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Weekend Pick for December 27, 2024

12/27/2024

Weekend Pick for December 27, 2024

Leilya Pitre

As the New 2025 Year's bells are ringing closer, I would like to say thank you to everyone who worked with me during the past three years on Weekend Picks. I couldn't do it without you. Your contributions to this blog are immense, and I greatly appreciate every single one of you. I hope you will continue to invest in reading and your students, so we can witness positive changes in our immediate and global worlds.
Happy New Year, friends! Let it be kind, hopeful, and promising. Take care and stay well.
Best wishes,
Leilya

The 2024 weekend Picks conclude with Lesley Roessing final suggestion. To remind, Lesley is a former middle school and high school ELA teacher, a K-8 charter school literary consultant, a Writing Project director and instructor of teacher education.
Lesley shares recommendations and reviews of her reading on her website at https://www.literacywithlesley.com/book-reviews.html. She has written books on literacy for teachers and school librarian, such as Talking Tests: A Teachers’ Guide to Book Clubs across the Curriculum.

Lesley Roessing

Boundless, edited by Ismee Amiel Williams and Rebecca Balcarcel

The U.S. population is undergoing rapid racial and ethnic change. The multiracial population in the United States—those who identify with two or more races—is also increasing with the rise in interracial couples. The children of these interracial unions are forming a new generation that is much more likely to identify with multiple racial groups. By 2060, about 6 percent of the total population—and 11 percent of children under age 18—are projected to be multiracial. (Population Reference Bureau)

Most of us have felt, from time to time, that we don’t fit in—with our peers, our communities, our families, even our own skins—for a variety of reasons.

These are twenty stories of adolescents who don’t feel they fit in or they are not “whole” because they are multiracial or multicultural. Boundless shares the multiracial and multicultural experience of contemporary adolescents—Asian, Hispanic-Jewish, Japanese-Jewish, Mexican-Irish, Italian-Chinese, Indian-White, Honduran adopted by an Irish couple, for example.

Boundless, edited by Ismee Amiel Williams and Rebecca Balcarcel, shares stories for those who have not felt “enough” for any reason. This is a book that invites some adolescents to see their lives and experiences reflected and invites others to experience the lives of their contemporaries.

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Weekend Pick for December 20, 2024

12/20/2024

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Weekend Pick for December 20, 2024

Lesley Roessing

If you haven\t met Lesley Roessing yet, let me introduce you. Lesley is a former middle school and high school ELA teacher, a K-8 charter school literary consultant, a Writing Project director and instructor of teacher education, including courses on Adolescent Literature, and shares recommendations and reviews of her reading on her website at https://www.literacywithlesley.com/book-reviews.html. She has written books on literacy for teachers and school librarians, such as Talking Tests: A Teachers’ Guide to Book Clubs across the Curriculum.

One Last Chance to Live by Francisco Stork

I first “met” Francisco Stork when reading The Memory of Light on my search for books about characters facing mental illnesses. I then read Marcelo in the Real World, Disappeared and its sequel Illegal, On the Hook, and I Am Not Alone. Stork’s writing is fresh and his characters memorable. He writes about meaningful topics – illegal immigration, gang life, revenge, mental health, social justice, and respect—self-respect and respect for others. Teachers, parents, and librarians will appreciate that he can explore these topics—with genuine, true-to-life adolescent characters—without the use of profanity, proving that “realistic” is not the same as “necessary.”

Francisco Stork

My favorite novel, other than The Memory of Light, is his most recent One Last Chance to Live. Readers will come to care about, and hurt for and with, Nico, an aspiring teen writer, who becomes obsessed with discovering his fellow writer and close friend (although he wished for more than that) Rosario’s recent death. He needs to find out what happened and why she gave up her dream after finally finishing her book of short stories. He wants to find out if and how their high school writing teacher is involved and how his recent dream of death is tied to Rosario’s death.

Meanwhile Nico’s mother becomes seriously ill with cancer and his 10-year-old half-brother is becoming involved with the local gang. Nico is looking at a future which may be hopeless, which may be how Rosario felt, but a future in which he will need to take charge.

This is a story of hope and hopelessness, family, love, hate, and acceptance; it is the story of finding meaning in our actions.
Hope you'll enjoy your weekend with this great novel.

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Weekend Pick for December 13, 2024

12/13/2024

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Weekend Pick for December 13, 2024

Lesley Roessing

To remind our readers, the December Weekend Picks contributor is Lesley Roessing, a former middle school and high school ELA teacher, a K-8 charter school literary consultant, a Writing Project director and instructor of teacher education, including courses on Adolescent Literature. She shares recommendations and reviews of her reading on her website at https://www.literacywithlesley.com/book-reviews.html. She has written books on literacy for teachers and school librarians, such as Talking Tests: A Teachers’ Guide to Book Clubs across the Curriculum.

JUMPER by Melanie Crowder

So far in 2024 from January 1st to October 18th, there have been 42,698 wildfires in the United States covering 7,865,946 acres. Fires across the country are predicted to burn between 4 and 6 million acres of land in 2024. Firefighters work for a variety of federal agencies, state institutions, tribes, and private contractors. These fires are fought on the ground by handcrews, hotshots, and engine crews, and in the air by helitak crews and smokejumpers. Smokejumpers parachute from airplanes to provide quick initial attack on wildland fires in remote areas.
Blair Scott has a passion – fighting wildfires. She has a goal—to become a smokejumper even though she is only 19 years old. But Blair also has a secret—she has Type 1 Diabetes, a condition which could keep her from reaching her goal. Blair feels she has to take risks and prove herself as, not only a young recruit, but especially as a woman. But when a tragedy occurs, she realizes the importance of collaboration and community.

