I'd like to invite visitors to Help Readers Love Reading! - new folks and the regulars alike - to visit my new site, simply called Help...

Great books are like a hike up a steep hill with a spectacular view. The heart rate climbs. Breathing quickens. The desire to finish grows, ...

"Mark Twain was born fully grown, with a cheap cigar clamped between his teeth." So begins Chapter 1 of The Trouble Begins at 8 . ...

I don't think Lincoln and His Boys offers too much new or relatively unknown information about Abraham Lincoln, but it does offer a per...

New column today. I should have dedicated this one to all the parents who fondly remember Pong and their first 8-Tracks. COLUMN: WiiOnes ca...

Stinky enjoys his stinky yet simple life. His cave has bats and bugs and a pet toad named Wartbelly. He has an abundant supply of pickled b...

Is he gonna get to keep the toy factory? I'll bet he's gonna win the whole toy factory. The old owner's probably got some secret...

In my initial reactions to the Newbery medal and ALA Youth Media Award winners, I said I was waiting for a copy of How I Learned Geography ...

The events of The Surrender Tree: Poems of Cuba's Struggle for Freedom span 50 years, from the childhood of Rosa and Lieutenant Death t...

A River of Words: The Story of William Carlos Williams is a hard book to classify. Is it a poetry book with additional background informati...

When Jason’s grandmother dies, he travels from Boston to St. Petersburg, Florida to help his father do whatever needs to be done. Funeral ar...

After The House in the Night won the Caldecott Medal, and having just finished a student-selected mock Caldecott with my fourth graders, I ...

I walked out of the library and passed One Boy to the resident first grader sitting in the backseat who, in his mind, has become quite a bo...

Piggie and Gerald are ready for an outside adventure. Will they run? Will they skip? Will they jump? Yes, yes, and yes! “NOTHING CAN STOP US...

No doubt you've already learned who the 2009 winners are, but here some of my initial thoughts on this morning's Newbery announcemen...

What kid hasn’t wondered how life would change if a certain teacher would just disappear? Especially if that teacher is like Bunny Starch? M...

I love reading books about familiar places. I once lived in St. Paul, and Julia Gillian lives in south Minneapolis. That’s like the same th...

"Once there was a pencil, a lonely little pencil, and nothing else." The Pencil is the story of what that lonely little pencil de...

One year ago today Help Readers Love Reading! found its home on the web. Okay, not really, not one year to the day exactly. Last January we ...

Who knew? Who knew that a life of sleeping all day, staying up all night, feasting on bugs, and fluttering and swooping and soaring in the n...

Birthdays don't sneak up on anybody. Whether they are either eagerly anticipated or grudgingly accepted, we know they are coming. But th...

New column in the local paper today, all about my favorite part of Christmas break. Closets' purpose differs for children OR Printa...

When Jane realizes, finally, at age twelve, that she can pray, she decides to get busy. She prays for a hundred adventures, and wonders if u...

After disasters, droughts and storms, fires, rising seas, and the resulting war for what little remained, this futuristic North America beca...