We started this meeting by talking a little bit about the readers' advisory training we had a couple weeks ago from Suzanne Walker at the Indiana State Library. We mentioned some of the things we learned at the training and discussed the appeal factors that Suzanne taught us about. Then we shared our booktalks and I asked staff to consider the appeal factors as we went. For our future meetings, I've revised the book review forms to include the four appeal factors (pacing, characterization, storyline, and setting).
Science fiction is another genre that we get asked about quite often. One of our middle schools has been doing Donalyn Miller's 40-book challenge with their students and requiring them to read from a variety of genres. Middle-grade science fiction is often one of the genres that kids have trouble with. Either they like it or they don't, and our quest is to find middle-grade books that will appeal to kids who are not really that interested in sci-fi.
Here are the books my staff read for our discussion this month:
The City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau
The Doom Machine by Mark Teague
Eye of the Storm by Kate Messner
Geeks, Girls, and Secret Identities by Mike Jung
Invasion (Animorphs #1) by K.A. Applegate
Lunch Walks Among Us (Franny K. Stein #1) by Jim Benton
The Missing series by Margaret Peterson Haddix
The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart
The People of Sparks by Jeanne DuPrau
The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
Zita the Spacegirl by Ben Hatke
Our teen librarian played along again this month and shared The Angel Experiment (Maximum Ride #1) by James Patterson and Eve and Adam by Michael Grant and Katherine Applegate. We had a great discussion about being nonjudgmental in readers' advisory and about our honest opinions of some of the series that are very popular with kids and teens.
Next month, our genre is adventure and that's definitely one I'm looking forward to. What are your favorite adventure books for kids?