It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? 11/16/2020 #imwayr

November 16, 2020November 16, 2020 ~ Shaye Miller

Kellee Moye of Unleashing Readers and Jen Vincent of Teach Mentor Texts decided to give Kathryn’s (at Book Date) “It’s Monday! What Are You Reading?” meme a kidlit focus, reviewing books in children’s literature (picture books, chapter books, middle grade novels, young adult novels, or anything in the world of kidlit). If you enjoy this type of reading, join us every Monday to share what you’ve been reading!

I completely missed last week’s post, which is highly unusual for me. I’m normally a little obsessive about not only posting every week, but also about making sure to visit and comment on all KidLit #imwayr community link-ups. But my mind was most definitely preoccupied with the U.S. election (as well as the fierce division between many friends, family, and acquaintances). Additionally, we’re coming to the end of the college semester and so my Children’s Literature students are submitting their final work while I prepare to post final grades. I feel like I’m walking through molasses just trying to get everything done.

One FUN thing I failed to share previously was what our family did for Halloween. Every year we try to make that evening meal into some fun spooky snack-fest. So this year we had cheese dip and vomiting guacamole pumpkin head, bandaid graham crackers, spider Oreo cookies, mummy hotdogs, rice crispy treat pumpkins, fruit kabobs, clementine pumpkins, spider peanut butter crackers, roasted pumpkin seeds, and hummus with pita crackers. The kids didn’t dress up or go trick-or-treating, but we had a family game of Catan followed by watching It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown before the older kids watched Harry Potter (where we laughed and laughed because it seemed like the troll in the girls’ bathroom was getting a Covid-19 test!!).

What a fun Halloween night with a beautiful full “blue” moon followed by a time change (I can’t believe it was also the end of daylight savings!). Here’s a photo of the fun snacks we made for supper, that evening:

Regardless of my preoccupation with the election over a week ago, I did get just a little bit of reading done. I enjoyed a couple great middle grade novels as well as a few new picture books ILL’ed from across the state. So maybe you’ll find something of interest to add to your reading list.

War Stories
Gordon Korman
July 21, 2020
Scholastic, Inc.

With Veteran’s Day day this past week in the U.S., this middle grade historical fiction novel seemed a fitting read. Young Trevor is on a trip across Europe with his 93-year-old great grandfather, Jacob. Jacob is a WWII vet who Trevor has always idolized for his heroic efforts to defeat Hitler. While they visiting a variety of locations and his great grandfather stops to share stories of what happened where and when, some chapters flash back to Jake’s past where he’s a young 17 year old, fighting for his country while also fighting for his life. We know pretty early on that there’s something terrible that happened, but we don’t know what. So when the gut-wrenching truth comes out, there’s a difficult lesson to learn.

“Wars may have winning sides, but everybody loses.”

This book is definitely written for an audience of children, but it doesn’t shy away from some of the more difficult aspects of war. They were cold, hungry, injured, watching one another die, and sometimes wondering if death would be easier than survival (because at least they wouldn’t be living the nightmare). The people represented on both sides are shown to be human. Questions constantly come up, encouraging the reader to consider whether war is worth it, but those are asked alongside, “Well, aren’t we glad Hitler is no longer in charge of Germany?”

In an Author’s Note, Korman lists other important books to read followed by: “I encourage all readers to dive into the stories of WWII and to keep in mind that the story of any war needs many voices from many sides to be fully told.”

“…in a conflict as massive and chaotic as a world war, it can sometimes be difficult to tell the difference between heroics and villainy.”

I highly recommend this one!