November Book Post: The Dragon in the Sock Drawer

Our November book selection is "The Dragon in the Sock Drawer" by Kate Klimo. This is the first book in a series called "Dragon Keepers." This fun book is about ten-year-old cousins Jesse and Daisy. Jesse is living with Daisy while his doctor-parents are in Africa establishing a children's clinic. The cousins are good friends and have always wanted something magical to happen to them. One day, Daisy's father (Jesse's uncle), a geologist, take the kids hiking and rock collecting to High Peak. Jesse finds what he thinks is a geode or "thunder egg". He picks it up and he thinks he hears the rock talking to him! Back home, all attempts to cut open the geode result in broken saw blades. Jesse puts the geode in his sock drawer. The next day, with a huge bang, the thunder egg hatches open and a tiny talkative baby dragon pops out! The two cousins are thrilled but clueless as to how to care for a dragon. They search the public library and the Internet where they find a strange website with a talking professor who can hear everything the cousins say. The professor guides the children on everything they need to know about the dragon. He tells them that the dragon’s hatching has designated them “Dragon Keepers.” Their biggest challenge is keeping the dragon, whom they named Emmy, safe from Saint George. St. George is masquerading as a herpetologist at the local university but he is really a villainous character who has kept himself alive for centuries by drinking dragons’ blood! There are two more books in the series with a fourth book planned for May of 2011.

October Book Club: The Magic Half

The book selection for October was "The Magic Half" by Annie Barrows. This is a wonderful book--part mystery, part history, part fantasy, part realistic fiction. The main character is Miri, an 11-year-old girl with twin older brothers and twin younger sisters. Miri often feels left out, especially after they move to a new house on land that used to be a working farm. The best part of the old house is that Miri finally gets to have her own bedroom. One day as she is in her bedroom imagining how it will look with freshly painted walls, she spies a glass lens taped to the wall near the floor. Curious, Miri pulls the lens free and looks through it...and is immediately transported back in time to 1935! She is still in the same house but that's all that is the same. There's a different girl, Molly, living in her bedroom. Molly is badly in need of help to escape an abusive situation. Miri feels an intense connection with Molly and wants to help her. Molly, in turn, says she and her magical grandmother have "called" up Miri. Together, with many twists and turns and near-disasters, Molly and Miri construct a plan that eventually succeeds in bringing them both back to the present day where they find that history has been changed! It's as through Molly and Miri have always been twins. Only they have any memories of what really happened.

September Book Club: Alvin Ho...

Our Ashburn Kids Book Club is off to a good start! We met on September 13 to discuss our first book pick of the school year: "Alvin Ho: Allergic to Girls, School, and Other Scary Things" by Lenore Look. This book is one of the nominations for the 2010-2011 Virginia's Readers Choice Award. It is a fine example of a transitional or early chapter book.

Alvin is a young Chinese-American boy just starting second grade. He is fearful of many things--elevators, scary movies, his piano teacher, the dark, and most of all, school. In fact, he is so fearful of school that he is completely unable to talk while at school. He can talk at home and on the school bus but once inside the classroom, he is completely mute. He handles his fears in quirky ways. For example, he carries a PDK--a Personal Disaster Kit--filled with equipment to help him survive whatever random bad stuff might arise.

Fortunately for Alvin, he has a loving and sympathetic (usually) family. Alvin's father is a particularly warm and real character in the book. He is patient and non-judgemental with Alvin and truly wants to help him overcome his fears and anxieties. Another great character is Alvin's grandfather who likes to sew (he makes all their Halloween costumes) and teaches the kids how to pitch a baseball.

Alvin's adventures at home, school, and in the neighborhood are handled with matter-of-fact humor and much fun. I think this book would be especially effective as a read-aloud. There are two more books in the Alvin Ho series, both with cartoon-like illustrations by LeUyen Pham.

AKBC for 2010-11

Whether we like it or not, the new school year is quickly approaching. We are gearing up for another fun year for the Ashburn Kids Book Club (AKBC). Once again, we will be reading 10-12 award-winning books, many of which are nominated for this year's Virginia Readers Choice Award.

Each month we will meet at the Ashburn Library at 7 pm, according to the following schedule:

Monday, Sept. 13: Book: "Alvin Ho: Allergic to Girls, School, and Other Scary Things" by Lenore Look
Monday, Oct. 4: Book: "The Magic Half" by Annie Barrows
Monday, Nov. 1: Book: "The Dragon in the Sock Drawer" by Kate Klimo
Monday, Dec. 6: Book: "Charlotte's Web" by E. B. White
Monday, Jan. 10: Book: "Chicken Feathers" by Joy Crowley
Monday, Feb. 7: Book: "Lady Liberty: A Biography" by Doreen Rappaport AND
Book: "You Wouldn't Want to be a Worker on the Statue of Liberty" by John Malam
Monday, Mar. 7: Book: "Lady Liberty" by Doreen Rappaport AND "You Wouldn't Want to be a Worker on the Statue of Liberty" by John Malam
Monday, Apr. 4: Book: "Blown Away" by Joan Hiatt Harlow
Monday, May 2: Book: "Gully's Travels" by Tor Seidler

And the winner is...

