A Million Holds

There are a million holds on Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds, so I just bought the audio and wow, wow, it was so worth it!  What a book.  I just couldn't wait any longer after hearing him talk about his book on Mashreads this morning.  (this is where I want David "I Hate Fat People" Levithan to know that I was running (albeit slowly) while listening.  Oh yeah, also, Mr. Levithan, I am 123lbs now.  Down 215lbs.  Do you like me now?  
Oh my gosh, I digress!
So sorry.  Anyway...
Long Way Down really, really is Printz worthy.  It has bumped The Hate U Give, maybe.  Or maybe it has tied with it.  (But still, Auma's Long Run is my favorite for both Printz and Newbery.)

Maybe it was just a really hard subject

After reading Your Own, Sylvia:  a verse portrait of Sylvia Plath, and loving it and after having failed to get through Frankenstein itself, I thought that I would read Hideous Love:  the story of the girl who wrote Frankenstein and that I would love it and that it would motivate me to try Frankenstein again.  But I really couldn't get into HL.  It just didn't grab me and maybe that is because Mary Shelley and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley sound like complete jaggoffs, not just in this book (but for sure in this book) but also in the other places I have read about them.

Sylvia

Not this Sylvia.  But this one.  I was never interested in learning much about Sylvia Plath.  I think that I grouped her into this terrible category with Lisa, Bright and Dark, which I read at way too young of an age to understand, I think.  I was eight and the book just terrified me.  The girl who lived across the street from me had an older sister and she and her friends were all reading it, so I wanted to read it to.  After they read LBAD they were reading The Bell Jar and after my nightmare experience with LBAD, I was determined to stay away from Sylvia Plath!  This was a pretty amazing book, though.  Stephanie Hemphill has written this novel is verse and she is very clear that it is a work of fiction, but there is a lot of biographical information in here and wow, I can see why this won the Printz.  I am going to buy her Hideous Love:  The Story of the Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein on audio on payday!  I wish Wicked Girls was available on audio, too.  There is just something that I love about listening to novels in verse.  I enjoy the experience so much more than when I read them.
One of things that made this book so good was that Hemphill says from the start that she loves Sylvia Plath, that Plath's writing has always meant a lot to her.  This reads like a love story, you can really tell that Hemphill was hoping to create a work dedicated to an author she admires so very much.  I don't think I will ever read Plath, but I am going to read everything from Hemphill that I can find!

Newbery! Newbery!

It won't make me upset at all if The Crossover wins the Newbery.  Not only is it an excellent, moving, realistic book, written so so so so so well, it is also a book that kids will like!  In fact, The Crossover is now my top pick for the Newbery because it really will appeal to its audience, not just librarians!  Just fantastic.  I can't wait to read He Said, She Said, also by Kwame Alexander

The poetry here is so incredible.  I mean, I don't know much about poetry, but this just sounded so good.  I listened to the book, read by Corey Allen who also did the EllRay Jakes books! 

This isn't just a basketball story, it is a story about the loss of a parent and the love between brothers (twins) and how hard it is to grow up.  An excellent middle-grade book.  Just an all-the-way-around awesome book.
I first saw it on the Anderson's Mock Newbery List and then when I posted on the discussion on goodreads about Caminar, which I still do totally love, this gal, who clearly has excellent taste in books said that The Crossover was her favorite and I am so thankful that she did!   It made me want to buy it right away, which I did, using my last audible credit and man, man, man, so good!  

Will this win the Newbery though?  Will it be 1954?  Will this be one of those horrid, "Oh it will get the Coretta Scott King Award deals?  We can only pray not.  

Not only will kids love to read this, but even kids who don't love to read will want to read this!  

WINNER!

One of those giant books that aren't really giant

My friend Dolores pulled Love and Leftovers off the shelf on Monday and said that she had heard good things about it.  I looked at it and even though I needed a book, it just looked so giant!!!  432 pages!  But then we opened it up and saw that it was written in verse!  Hooray! 

And I am so glad it was written in verse, because I like books written in verse, and this one was really good and original.  It also will be one that is very easy to recommend.  AND it is half in Idaho and half in New Hamphsire.  Well I already had New Hampshire, but not Idaho!

Marcie's father has just announced to his family that he is gay and has a boyfriend and Marcie's mother is devastated and she and Marcie are staying in New Hampshire at their summer home.  Marcie's mom pretty much falls apart.  Marcie's dad and his boyfriend are totally good guys, but it is still weird for Marcie, plus, she is halfway across the country now, away from her friends and her boyfriend Linus and she is so so lonely.  The story deals with love, sexuality, depression, all kinds of things, in a really spot-on way.  Very readable.  Great characters.  Easy to feel for them all. 

Thump...thump...thump...thump...

Sharon Creech is fast becoming a favorite author of mine.  She's really making me appreciate poetry-like, free verse, blank verse books.  Heartbeat is a pleasant, thoughtful story of a Annie, tween girl who loves to run- not for a team or anything, even though her school's track coach pressures her to do so.  She runs barefoot in the woods, sometimes with Max, a classmate who does run for the school's track team.  Their relationship is one story line in Heartbeat.  The other is Annie's mom's pregnancy.  Another is the declining health of Annie's grandfather. 
Running through the background of the whole story is an art assignment in which Annie has to draw the same apple every day for one hundred days. How this all fits together is pure literary genius. 
What a lovely book.