Real Kids. Good Books.

A toast to all you Real Kids out there. I hope this new year finds you enjoying more Good Books than you ever thought possible. 

My Real Kids/ Good Books resolutions:

-focus on books for boys!
-more LGBTQ books starting with the Our Family Coalition suggestions:

• 10,000 Dresses by Marcus Ewert
• Antonio’s Car by Rigoberto Gonzalez
• The Duke Who Outlawed Jellybeans and Other Stories by Johnny Valentine
• Felicia’s Favorite Story by Leslea Newman
• The Harvey Milk Story by Kari Krakow
• In Our Mothers’ House by Patricia Polacco
• My Princess Boy by Cheryl Kilodavis
• A Tale of Two Daddies by Vanita Oelschlager 
• The Case of the Stolen Scarab by Nancy Garden
• A Clear Spring by Barbara Wilson
• The Misfits series by James Howe
• The Popularity Papers Series by Amy Ignatow
• Riding Freedom by Pam Munoz Ryan

-get my own manuscripts polished up and send out

The 2011 Round-up

9 months blogging
129 original book reviews

79 picture books
20 nonfiction books 
10 middle grade novels
6 early readers
5 YA novels
5 graphic novels
4 board books
and an assortment of reblogs of news and whatnot pertaining to kids, books, writing and apparently anything having to do with Totoro

+ a bunch of wonderful people following this blog

Thanks for making this little project fun.  

Excerpt from Ash by Malinda Lo. For more, head to her website. 

Aisling’s mother died at midsummer. She had fallen sick so suddenly that some of the villagers wondered if the fairies had come and taken her, for she was still young and beautiful. She was buried three days later beneath the hawthorn tree behind the house, just as twilight was darkening the sky.

Maire Solanya, the village greenwitch, came that evening to perform the old rituals over the grave. She stood at the foot of the mound of black soil, a thin old woman with white hair bound in a braid that reached her hips, her face a finely drawn map of lines. Aisling and her father stood across from each other on either side of the grave, and at the head of it, resting on the simple headstone, was the burning candle. Aisling’s father had lit it shortly after Elinor died, and it would burn all night, sheltered by the curving glass around it. The gravestone was a plain piece of slate carved with her name: Elinor. Grass and tree roots would grow up around it as the months and years passed, until it would seem as if it had always been there.

Maire Solanya said in her low, clear voice, “From life to life, from breath to breath, we remember Elinor.” She held a round loaf of bread in her hands, and she tore off a small piece and ate it, chewing deliberately, before handing the loaf to Aisling’s father. He pulled off his own piece, then passed it to his daughter. It was still warm, and it smelled like her mother’s kitchen after baking. But it hadn’t come from her mother’s hands, and that realization made a hard lump rise in her throat. The bread was tasteless.