#Early middle grade book

[booksteacupandreviews]

Dolls of Despair by C.G. Salamander - fun and exhilarating graphic novel

Dolls of Despair is a fun and exhilarating graphic novel, set in a magical world filled with captivating characters and vibrant illustrations. Dolls of DespairSynopsisReviewBook Links Maithili and the Minotaur: Dolls of Despair (Outlandish Graphic Novel Series #3) by C.G. Salamander Publication Date : April 17, 2024 Publisher : Puffin Read Date : September 25, 2024 Genre : Graphic Novel /…

[cjbolan]

Mary Penelope Windsnap in Book 1: *courageously disarms and traps in a net with her bare hands a dangerous Royal spy with superhuman armed guards at his beck and call*

Mary Penelope Windsnap in Book 2:

* sails headfirst into a deadly sea monster’s reach to find her daughter*

Mary Penelope Windsnap in Book 8:

* is too scared of a possibly unarmed man in a silly pirate costume who’s surrounded by a bunch of kids to do anything except just hide*

[literaticat]

Thank you so much for answering all of our questions! I'm struggling to conceptualize the difference between an early reader, a chapter book, and middle grade? (Do they ever call middle grade books chapter books?) Thanks!

If I wrote a book and was having a hard time determining if it fit into early reader or chapter book, is that something an agent can help me figure out where it best fit?

While there is a little bit of crossover between these categories -- a LITTLE bit -- ie, a handful of books that one might argue COULD be considered early readers/chapter books, or chapter books/young MG -- the reality is, for the most part, these categories each have pretty distinct parameters.

Therefore, I'm going to be brutally honest: If you can't tell the difference between these categories, you have not read enough children's books to be writing them. Go to the bookstore or library and get to reading!

But before you go, here, I made you a cheat sheet -- hey, don't make fun of it, "graphic design is my passion" lol :D

(ETA: Oh and yes - sometimes random people -- parents, teachers, kids -- do call anything with chapters a chapter book. In publishing terms, though, chapter book is its own distinct category, and a middle grade book would never be called a chapter book.)

(ETA AGAIN: Sure, your agent can certainly help you decide at which audience to aim your book, like for example, suggesting that an early reader might sell better as a chapter book, or vice versa -- but it would def help if you knew the difference first and had a goal in mind, yanno?)

[ladyfate2010]

BOOK ALERT

If your child is a fantasy-fiction lover, I have a perfect book for you. Featuring a storyteller grandma, curious children, a beautiful garden, the bond of siblings and, of course, fairies.

Buy it only on Bribooks -

[ritzcrackee]

i need book friendssss

[ace-with--a-mace]

i definitely think quarantine stunted everyone under the age of like 25's growth and its detrimental to society today

[narratorstragedy]

it’s wild to me when people are like “i learned to read when i was three 😌” because i genuinely can’t remember reading before age 6 or so (besides the painstakingly sounding out words type)… like in my head it always felt like i woke up one day and picked up a magic tree house book and i could suddenly understand it. i also learned to walk rather late because i figured out i could just crawl instead and couldn’t be bothered. which is iconic actually

[bargainsleuthbooks]

Book Reviews: Children's Edition; Simone Biles: Little People, Big Dreams; My Friend LeVar; The Owl Prowl Mystery; Big Jim and the White Boy; From the Early 1900s to the Mid-1900s: Inventors #NetGalley #NewBooks

Time for another round-up of ARCs that I've read lately. This time 'round, it's a bunch of children's books of all ages, including a retelling of Huck Finn, and a book on #Olympian #SimoneBiles #Bookreview #netgalley #newbooks #levarburton

I’m cruising along and getting through all my Advanced Reader’s Copies from NetGalley. In order to keep up with blogging about them all, I’ve decided to do more roundups like this. Most books can be found at the affiliate links below or try your local library when they are released! (Amazon US) (Amazon CA) (Amazon UK)  (AbeBooks) (Barnes & Noble) (Booksamillion)  (Audible.com)…

[chantireviews]

The 2023 CIBAs Grand Prize Winners for Fiction!

