Geo Librarian

MISS PEREGRINE'S HOME OF PECULIAR CHILDREN by Ransom Riggs Quirk Books, 2011 ISBN: 978-1-59474-476-1 Grades 7 and up Reviewed from ARC received in giveaway. A mysterious island. An abandoned orphanage. A strange collection of very curious photographs. Fiction is based on real black and white photographs. The death of grandfather Abe sends sixteen-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, and explores abandoned bedrooms and hallways. The children may still live. I've been wanting to read this book for awhile.  It's received so much attention that I was curious to see what it was like. I was rather uncertain at first, the swearing and dark nature of the story were not appealing to me, but I kept with the story and found that I liked it more than I had originally thought I would. The photographs were mind boggling in and of themselves and the way ...

Desk Stories written & illustrated by Kevin O'Malley Albert Whitman & Company, 2011. Grades 1-5 Reviewed from purchased copy. Blurb: Even though kids spend most of their days with one, desks can be very....surprising. Desks have a long and enduring history -- from the spiked desks of the Middle Ages to the beanbag desks of the 1960s. School desks, in particular, can hide a wide variety of...let's just say "things." In this tongue-in-cheek companion to Backpack Stories, Kevin O'Malley returns with six stories of desks gone wild. ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11451417-desk-stories) One thing I enjoy about O'Malley's work is the variety of styles that he uses.  In this collection of short stories he uses a variety of styles, making each story stand on it's own.  My favorite story was the one about the history of the desk (it was fun reading the made up caveman talk). The jokes were a nice pause in the middle and the desks of t...

Substitute Creacher written & illustrated by Chris Gall Little, Brown & Company, 2011. Grades 1-5 Reviewed from purchased copy. Blurb: The troublemaking students of Ms. Jenkins' class arrive at school one day to discover a substitute creacher has come to put a stop to their monkey business! He regales them with mind-boggling stories about his former students who didn't follow the rules: Keith the glue-eater, Zach the daydreamer, and Hank the prankster, to name a few. But even this multi-tentacled, yellow-spotted, one-eyed monster's cautionary tales about the consequences of mischief-making can't seem to change the students' wicked ways until he reveals the spookiest and most surprising story of all: his own. ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/9419182-substitute-creacher )  I must confess, I'm not entirely sure about this book.  On the one hand, the rhymes are fun to read, but it's hard to switch back and forth from the rhyming text t...