END OF THE SUMMER

It's hard to believe that the summer is almost over and we will be back in school next week. I have 3 more books to tell you about before I begin concentrating on the 2012 Rebecca Caudill nominees. First is an historical fiction by Caroline B. Cooney, one of my favorite authors. The Ransom of Mercy Carter tells the story of a young girl captured by Canadian Indians during the French and Indian War. Mercy sees her village destroyed and many of her friends and neighbors killed. Then she, her brothers, and most of the children of her village are marched hundreds of miles to Indian villages where they are adopted by Indian families. Mercy shows great courage and curiosity as she adapts to Indian life. When ransom finally comes she must decide if she wants to return to her English home or stay in her Indian home.

Rosemary Wells's Red Moon at Sharpsburg features another courageous girl India who lives in Virginia during the Civil War. Not only does India believe in the cause of the Confederacy, but she is fascinated by the chemistry and biology she learns from a neighbor, Emory Trimble. Repeatedly told that girls do not study the sciences, India holds on to her dream to go to college when the war is over. What India sees of the war and the medicine of the time is quite sickening, but the ending gives hope for a brighter future.

I end the summer with a science fiction book - Across the Universe, by Beth Revis - that takes the reader on a three-hundred year space journey to a new life on a new planet. In alternating chapters we learn the story of Amy, a girl from our time who is frozen along with her parents for the space journey, and Elder, a boy who has grown up on the ship as part of the multi-generation crew. Together these two teenagers solve the mystery of what has been happening on the ship and why the journey is taking much longer than expected -- so long that a totally different society has evolved aboard the ship.

Thank you to those who have shared your summer reading with me. I look forward to hearing from more of you as we meet in the new school year.

ESPECIALLY FOR THE GUYS

Guys, are you tired of hearing your parents and teachers insist that you spend the summer reading? Well, so is Derek in Janet Tashijian's My Life as a Book. Derek expects to spend his summer lying in the grass with his dog Bodi or hanging out with his best friend Matt. But his teacher has assigned 3 books for summer reading and his parents are sending him to Learning Camp! A big extra in this book are the margin drawings by the author's teenage son Jake. In the story they are Derek's drawings of vocabulary words. These stick figure, cartoon-like drawings add to the fun of the book.

A dead body discovered in a nearby river starts off Todd's summer in Tedd Arnold's Rat Life. Although Todd helps out at his parents' motel, he gets no allowance or salary. So when he is offered a paying job at the local drive-in movie theater, he figures this is the best summer ever. At the drive-in he meets Rat and that leads to a host of strange adventures including another dead body, a dangerous flood, and the answers to his questions about Rat. A tinkling murder mystery with all kinds of puzzles to solve in the space of one exciting summer.

NONFICTION THAT READS LIKE FICTION

James L. Swanson has adapted two of his adult books for younger readers. Both books are concerned with the end of the American Civil War and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. In Chasing Lincoln's Killer, Swanson tells how the assassination of Lincoln was accomplished and of the manhunt for John Wilkes Booth, the assassin, and his accomplices. It is a fast-paced thriller where you have to keep reminding yourself that communication in those days was so slow that it took two weeks before Booth was finally tracked down! Even though you know the end of the story, Swanson's day-by-day account builds with suspense.
Following that book Swanson has given us Bloody Times, the story of the funeral of Lincoln and the manhunt for Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy. While the North mourns the loss of Lincoln and a funeral train slowly brings his body back to Illinois passing millions of mourners, Davis moves further south as the states of Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina become too dangerous for him. Both men were respected by their people, but came to such different ends.
Both books are filled with illustrations, many of them photographs, which helps you get a real sense of time period. I found that I had a hard time putting down either book.