the title perfectly, but with the help of Amazon, I found it! Who Walks the Attic by Laura Bannon. I asked him if it was worth $7 to read it again. He said it…
Down Cut Shin Creek: The Pack Horse Librarians of Kentucky
“Son, the times they was so hard, you couldn’t hardly crack them.” Grace Caudill Lucas What if you had never learned to read? Can you imagine going to a school where there were no books? What if the only books you had access to were those that libraries didn’t want anymore that, once discarded, had…
Waiting for the Biblioburro
On a hill behind a tree, there is a house. In the house, there is a bed and on the bed there is a little girl named Ana, fast asleep, dreaming about the world outside and beyond the hill. Ana has to help her father and mother with the farm work. When it’s hot outside,…
That Book Woman
I had already read That Book Woman once before reading it aloud to my class today. But I choked up on the last page again anyway. “‘Wish there was something I could gift you too.’ That Book Woman turns to look at me with big dark eyes. ‘Come here, Cal,’ she says real gentle, and…
Toward Morning: A Story of the Hungarian Freedom Fighters
Alta Halverson Seymour’s book, Toward Morning: A Story of the Hungarian Freedom Fighters, is a fast-paced, small-slice story of a group of family and friends escaping Hungary in the midst of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. The Kirkus Review of this book from March, 1961 says, the “heroic story will interest American teenagers who met…
The School that Escaped the Nazis
There are so many old books I haven’t read yet that I seldom read new books. But a reading rabbit trail led me to The School that Escaped the Nazis: The True Story of the Schoolteacher Who Defied Hitler, by Deborah Cadbury, published in 2022. The teacher who defied Hitler was Anna Essinger, a Jewish…
Three Knocks on the Wall
Judging by the three Lampman novels I have read, Lampman was intent on drawing attention to many forms of discrimination. In Three Knocks, Lampman outdoes…
The Mysterious Voyage of Captain Kidd
Captain Kidd Show Notes Captain William Kidd was a pirate. Everyone knows that, don’t they? A.B.C. Whipple’s book, The Mysterious Voyage of Captain Kidd, is written from a different perspective. From the beginning, Whipple draws a map of conspiracy, greed, government corruption, and bad luck. Whipple is careful to define the difference between piracy and…
A House Is a House for Me
I’m teaching literature this year in a program for homeschool kids. The most challenging group is the fourteen six-and-seven-year-olds. Reading levels in the group are so varied that I’m focusing on excellent picture books, and they are loving it. More than half of these kids were in last year’s five-year-old class, so I can’t rerun…
Old Ironsides
“The story is told that one British sailor cried out in desperation, ‘Look, her sides are made of iron.’” Her sides were not made of iron. However, “Once planked inside and out, Constitution’s hull would be a solid wall of wood almost 2 feet thick,” covered with copper sheeting. “She is a frigate and the…
The “Small” and “Little” Books by Lois Lenski
These books by Lois Lenski are for your youngest listeners. Children will be drawn into the delight of words as they associate them with everyday activities.
Little Old Bear
“Once upon a time there was a little old Teddy bear. He was so old that he had lost his fur and his eyes and he was not the handsome little bear he had once been. “The children he had played with had grown up and gone away, and so he lay in a dusty…