Star Jumps

Hmm, is it wrong to read a book about drought whilst sitting in a bath? I suspect it is. Morally reprehensible at the very least, if not full on wrong. It wasn't a dry bath, there was water in it. I didn't realise that was what I was going to be doing tonight it must be said. I decided to have a bath, I had Star Jumps out from the library and it looked like a perfect bath sized snack. And it was.

I've become very fond of verse novels over the past few years, I really can't fully explain it as I'm so terrible at reading poetry. Of course, the reading speed is great, it's not that often that I can knock over a book in a day- I've been known to fall asleep reading a picture book...

I'd been meaning to read Star Jumps for years, probably since it won the Prime Ministers Literary Award for Children's Fiction in 2010 (the first time that a Children's category was included).

Star Jumps is the story of a dairy farming family told in first person by the youngest of the three children, Ruby. Ruby is young enough to not remember a day of rain, she has grown up in drought and knows nothing else.

There is something we don't understand,

 as if we were just kids,

grubby in old clothes,

playing in weeds,

with a dog that doesn't scare strangers 

and cows that want to die 

instead 

of making milk. 

The cows, the farm and the family are all doing it tough because of the drought. Star Jumps is about the ties that bind, making your own fun, and coming together in the hard times. Themes that would be familiar to any rural family, and many urban families, but with less cows. 

Lorraine Marwood is an Australian poet and author, and was a dairy farmer herself for many years, and this definitely shows in her depth of understanding of farming, of the practicalities and the hardships. But she kept saying that the newborn calves were baaing.

The gentle baaing from the five new calves

I'm confused. Do calves baa?

I am probably more annoyed than I should be that the kid on the cover is doing a handstand and not a star jump. Otherwise I do like the image of the cover.


Teacher's Notes for Star Jumps

http://australianwomenwriters.com

The Art of Taxidermy

I do love a verse novel, so I was very excited when I spied The Art of Taxidermy in the Text Catalogue earlier in the year. I eagerly awaited the publication date, and then ordered it from my local bookshop. I picked it up this week. I've really been in a bit of a reading slump for the past few months (and a blogging slump too), and I thought a verse novel would be good for what ails me. It was. 

The Art of Taxidermy tells the story of Charlotte, Lottie, living in South Australia with her father. Her mother has died and her Aunt Hilda hovers closely, helping look after both Charlotte and her father. Lottie is 11. She is a rather sad and lonely child. Alone at school. 

Back there with the kids

who didn't talk to me

was like being at a funeral

every day. 

Lottie becomes obsessed with death.

At the age of eleven

I fell in love

with death

She starts collecting dead things - frogs, skinks, lots of birds, even a red-bellied black snake. But of course all this creates a "fusty fug" in her bedroom and attracts the attention of Aunt Hilda, who is far from enthusiastic about Charlotte's new hobby. 

On a visit to the museum with her scientist father Charlotte sees taxidermied specimens for the first time.

They are perfect-

perfectly dead. 

Not shrinking?

Not disintegrating?

Lottie becomes even more interested in the dead, subsuming her grief for her mother. 

I pulled on layer after layer of her:underwear, stockings,shirts and skirts,coat and shoes.I wrapped myself in herfolded myself upuntil it feltlike a warm hug.

Besides the more obvious themes of grief and death, there are themes of friendship, loneliness, glimpses of Aboriginal culture and Aboriginal relations with white Australia, and the history of German immigrants to South Australia. The book is also full of appreciation for our Australian wildlife and in particular our wonderful birds. 

The Art of Taxidermy was shortlisted for the 2017 Text Prize. The gorgeous cover and illustrations are by Edith Rewa. 

Sharon Kernot is a South Australian author and poet. The Art of Taxidermy is her second novel. 

Teaching Notes

http://australianwomenwriters.com

Verse Novels

 It was way back in 2014 that Steven Herrick showed me how great verse novels could be. I've really come to love them since, which I don't think could surprise anyone more than me. Because I haven't learnt to like poetry yet. But many of these verse novels would count as some of my favourite books of the past four years or so, or ever. .

I thought I would group together the verse novels I want to read, and those that I have read. A lot of these books are middle grade or YA, but I've started to read some adult verse novels too- although I think that there aren't as many of these about- or perhaps I just haven't found them yet.

And in a random act of coincidence that almost looks like planning April is National Poetry Month (in the US at least).


After the Kiss - Terra Elan McVoy

Aurora Leigh - Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Brown Girl Dreaming - Jacqueline Woodson (see my review)

Bruiser - Neal Shusterman

Bully on the Bus - Kathryn Apel (see my review)

By The River - Steven Herrick (see my review)

Cinnamon Rain - Emma Cameron (see my review)

Crank - Ellen Hopkins

Enchanted Air - Margarita Engle

Freakboy - Kristin Elizabeth Clark

Glimpse - Carol Lynch Williams

Here is the Beehive - Sarah Crossan

Home of the Brave - Katherine Applegate

I Heart You, You Haunt Me - Lisa Schroeder

Inside Out & Back Again - Thanhha Lai (see my review)

Long Way Down - Jason Reynolds 

Love That Dog - Sharon Creech

May B - Caroline Starr Rose

Moonrise - Sarah Crossan (see my review)

October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard - Leslea Newman

One - Sarah Crossan (see my review)

