Tandem Insights

Book of the Week: Lady Liberty

In March of 1885, the newspaperman Joseph Pulitzer launched his second fund-raising campaign to help erect the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor. The French government was prepared to donate the statue, but a pedestal needed to be built and the U.S. Congress had rejected a proposal to publicly fund it. You can discover the fascinating story behind the Statue of Liberty in Lady Liberty: A Biography. First-person prose poems give insight into the many people who were involved, from the French designers and engineers to the American contractors and advocates like Pulitzer who raised awareness of the project. Through the eyes of those who were there, readers learn how the massive statue was constructed and what its symbol of freedom meant to immigrants, then and now. A helpful timeline and bibliography will encourage readers to learn more. This book is a great picture book choice for older readers. View this book in the Tandem Library Books online bookstore.

Book of the Week: Grayson

Imagine swimming in the ocean at the break of dawn. Marine life swirls around you as the salty water keeps you floating near the surface. Sounds are amplified while your vision is clouded by goggles and dark water. Now imagine that you realize you’re swimming side-by-side with a baby gray whale...

This is the true account of distance swimmer Lynne Cox’s encounter with the whale she named Grayson when she was seventeen years old. Cox was training at her hometown beach in southern California and was just getting ready to swim to shore when she saw the whale. Knowing it had been separated from its mother and needed to be reunited in order to survive, Cox decided to keep swimming with it until the mother could be found. Spoiler alert: the book does have a happy ending, and in addition to the amazing true story, it is also a fascinating look at ocean life and a testament to the power of human-animal connections.

Grayson is a quick, engaging read and will make a great read-aloud for classrooms and libraries. Readers of all ages will enjoy this remarkable story. Pair it with a unit of study on oceans or marine animals, and be sure to read the epilogue for ideas on how teachers and librarians have integrated it with curriculum.

View this book in the Tandem Library Books online bookstore.

Book of the Week: Remembering Raquel

“It’s amazing how much dying can do for a girl’s popularity.”

Raquel Falcone was not the most popular girl in her high school.  She was quiet and overweight.  She had a few friends, but her death affects more than just the few who knew her well. 

Now there’s a collection going to get a memorial park bench in her name and a letter-writing campaign to lower the speed limit on the road where her fatal accident occurred.  Amidst the crusading of some of Raquel’s classmates though, there are questions.  No one is 100% sure what happened.  Did she fall in front of the car?  Was she pushed?  Or did she step in front of the car?

Despite a premise that seems heavy and full of tragedy, Remembering Raquel is actually a fairly light and fast read.  At only 160 pages, this slim book will appeal to readers who don’t want a huge time commitment.  And the alternating perspectives keep the book moving at a quick pace while keeping it interesting.

All the while, you’re left wondering how you might be remembered.

View this book in the Tandem Library Books Online Bookstore.

Book of the Week: Jabberwocky

Jabberwocky is powerful take on Lewis Carroll’s well-loved nonsensical poem and a sure fire hit for today’s young readers.  Illustrations come alive in electric color, framing and taking charge of Carroll’s bold verse.

An urban basketball court is the setting for a face-off between an epic challenger and hopeful contender.  Lime green, yellow, fuchsia, red, orange and sky blue text color the mood as the bold young hero takes on the Jabberwock in a game of one-on-one.  Control and thought arm the hero in what should be an impossible match-up versus the fourteen-fingered slam-dunking beast.  Students and teachers in grades four and up will find many lessons in this picture book for all ages: analysis of the setting for Myers’ illustrated interpretation, study of the use of portmanteaux in Carroll’s poem from his novel Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1871), or defining words of poems even if they are beyond definition.

Christopher Myers delivers a poem with punch.

Click here to view other books written and/or illustrated by Myers, one of today’s most talented children’s book illustrators.  Included on the list are: Harlem which earned a Caldecott Honor for illustrations, as well as Black Cat and Jazz which both earned Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honors.