A Huge Congratulations to all of the 2023 Chanticleer Int’l Book Awards (CIBAs) FICTION Division Grand Prize Winners! Every tier of the CIBAs is an important one, though few rise to be one of the coveted Division Grand Prize Winners. We will link to the Non-Fiction, Series, Shorts, and Overall Grand Prize lists after they post! This post has links to each of the 16 individual CIBA FICTION…

[booksteacupandreviews]

Grandpa's Bag of Stories by Sudha Murty - engaging collection of stories

Grandpa’s Bag of Stories by Sudha Murty is fast-paced, beautifully engaging collection of stories filled with morals that parents and grandparents will love sharing with their children of age 8 or more. Grandpa’s Bag of Stories by Sudha MurtySynopsisReviewBook Links Grandpa’s Bag of Stories by Sudha Murty Publication Date : July 29, 2024 Publisher : Puffin Read Date : September 2,…

[cjbolan]

After finishing the Netflix ATLA I realized Shiprock is a lot like the Northern Water Tribe. They treat women OK but give them way fewer opportunities than the men. Just as women in the Northern Water Tribe can only be healers, women in Shiprock can only be schoolteachers or sirens . With very few exceptions.

And they make miserable any woman who dares want more options.

(I always thought Jake Windsnap is a bit sexist in the early books and this comparison confirms it)

[readsalot1]

-Chronicles of Prydain; it gets a bit darker as the series goes on, but I'm 99.9% sure it has no swearing--they end up talking about Annuvin a bunch, but (a) it's not actually hell, and (b) all the place names are in pseudo/actual Welsh, so he probably won't know if it pops up anyway, lol

-Another series by Lloyd Alexander is the Westmark Trilogy; I read it at around 14? Really good, but it has more mature themes than Prydain. There's probably swearing in at least book 2 (The Kestrel is quite possibly the most blatantly gory YA book that I've ever read--I pulled an all-nighter so I wouldn't dream about it, haha) but book 1 (Westmark) will probably be okay? Although thinking about it, the series opens with "Theo was, by occupation, a devil. A printer's devil..." as in an apprentice to the trade. It put my little sister off the series until I told her I'd read it out loud and substitute "devil" with "apprentice" (she's so cute, I love her)

-if he likes Star Wars, I 100% suggest the OG Thrawn Trilogy (the one from the 90s; I haven't read the new one yet), and maybe Young Jedi Knights (pretty sure it's YA? if he's more willing to jump into grimdark, New Jedi Order is AMAZING)

-I totally forgot Earthsea!!!! So good! Ursula Le Guin was an amazing writer. It's probably targeting late YA/mid- to late teens, now that I'm thinking about it. I remember having a really obsessive phase in 7th grade or so? and the creepier stuff went over my head. You might want to read them first to decide if he'd like them--there's some stuff that looking back was actually really dark? But it's so well written, and the things that were bad were very obviously painted as Things Not to Do, so it gets a place on the list

-Redwall is really good, actually--if he changes his mind he should go for it

Trusted mutuals and friends, I put a question to you: my youngest brother (thirteen years old) is desperately looking for some books to read—do y’all have any recs? A few criteria: a few of his favorite series recently have been Keeper of the Lost Cities, The Unwanteds, and The Green Ember. He’s also pretty sensitive to swearing, but not so much to violence.

[butchlifeguard]

so is a child in this book written really badly or are my only references Early Bloomers with 160 iq

[simplyshelbs16xoxo]

Stuck at the bookstore until 3. Normally I wouldn't mind, but most of the people who have walked in here have been either annoying or an asshole.

[gowns]

Why Kids Aren't Falling in Love With Reading - It's Not Just Screens

A shrinking number of kids are reading widely and voraciously for fun.

The ubiquity and allure of screens surely play a large part in this—most American children have smartphones by the age of 11—as does learning loss during the pandemic. But this isn’t the whole story. A survey just before the pandemic by the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that the percentages of 9- and 13-year-olds who said they read daily for fun had dropped by double digits since 1984. I recently spoke with educators and librarians about this trend, and they gave many explanations, but one of the most compelling—and depressing—is rooted in how our education system teaches kids to relate to books.