The Virginia State Reading Association has announced the winners of this year's 2009-10 Virginia Readers Choice Award. They are:

Primary: Library Mouse by Daniel Kirk

Elementary: The Lemonade War by Jacqueline Davies

Middle: Savvy by Ingrid Law

High: Unwind by Neal Shusterman

The winners are determined by tallying votes from children all over the state of Virginia. Only children's votes are counted. Our Ashburn Kids Book Club also voted and the winning book for us was No Talking by Andrew Clements.

May Book Club: Igraine the Brave

The month of May brings the final meeting of the Ashburn Kids Book Club for this school year. Our book this month is "Igraine the Brave" by Cornelia Funke. It is one of the books nominated for this year's Virginia Readers Choice Award. We don't often get a fantasy selection on the nomination list for VRC so it's been a fun change to read this book. Cornelia Funke is a gifted writer (often compared to JK Rowling of Harry Potter fame) and this book is delightful! It tells the story of twelve-year-old Igraine, the daughter of two magicians, who wants to become a brave knight rather than enter the family's magic business. Igraine has an older brother, Arthur, who is mid-way through his magic studies and still struggles with certain spells, i.e. the only food he is able to conjur up are dry biscuits and blue eggs. When their castle is attacked by an scheming neighbor bent on stealing their magic books, Igraine and Arthur each demonstrate their bravery in their own ways, which is especially crucial since their parents have been accidentally turned into pigs by a miss-spoken spell and have lost all their magical abilities. This book has come-to-life gargoyles, three-headed dragons, a sorrowful knight, a talking cat, an enchanted moat, a creepy dungeon, and much more! It is just the right mix of suspense, humor, and triumph over evil without ever being too dark or frightening. I really enjoyed it and I'm usually not a fan of fantasy.

April Book Club: Lunch Money

Our book selection for the month of April was "Lunch Money" by Andrew Clements. It's a very fun, fast-paced book about money! Well, more specifically about a twelve-year-old boy named Greg who has always been good at coming up with schemes and projects to make money. This time Greg thinks he can make money by designing, producing, and selling his own line of mini comic books at school. But it's an uphill battle. His plan brings disapproval from the principal and he soon has a rival comic artist in the form of his neighborhood nemesis and lifelong rival, Maura. In the end Greg and Maura make an unlike team to bring many changes to their school. Their mini-comic book business succeeds beyond anyone's expectations and they learn how to solve their differences in constructive ways. It's a good read and the book club kids seemed to really enjoy the book.

March Book Club: A Crooked Kind of Perfect

Our March meeting of the Ashburn Kids Book Club will feature the book, "A Crooked Kind of Perfect" by Linda Urban. This book is one of the nominees for this year's Virginia Readers Choice award. This book features 11-year-old Zoe as the main character. Zoe dreams of playing the piano and one day performing in Carnegie Hall. But her eccentric father gets talked into buying an organ instead of a piano and Zoe must adjust her dream to fit reality. Her organ teacher, Maybelline Person, recognizes that Zoe has natural talent and nudges her to enter an organ competition. Zoe accepts the challenge but must also cope with her loving but agoraphobic father, a lonely classmate who starts to hang out at Zoe's house, and her workaholic mother. Zoe and the other characters are full of quirky wisdom and irrepressible good humor. The family's life is a bit unconventional but works well and Zoe knows she is loved and supported. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and found myself laughing out loud at times. This is an impressive debut novel for author Linda Urban. Hopefully there will be more books by her soon. See you all on March 7, 7 pm, for our next Ashburn Kids Book Club meeting.

February Book Club: Jackie Robinson

February is traditionally the month when school children study about Black History. I thought it would work well to do two books about Jackie Robinson this month. The first book is titled, "Dad, Jackie, and Me" and was written by author Myron Uhlberg. This is a picture book and is one of the nominees for this year's Virginia Readers Choice book award. The book details the story of a young boy and his deaf father and their shared enthusiasm for the Brooklyn Dodgers during the 1947 season when Jackie Robinson became the first African-American baseball player in the major leagues. It is also about discrimination and tolerance--both from the standpoint of Jackie Robinson and the deaf father. The beautiful illustrations by artist Colin Bootman are a perfect match for Uhlberg's poignant text.

The second book we are reading for Febrary has an almost identical title: "Jackie and Me." It is written by Dan Gutman and is one of the books in his well-known Baseball Card Adventure series. The premise of these books is that the main character, 13-year-old Joe Stoshack, has the ability to travel back in time by using baseball cards. In this book, Joe travels back to the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers season in order to experience first-hand what it was like for Jackie Robinson. Not only does he travel back in time, he actually stays with the Robinson's at their apartment and becomes a bat boy for the team. He is also transformed into an African-American and gets to experience for himself what discrimination was like back in the 1940s. The author has done an excellent job of researching the details of Jackie Robinson's life and career and using those details to create an exciting and suspenseful book.

For our activity this month we will be watching several film clips about Jackie Robinson from Ken Burns' documentary, Baseball. See you on Thursday, February 4, at 7 pm.