Book Mail ~ Celebrate 2017 (Six)

Each week Ruth Ayres extends an invitation to share our celebrations. 

Gone is the day when my mailbox is filled with bills.  With online banking, bills are thankfully at a minimum.  This week my mailbox has been filled with book mail ~ a true celebration!

I belong to a group of teachers who receive ARCs from publishers and authors, read and leave notes, share on social media, and then send off to the next reader.  Our group's hashtag is #bookrelays, and we love passing the baton to each other.

This week I received Scar Island, by Dan Gemeinhart.  It has completed the relay and found its way back to me, full of everyone's thoughts and notes.  It has been fun to go through and read everyone's sticky notes posted throughout the book.  It didn't take me long to hand this one off to a student.  You can read here about how I may have hooked a reader with this book.

Publication date:  October 2017

Tony Abbott sent me a copy of his new book, The Summer of Owen Todd.  I finished this book last night and will write more about this heartbreaking story at another time.  

But I will say, I have never read a story about sexual abuse for this age level.  Although it is a much needed book about a sensitive topic, I feel this book will take a special audience.  

Publication date:  October 2017

I also received a copy of Mr. Lemoncello's Great Library Race, the third in this series, by Chris Grabenstein.  This book stresses the importance of research and reliable sources while still playing games and solving puzzles.

My students have loved reading this series, and I can't wait to for this one to be published. 

Midnight Without a Moon is a book my #bookrelays group shared late summer.  This is a powerfully intense middle grade book that takes place in Mississippi in the 1950's.  Linda Jackson has written a book that deserves to be placed in the middle of any civivl rights unit.

I wanted to reread this book before I wrote a more formal review because it truly deserves one.  I was ecstatic when my own personal copy came this week too.

Last but not least, I won a copy of Here We Go by Sylvia Vardell and Janet Wong from Margaret Simon in a giveaway on her blog.  An added bonus in my package was a poetry postcard from Margaret.

Click here to read Margaret's post about the book and how her poem was published in the collection..

It has been a book week worth celebrating!  Now, if I could just figure out how to get rid of the junk mail!