SPRING BREAK

I'm looking forward to a long week of sleeping in (anything after 5 AM is great) and finishing several great books that I've started. I'm halfway through Rick Riordan's The Mark of Athena, the last book in the Lost Olympian series. I am al;o about halfway through Kat Falls's Rip Tide, the sequel to this year's Caudill nominee Dark Life. It's really exciting. I have just started a book from the Abraham Lincoln Award list - Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. It's a science fiction book about a teenage computer hacker who is detained by Homeland Security after the Bay Bridge in San Francisco is blow up by terrorists. I'll be able to tell you more about these books after spring break. I hope you will also find time to enjoy a great book over break. Let me know what you're reading.

HOLOCAUST BOOKS

As I am preparing for book talks next week to the 8th grade regular LA classes as part of their Diary of Anne Frank unit, I have realized how many excellent Holocaust books we have in our collection. Among the non-fiction books, I think my favorite is Barbara Rogasky's Smoke and Ashes; The Story of the Holocaust which is an overview beginning with the origins of Jewish persecution in the early years of Christianity and ending with the Nuremburg trials and justice.

In the fiction section the choice is more difficult. I really like Susan Campbell Bartoletti's The Boy Who Dared and Paul Dowswell's The Auslander. These books are about German boys who saw what was happening and worked to try and stop it. Michael Morpurgo's The Mozart Question and Jane Yolen's The Devil's Arithmetic give us stories about what it was like inside the concentration camps. Lois Lowry's Number the Stars tells how sympathetic families tried to protect Jews. Jerry Spinelli's Milkweed shows what life was like inside the Warsaw Ghetto. And finally, Joan M. Wolf's Someone Named Eva and Donna Jo Napoli's Stones in Water show how poorly people of Germany's allies and conquered countries were treated. The students next week will have many fine books to choose for their project.