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.

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.

April Book Club: Phineas L. MacGuire...Erupts!

Our April meeting of the Ashburn Kids Book Club will meet on Thursday, April 2, at 7 pm. We will be discussing the book, Phineas L. MacGuire...Erupts, by Frances O'Roark Dowell. This book is one of the titles nominated for this year's Virginia Readers Choice (VRC) Award. It tells the story of a 4th grade boy, Phineas, who loves science and experiments more than anything. Phineas says, "If you're a scientist like me, you're always interested when a problem comes around. Because what you learn when you study science is that if you think hard enough and are willing to take risks, almost every problem has a solution. It's just a matter of discovering what that solution is." This philosophy is put to the test, however, when Phineas is forced to team up with a new boy in the class--a boy who has clashed with Phineas from day one--for the 4th grade science project fair. Phineas puts his scientific problem-solving to good use and, in the process, learns quite a lot about himself and others.

Besides our book discussion, we will also be voting for our favorite VRC books. The votes are due by the first week of April to the Virginia State Reading Association who will compile the votes of children all over the state and then announce the winners of this year's award.

March Book Club: "Rules" by Cynthia Lord

Our book club for March will meet on Thursday, March 5, and we will be discussing the book, Rules by Cynthia Lord. This Newbery Honor Medal book is one of the books nominated for the Virginia Readers Choice award for 2008-2009. It has also received many other awards--too many to list them all here. The story is about a 12-year-old girl named Catherine who has a younger autistic brother, David. The title of the book comes from all the rules Catherine establishes to help David understand and interact with his world. For example, one rule is: No toys in the fish tank. I'll bet you can guess why she has this rule! Catherine loves her brother and is sensitive to his needs but she is also growing impatient with the responsibilities and embarrassment he brings. Catherine often accompanies her brother to his therapy sessions at a clinic. One day at the clinic Catherine befriends a wheel-chair bound boy, Jason, who can only communicate by pointing to small word cards. Catherine uses her drawing skills to make additional word cards for him and their friendship gradually grows. Catherine experiences some of the same discomfort with Jason that others do in the presence of her brother David. This gives Catherine the opportunity to explore her own thoughts and feelings and begin to look at her world differently. This is a tender and heart-warming book which the author says is loosely based on her own experience raising a son with autism.

February Book Club: Owen & Mzee + Henry's Freedom Box

Our February meeting of the Ashburn Kids Book Club was very busy! We did two books for the month. They were: Henry's Freedom Box by Ellen Levine and Owen & Mzee: The True Story of a Remarkable Friendship by Isabella and Craig Hatkoff.

Henry's Freedom Box retells the true story of a 1849 Virginia slave, Henry "Box" Brown, who desired freedom so badly he devised a method of escape--he mailed himself to freedom by shipping himself in a wooden crate from Richmond to Philadelphia. The wonderful illustrations are by the award-winning artist, Kadir Nelson. The evocative illustrations are the perfect accompaniment to the simple text. Often we think picture books are just for young readers but this book is a good example of a picture book format written for older readers.

Owen & Mzee: The True Story of a Remarkable Friendship tells the story of a baby hippo, Owen, who was orphaned in Kenya as a result of the 2004 tsunami. He was rescued and taken to an animal sanctuary where he formed a most unlikely friendship with a 130 year old Aldabra tortoise, Mzee. The book is illustrated by wonderful photographs that chronicle the whole amazing story. We were able to watch a documentary film about Owen & Mzee downloaded from their website. It was amazing to see such unlikely animals--a mammal and a reptile--form a lifelong bond of friendship. It's hard to explain how this would happen but perhaps the author's simple explanation is the best one, "Science can't always explain what the heart already knows: Our most important friends are sometimes those we least expect."

Both of these books have been nominated for the 2008-2009 Virginia Reader's Choice Award for grades 3-5.

January Book Club: "The Homework Machine" by Dan Gutman

Our January book club meeting will take place on Thursday, January 8, at 7 pm. We will be discussing the book, The Homework Machine by Dan Gutman. This book has an intriguing way of telling the story. It is told in the alternating voices of four 11-year-olds as they make statements to the police. The children are all fifth graders in the same class at the Grand Canyon elementary school. They are about as different from each as any four kids could be, but they do have one thing in common--they have all been involved in a scheme to use a machine, invented by one of the group, to do their homework. Their plan takes many twists and turns and gets more complicated than any of them could have imagined. The book appeals equally well to boys and girls and is both funny and thought provoking. It is one of the ten books nominated this year for the Virginia Readers Choice Award.

November Book Club: "The Ghost's Grave"

For our November 6th meeting of the Ashburn Kids Book Club, we will be reading and discussing the book, "The Ghost's Grave" by Peg Kehret. This book is one of ten books nominated for this school year's Virginia Readers Choice Award, an annual award presented by the Virginia State Reading Association. The award is based on votes of children all over Virginia who read the ten book nominations and then choose their favorites. "The Ghost's Grave" has already won young reader awards in the states of Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Washington and So. Dakota.

This book is about a 12-year-old boy named Josh whose plans for an exciting summer of baseball playing and hanging out with his friends are shattered when he learns he will be spending the summer with his old eccentric aunt who lives in a tiny town and has no television and no internet. Things don't stay dull for long, though. Josh soon meets Willie, the ghost of a coal miner killed in a mine explosion. Willie has been waiting years for some kind soul to dig up his leg and rebury it with the rest of him--only then will he be at peace. Josh reluctantly agrees to do the grisly deed, but when he digs in the old cemetery, he uncovers a cache of $100 bills--$130,000.00 total. The story takes many suspenseful twists and turns as Josh discovers who buried the money in Willie's grave, and just how far that person will go to get the money back.

It's the perfect book to read during this Halloween season!

Join us on Thursday, Nov. 6th, at 7 pm for our Ashburn Kids Books Club discussion of "The Ghost's Grave."