Velvet Undercover - Teri Brown

Brown, Teri. Velvet Undercover. New York: Balzer + Bray, 2015.

For a teenager living in Europe in the midst of World War I, life can be a series of suspenses.  Samantha’s father has disappeared. Her mother is lost without him. She comes in a sad second in her Girl Guides’ competition. Enter La Dame Blanche and the offer to serve her country as a spy. While challenged and intrigued, she feels she dares not leave her mother, but then the ultimate card is played.  If she spies, she gets information about her father.  She feels she must.  What follows is a true spy adventure.  She is trained and placed into undercover among royalty in Germany.  She is quickly thrust into the intrigue of double agents and chemical weapons.

While this title didn’t rock my world, I will be pleased to share it with my students.  Samantha is incredibly smart and stunningly capable.  She learns over the course of her adventure to heed the voice within her and recognize her own strengths. These are the kinds of heroines I love to give my girls.  Also, the glimpse into the intrigues of World War I and the life of spies is a solid one.  Our junior readers are looking for world history books for independent reading for social studies. I’m excited to add this one.  I am selling Elizabeth Wein’s protagonists everywhere.  While I am not quite as enamored of this title as those, I am indeed excited to have another title to offer.



Printz Win (For me!)

I have a love/hate relationship with the ALA YMA awards day. I look forward to seeing the winners - an exciting time for YA Lit.  But I sweat it some.  I wonder if I will have any of the titles in my collection - if I don't, does it call into question my chops as a librarian and literature teacher?  This year, I celebrate the small victories. I have read, liked, and blogged about all three Printz titles: Bone Gap, Out of Darkness, and The Ghosts of Heaven.  Today, for just a moment, I forgot about test scores, common core, SLO's, and all of the things that stress me out about teaching and felt like a winner!

Coloring!

 I love to color - always have.  I mourned when my kids grew out of coloring, ending my logical reason for doing so.  Needless to say, I am thrilled with the new adult coloring trend.  While I have been recently mourning a significant loss, a friend gave me a book of birds and blooms to color. Therapy. 

I was pretty pleased to read this post by Naomi Bates at YA Books and More about coloring. On a personal level I am grateful for the links and apps to check out. As a librarian, I am grateful of the suggestions of how to incorporate this trend into my school library.  I had a phase for a couple of years where kids came and printed pics and colored.  It has passed the library by for a bit, but I love the ideas of printing these pages and cutting them to be used as book marks.  I have been toying with very simple ideas to create a maker space atmosphere in the library, and I am sure with some creative thinking I can piggy back on this new coloring trend.

Bone Gap - Laura Ruby

Ruby, Laura. Bone Gap. New York: Balzer+Bray, 2015.

What a lovely book, a bit magical and fantastical with lovely characters who are nothing but real. I have no recollection why I added this book to my order; it is SUCH a long journey from choosing to ordering to arriving, but I am truly glad that I did. This story of the missing Roza and Finn who witnessed her departure - of his brother Sean who loved her will sneak into your heart and demand your attention.  The suspense builds slowly. We meet bullies, and Priscilla who prefers to be called Petey. We get to know the friends and neighbors who populate the small, rural town of Bone Gap. And we get short, bone chilling glimpses the the man who’s stolen Roza away. A difficult book for me to summarize simply, but well worth the read.

I love Finn. He surely struggles with a community who thinks he is just not all quite there. He is bullied and initially seems to even invite the physical pain to distract him from his emotional pain. He is drawn to Petey, a young, complex keeper of bees. He wishes his brother would forgive him for letting Roza go, but doesn’t fully understand why Sean doesn’t search for her.  He embraces the magical horse that appears in his barn, and his fully absorbed in the magical rides the horse gives him. I felt a quiet joy in watching him grow and change throughout the course of his story.  The love story between Finn and Petey is a slow burn, but beautifully rendered.

This novel is a lovely choice for talented readers and aspiring writers.  The language here is phenomenal. I could just as easily turn this into a learning activity for my AP students: imagery, figurative language, diction. I have already had the privilege of talking about it with one of my best readers. She agrees with my assessment that the read is an excellent one. She, too, enjoyed the relationships in the novel. She was a bit more frustrated than I with the blurring between fantasy and reality.   She just wanted a few more answers.  But I like that she was passionate and intrigued enough to want them. I believe she will help me share this out with some more readers. The kids are my best took in talking books.

As an aside, I think a great deal about how we classify and label books.  This title has been reviewed as a YA one, and certainly I'll be using it in my 7-12 library. But, when I talk to my adult friends who love to read, I will surely be recommending this one.