What I remember most about reading in childhood was falling in love with characters and stories; I adored Judy Blume’s Margaret and Beverly Cleary’s Ralph S. Mouse. In New York, where I was in public elementary school in the early ’80s, we did have state assessments that tested reading level and comprehension, but the focus was on reading as many books as possible and engaging emotionally with them as a way to develop the requisite skills. Now the focus on reading analytically seems to be squashing that organic enjoyment. Critical reading is an important skill, especially for a generation bombarded with information, much of it unreliable or deceptive. But this hyperfocus on analysis comes at a steep price: The love of books and storytelling is being lost.

This disregard for story starts as early as elementary school. Take this requirement from the third-grade English-language-arts Common Core standard, used widely across the U.S.: “Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, distinguishing literal from nonliteral language.” There is a fun, easy way to introduce this concept: reading Peggy Parish’s classic, Amelia Bedelia, in which the eponymous maid follows commands such as “Draw the drapes when the sun comes in” by drawing a picture of the curtains. But here’s how one educator experienced in writing Common Core–aligned curricula proposes this be taught: First, teachers introduce the concepts of nonliteral and figurative language. Then, kids read a single paragraph from Amelia Bedelia and answer written questions.

For anyone who knows children, this is the opposite of engaging: The best way to present an abstract idea to kids is by hooking them on a story. “Nonliteral language” becomes a whole lot more interesting and comprehensible, especially to an 8-year-old, when they’ve gotten to laugh at Amelia’s antics first. The process of meeting a character and following them through a series of conflicts is the fun part of reading. Jumping into a paragraph in the middle of a book is about as appealing for most kids as cleaning their room.

But as several educators explained to me, the advent of accountability laws and policies, starting with No Child Left Behind in 2001, and accompanying high-stakes assessments based on standards, be they Common Core or similar state alternatives, has put enormous pressure on instructors to teach to these tests at the expense of best practices. Jennifer LaGarde, who has more than 20 years of experience as a public-school teacher and librarian, described how one such practice—the class read-aloud—invariably resulted in kids asking her for comparable titles. But read-alouds are now imperiled by the need to make sure that kids have mastered all the standards that await them in evaluation, an even more daunting task since the start of the pandemic. “There’s a whole generation of kids who associate reading with assessment now,” LaGarde said.

By middle school, not only is there even less time for activities such as class read-alouds, but instruction also continues to center heavily on passage analysis, said LaGarde, who taught that age group. A friend recently told me that her child’s middle-school teacher had introduced To Kill a Mockingbird to the class, explaining that they would read it over a number of months—and might not have time to finish it. “How can they not get to the end of To Kill a Mockingbird?” she wondered. I’m right there with her. You can’t teach kids to love reading if you don’t even prioritize making it to a book’s end. The reward comes from the emotional payoff of the story’s climax; kids miss out on this essential feeling if they don’t reach Atticus Finch’s powerful defense of Tom Robinson in the courtroom or never get to solve the mystery of Boo Radley.

... Young people should experience the intrinsic pleasure of taking a narrative journey, making an emotional connection with a character (including ones different from themselves), and wondering what will happen next—then finding out. This is the spell that reading casts. And, like with any magician’s trick, picking a story apart and learning how it’s done before you have experienced its wonder risks destroying the magic.

-- article by katherine marsh, the atlantic (12 foot link, no paywall)

[meezcarrie]

April 2023 New Releases

No foolin' - April 2023 has a bunch of great New Releases that are on my radar - and should be on yours too! #comingsoon #NewReleases #MustRead #TBR #TBRlist #BookTwitter #coverlove #readingcommunity #bookstoread #BooksWorthReading #books

Happy April! Spring is in the air here in Georgia… and so is pollen haha! There are 85 titles on this list of April 2023 New Releases, and they comprise a range of genres – contemporary, historical, cozy mystery, suspense, Amish fiction, children’s books, YA, and even some speculative fiction. And, of course, expect to see lots of romance because it’s me, after all 😉 All books listed are…