Melanie Crowder

Jumper is a novel of adventure, danger, courage, goals, friendships, support, and, most of all, the power of fire. Well-researched, the novel provides a vast amount of information about wildfire and firefighting training and protocols and will appeal to teen readers, especially those with an interest in adventure and nature.

Melanie Crowder is the author of nine very different novels—prose novels, a verse novel, historical fiction, a fantasy series, magical folktale—and a picture book about winds.

To learn more about Melanie Crowder, visit her home page at https://melaniecrowder.net

Happy reading!

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Weekend Pick for December 6, 2024

12/6/2024

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Weekend Pick for December 6, 2024

Lesley Roessing

Meet our December contributor Lesley Roessing. She is a former middle school and high school ELA teacher, a K-8 charter school literary consultant, a Writing Project director and instructor of teacher education, including courses on Adolescent Literature, and shares recommendations and reviews of her reading on her website at https://www.literacywithlesley.com/book-reviews.html. She has written books on literacy for teachers and school librarians, such as Talking Tests: A Teachers’ Guide to Book Clubs across the Curriculum.

I, Lesley, have written that one of the most effective ways to learn about any historical event, and the nuances and effects of those events, is through novel study—the power of story. Every historical event is distinct and affects people and places uniquely—and each is surrounded by misconceptions, misunderstandings, miscommunications, and differing and shifting perspectives. We may learn about history through textbooks and lectures, but we experience history through novels. And when we live it, we learn it; we do not merely learn about it. We discern the complex issues, and we feel empathy for all affected. We bear witness to the events we read and the plights of the people affected by those events.

Gringolandia, Torch, and Eyes Open by Lyn Miller-Lachmann

Author Lyn Miller-Lachmann received her Master’s in Library and Information Science and edited the journal MultiCultural Review. She also received a MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Lyn has taught both middle and high school English, social studies, and Jewish studies; translates books from Portuguese; and writes a blog at https://lynmillerlachmann.com/. She has written 6 novels, a picture book, co-authored a book on women film directors, and contributed to the She Persisted series with a book on Temple Grandin.

In the last few years, I have learned about some of the most interesting periods in history through the novels of Lyn Miller-Lachmann. These three novels cover social justice in 1980-1991 Chile, 1968-69 Czechoslovakia, and 1967 Portugal.

Gringolandia shares the story of high school student Daniel, a refugee from Chile's Pinochet regime, his activist "gringo" girlfriend Courtney, and Daniel's father who has just been released from years of torture in a Chilean prison and joins his family in Gringolandia. Spanning 1980-1991 this novel would be a valuable addition to a Social Justice or Social Studies curriculum or as in my personal case, a good read to learn a history generally not covered in curriculum.

On August 21, 1968, the Soviet Union and three other Communist regimes—Poland, Hungary, and Bulgaria—invaded Czechoslovakia. The new wave of repression that followed saw the withdrawal of freedoms, mass firings, expulsions from the Party, the imprisonment of dissidents, and the closing of the borders. (Author’s Note)

Taking place from December 1968 to Summer 1969, Torch is a story of not only an historic time period but of resilience, freedoms, resistance, creativity, family, and, above all, friendship.

When 17-year-old Pavol finds his dreams of attending university in Prague have been ended by the Party and he faces a life in the mines that killed his father, he and his friends Stepan and Tomas write a letter to deliver to the castle in Prague. When he and Stepan are stopped and sent away, Pavol follows the example of martyr Jan Palach and sets himself on fire, a human torch.

Lyn Miller-Lachmann

Readers see how not only the increasing restrictive and punitive government’s actions but also Pavol’s actions affect his pregnant girlfriend Lydia; her father, Ondrej, a WWII freedom fighter; his friends Stepan and Tomas; and his mother and three younger sisters. But his death didn't affect anything else.
Stepan, a former bully who had been transformed through his friendship with—and maybe a crush on—the kind Pavol, socially awkward Tomas whose father is high in the Party and calls him “antisocial” and threatening to send him to a mental hospital when he turns 18, and Lydia, pregnant with Pavol’s child became real, working their ways into my heart, feeling their pain and frustrations and cheering any victories as they formed unlikely bonds with each other as they began trying to support each other on to lives with the freedoms they needed.

The newest novel, Eyes Open, a verse novel, was spellbinding and eye-opening. I lived in 1967 Portugal with 15-year-old Sonia Maria Fernandes Dias through the highs and many lows of her year—as she writes poetry, fighting the nuns for the right to write in free, not rhymed, verse which she writes about her boyfriend, Ze Miquel, a revolutionary. In the future she will write books, he as illustrator. Sonia’s—and Portugal’s—story is most powerfully written; the author again puts the reader into the life and hearts of the characters.

"The bigger the issue, the smaller you write" claims Richard Price. We read for many reasons but one essential purpose is to learn about our world, including its history, and develop empathy for others.

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Weekend Pick for December 27, 2024

Weekend Pick for December 27, 2024

Weekend Pick for December 20, 2024

Weekend Pick for December 20, 2024

Weekend Pick for December 13, 2024

Weekend Pick for December 13, 2024

Weekend Pick for December 6, 2024

Weekend Pick for December 6, 2024

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