Book of the Week: The Golden Compass

Anything I can say about The Golden Compass will be overshadowed by both the awards it has won—ALA Notable, ALA Top Ten Best Book for Young Adults, Horn Book Fanfare Honor, BCCB Blue Ribbon, Publisher’s Weekly Best Book of the Year, Booklist Editor’s Choice, Carnegie Medal (England), Carnegie of Carnegies (best children’s book of all time in England), Guardian Prize for Fiction (England), not to mention four starred reviews—and the book itself.

The Golden Compass is the first book in an incredible trilogy, featuring 11-year-old orphan Lyra and her daemon, Pantalaimon. The daemon is the first of author Philip Pullman’s amazing creations. A daemon is a sort of soul/conscience made physical; it takes the form of an animal, but the form isn’t fixed until adolescence, so children like Lyra have daemons that are constantly changing from one animal to the next.  (Confession: I so want a daemon!)

Lyra lives at Jordan College in a world very close to ours, yet very different also. Her adventure begins when she hides in a wardrobe and sees her Uncle Asriel show the college scholars some mysterious photos and artifacts that show evidence of Dust from the far north. Then, in quick succession, her best friend is captured by the Gobblers, and Lyra is taken in by the gorgeous, very charming, and very very frightening Mrs. Coulter, who is also chasing Dust. From there, Lyra's quest to save her friend sweeps her into the far north where she befriends gyptians, witches, an aeronaut from Texas, and even one of the panserbjorne, the talking armored polar bears of the north. The bear, Iorek Byrnison, and Pan, her daemon, and the mysterious golden alethiometer that answers questions through symbols are Lyra’s truest companions in this vast fantasy.

So what is this Dust? That question takes the entire trilogy to answer.  Lyra, a stubborn, charming, willful, innocent girl, comes to believe that it must be good because all the grown-ups around her who keep telling her it’s evil do such bad things themselves, like separating kids from their daemons which is infinitely painful.

And yes, it is the Church that is behind this horrible separating.  Talk has been swirling around The Golden Compass, as the opening date of the movie approaches, that it is anti-Christian. Here is what Pullman had to say in response: “In the world of the story — Lyra’s world — there is a church that has acquired great political power, rather in the way that some religions in our world have done at various times, and still do (think of the Taliban in Afghanistan). My point is that religion is at its best — it does most good — when it is farthest away from political power, and that when it gets hold of the power to (for example) send armies to war or to condemn people to death, or to rule every aspect of our lives, it rapidly goes bad. Sometimes people think that if something is done in the name of faith or religion, it must be good. Unfortunately, that isn’t true; some things done in the name of religion are very bad. That was what I was trying to describe in my story.”

While the main character of this story is an 11-year-old girl, so 11-year-olds might enjoy it, this book, the entire trilogy, is so rich and complex that I believe older readers, YAs and OAs (old adults) will get the most from it.

A movie based on The Golden Compass is coming out on December 7, 2007, so check back for a review of the movie and how well (or poorly) it compares to the book.

View this book in the Tandem Library Books online Bookstore

Book of the Week: Into the Wild

It's tough being Rapunzel's daughter.  Sometimes all Julie wants is to live a normal life instead of having magical items she can't use locked in the linen closet and having a cat for a brother.  But that all comes with the territory when your mother is a legend among her own kind.  Rapunzel, owner of Rapunzel's Hair Salon, is the hero who helped all the fairy tale characters, including Goldilocks, Cinderella, and others, escape the Wild Wood, where they were trapped in their stories--living them over and over again.

Now, they all live relatively normal lives in the real world.  And Julie is stuck in the middle.  She knows too much about the Wild Wood to be a normal junior high school student.  But she's not quite as special as her mother's fairy tale friends.

But that in-the-middle status will come in handy when the Wild Wood starts taking over and finding new stories in which to trap people.  Julie is the only one who can stop the Wild from growing.

Fairy tale fans will love Into the Wild''s unusual look at fairy tales from an outsider's perspective.  This light-hearted fantasy-adventure will be familiar and new at the same time to most middle school readers. 

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