Tandem Insights

Teen Read WeekTM Round Up

Everyone likes to laugh, right?  Well, rubber chickens, whoopee cushions, and handshake buzzers may not be what the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) has in mind for this year’s Teen Read Week^TM (TRW), but you can bet that with a theme of LOL @ your library, people are going to be having a good time.  Good thing too, because TRW’s initiative aims to encourage 12-18 year-olds to “Read For The Fun Of It” and with its 10-year anniversary to celebrate this October 14-20, 2007 you can bet plenty of teens, their parents, librarians, educators, booksellers and other concerned adults will be ROTFL (Rolling on the floor laughing) or at the very least LOL / GOL (Laughing / Giggling out loud).

Who knows you may already have these books on display for this year’s TRW-  GMTA (Great minds do think alike), but if you’re game here’s a round up of some funny YA fiction for MS and HS students:

Sue Limb’s fun and funny British-flavored series that will not disappoint students in Grades 7-10-   Jess Jordan takes us through her teenage life with razor-sharp observations and deadpan humor as a Girl, 15: Charming But Insane, Girl (Nearly) 16: Absolute Torture and Girl, Going on 17: Pants on Fire. The fourth Girl 15 series book, Girl, 15: Flirting for England, is due out in January 2008 and is a prequel to book one.

Fans of the Girl 15 series will also what to check out Louise Rennison's Georgia Nicolson’s diary series.  Georgia Nicolson, like Jess Jordan, is from Billy Shakespeare land, but her diaries include the kind of heartbreaking, embarrassing, and familiar confessions that so many Hamburger-a-gogo land dwellers already find marvey.

Neal Shusteman’s Schwa Was Here is aimed at middle school readers and while being funny teaches readers that even accidental relationships can be better than expected.  This book’s characters are so real and interesting that all readers will want to keep up with this unlikely crew and its adventures.

Tried and true favorite to make you LOL are Richard Peck’s A Long Way from Chicago and companion novel A Year Down Yonder where Joey and his sister, Mary Alice spend nine unforgettable summers with the worst influence imaginable—their grandmother!

     

Please visit Teen Read Week^TM website for more information and ideas.

The Cybils

The Internet's first literary awards are back.

The Children’s and YA Bloggers’ Literary Awards, or the Cybils, started in 2006 when a group of bloggers decided to invent their own book award.  Within hours, the word had spread through the blogosphere.  Within days, the new awards had a name and a website.  Nominations quickly opened in eight categories, from picture books up to Young Adult fiction and even graphic novels.  Participating bloggers include librarians, teachers, booksellers, authors, and the kidlit-obsessed. 

Tandem Library Books was pleased to promote the Cybils’ freshman year to our customers, including the fact that one of our own, a longtime book blogger (that’s me!), was involved as a panelist and an administrator.  We are also excited to let you know that last year’s contest was so successful last year that it’s on again for 2007!  I’m switching to nonfiction this year, and I’m looking forward to immersing myself in the best YA and middle grade nonfiction of the year.

Nominations are open to the public from October 1st through November 21st, so don’t miss your chance to be involved with this one-of-a-kind award by nominating your favorite titles of 2007 at www.cybils.com!

Don’t forget about last year’s Cybils winners and honor titles!  Panelists and judges read through some nearly 500 nominated titles to choose the very best in each category.  Some went on to win other major awards, like American Born Chinese.  Others were blogger favorites that didn’t get as much attention from more established awards, like A Drowned Maiden’s Hair and Scaredy Squirrel.  Here are all 45 honored titles from 2006.

Book of the Week: The Arrival

There’s been a lot of talk lately about authors and illustrators from Australia. Shaun Tan, an established artist from Western Australia, offers his newest book this month to an American audience. The Arrival is a stunning wordless graphic novel. (The Arthur Levine version is a reprint of an earlier Australian edition.) The story follows the journey of a man from his unnamed home country to a confusing new world which, despite presenting immense obstacles, offers the hope of a better life for his family. Because there are no words, the sepia-toned drawings carry the narrative, relying on the reader’s interpretations to complete the experience. I think this is what I appreciated most about the book: There are a lot of images and concepts that don’t make sense on first inspection, so as a reader you have to apply your own powers of perception, and you get to take part in the creation of the narrative.

In an essay for Viewpoint magazine, Shaun Tan had this to say:
“I am rarely interested in symbolic meanings, where one thing ‘stands for’ something else, because this dissolves the power of fiction to be reinterpreted. I’m more attracted to a kind of intuitive resonance or poetry we can enjoy when looking at pictures, and ‘understanding’ what we see without necessarily being able to articulate it.”

As a librarian and an avid reader, I’m surrounded by powerful words and their meanings. Reading The Arrival, I felt liberated from the obligation to make meaning, and enjoyed being able to let the pictures speak to me without making up a linear storyline. Questions came up, and my ideas about what was going on were constantly changing. For me, reading this book was a very emotional experience. In a manifestation of the old adage, a picture truly tells a thousand stories.

View this book in the Tandem Library Books Online Bookstore

Phonics Comics

           

Let’s face it: kids love graphic novels. Their popularity is ever increasing. Last week’s blog posts featured a bunch of really stellar graphic novels that no library should be without. But we also know there are still some haters out there. For anyone who thinks that graphic novels have no business in the classroom or in helping kids learn, I’d like to suggest the Phonics Comics series from the small publisher Innovative Kids.

These leveled readers are the same trim size as other familiar early reader series. The stories combine phonics-based narratives with bright, comic-style illustrations that support the text. Struggling or reluctant early readers will likely feel comfortable with the paneled format and the straightforward, sans-serif text in the talking bubbles. There are stories about dinosaurs, robots, and flying ponies, among other intriguing subjects. Each volume contains three separate stories, so they can be read in short bursts or all at once. The cartoon-like illustrations definitely have kid appeal. Developed with the help of a literacy educator, these fun stories support the tenets of the NCLB fluent literacy platform in a fun, exciting way.

View these books in the Tandem Library Books Online Bookstore