This year’s goal was to count every book I read (why a lot of picture book reviews) and to see if I can get to 500 books because of it. Due to the fact some books I could not write reviews for them, they did not make it here, but I am almost at 500. And one reason is Brave book two in the Berrybrook Middle School series by Svetlana Chmakova. While a stand-alone title, I recommend reading Awkward first. Brave is the trials of […]
Act One: Scene One: You the Reader Reading this Book
While staring Positively Izzy by Terri Libenson, I was thinking it was like every Raina Telgemeier graphic novel out there. Which is not a bad thing, but since I have read all the original graphic novels of Telgemeier, I was not really digging Izzy. However, by the end there is enough differences that you are not just rereading Telgemeier. The story pans out differently even though the characters are still similar but then again, practically any story you could pick up about middle schoolers today […]
I wanted to like it …
I didn’t read this one immediately after downloading it, so when the novel didn’t initially click for me, I blamed myself for forgetting that the main character was 12. I had been thinking of it as a YA novel, but with the ages being around 12, it isn’t quite YA, which of course leads to slightly misaligned expectations. “Oh,” I thought, “when they meant it’s like Harry Potter, they didn’t just mean magic, they meant age-wise, too.” However, when the novel continued to not quite […]
Ms. Hempel Chronicles
Well this is just a charming little book. Ms. Hempel is a twenty-something schoolteacher who lives a pretty normal, almost mundane, life. She attends the school talent show. She muses on the odd relationship between student and teacher, and sometimes teacher and teacher. She gets engaged. She breaks up. She takes kids on field trips. She wants to be the young cool teacher but she also feels that she ought to learn how to be a disciplinarian. The book is a novel, sort of, in […]