One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies - Sonya Sones

Out of the Dust - Karen Hesse

Paper Hearts - Meg Wiviott

Pookie Aleera is Not My Boyfriend - Seven Herrick (see my review)

Red Butterfly - A.L. Somnichsen

Sister Heart - Sally Morgan (see my review)

Somewhere Among - Annie Donwerth-Chikamatsy

The Black Flamingo - Dean Atta

The Crossover - Kwame Alexander

The House on Mango Street - Sandra Cisneros

The Little Wave - Pip Harry

The Lost Marble Notebook of Forgotten Girl & Random Boy - Marie Jaskulka

The Monkey's Mask - Dorothy Porter

The Poet X - Elizabeth Acevedo

The Realm of Possibility - David Levithan

The Red Pencil - Andrea Davis Pinkney

The Simple Gift - Steven Herrick (see my review)

The Sugar Mile - Glyn Maxwell

The Watch that Ends the Night - Voices From the Titanic - Allan Wolf

The Weight of Water - Sarah Crossan

Two Girls Staring at the Ceiling - Lucy Frank

Street Love - Walter Dean Myers

We Come Apart - Sarah Crossan and Brian Conaghan (see my review)



I will add to this list as I come across new books, or lists of verse novels. I do like to keep track of verse novels.

12 YA Books in Verse You Need to Read

9 Books in Verse You Need to Read ASAP

Michael Symmons Roberts Top 10 Verse Novels

And for when I run out of these books there are 100 Must-Read YA Books Written in Verse!

Sarah Tregay has created the motherlode of all verse novel lists split into age!

I need to put these lists down- I just bought 6 verse novels over at Bookdepository! Oops.

A Year in Books 2017

It's time to look back at another year in books. Happily I did a bit better with my reading in 2017 than I did in 2016.

In 2017 I read 17, 894 pages in 100 books. Not a bad effort. Up from the 11, 075 in 2016, but not at the dizzying heights of 2015 (20,061).

That 100 books in 2017 is no small coincidence. I had set my Goodreads target to 100 for the year, and for most of the year I was keeping up and on track but things unwound a little in the last few months of the year, and I had to make a concerted effort in late December to get to that magical 100. I did it with 50 minutes to spare! A close call indeed.

I wasn't particularly great at rating or reviewing books in 2017. Some of these I did give 5 stars at the time, some have just really stuck with me.

Scrappy Little Nobody. Anna Kendrick. Audio.

Florette. Anna Walker

The Remarkable Secret of Aurelie Bonhoffen. Deborah Abela. Audio

Maggot Moon. Sally Gardner. Audio. My Book of the Year. 

Don't Call Me Bear. Aaron Blabey

The Weight of a Human Heart. Ryan O'Neill

The Hidden Life of Trees. Peter Wohlleben. Audio

Tuck Everlasting. Natalie Babbitt

The Hate U Give. Angie Thomas

Burial Rites. Hannah Kent. Audio

Moonrise. Sarah Crossan

Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls. Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo

12 of my 100 reads were 5 stars.

5 Aussie books. 

4 Adult reads.

2 Picture Books. 

1 Verse Novel.

5 Audio Books. 

3 Nonfiction/memoir.

10 Female Authors.

3 Male Authors

9 New to Me Authors!

The Weight of a Human Heart had a big impact on my reading aspirations being the first short story collection that I've read in many a year. I have now amassed quite a number of short story collections (quite a number), I hope that more will be appearing in the best reads of 2018. 

Also interesting that 5 of my top 12 were audio books. I really have taken to them with gusto. I really loved all of those audio books. Maggot Moon was particularly stupendous of course, but the others are all fabulous. Burial Rites was magnificent and beautifully read, and it was wonderful to hear the Icelandic names and places pronounced rather than stumbling over them every time whilst reading. Noone could be more surprised than I was to actually listen to a celebrity memoir (it's not my thing) and then enjoying it so much. And The Hidden Life of Trees really changed how I view and think about trees. Did I even think about trees before? Not nearly as much. 

Rather incredibly I appear to have not read any Jackie French in 2017 so she can't make an appearance in this list. This is the first time that this has happened since lists began to be compiled. I shall have to rectify this terrible omission in 2018. 

We Come Apart

I was vaguely aware of this book when it was released earlier in the year, although I can't quite remember where I heard about it or saw it specifically. It caught my interest because it is a verse novel, and I do honestly enjoy them, but also because it has two authors, which is rather unusual. I bought it when I was in Sydney in November and snapped it up at Basement Books on sale. 

Sarah and Brian talk about collaborating

I was aware of both authors before this book. I've read a few of Sarah Crossan's books before. One (see my review). The Weight of Water. Moonrise, definitely my favourite so far (see my review), which means that Sarah has released two amazing verse novels this year. Brian Conaghan wrote The Bombs That Brought Us Together which I've bought (twice), but not yet read. 

We Come Apart is set in North London. Jess Clarke lives with her mother and stepfather, there are troubles at home and Jess has just been caught shoplifting and is ordered to attend a reparation scheme for 3 months of community service. At community service she meets Nicu Gabor, a Romanian boy who has recently come to London with his parents who has also been caught shoplifting. It's rather a grim life for both of them. 

I bet they don't live on grey estates
and eat Mars Bars for breakfast. 

The story is told in alternating chapters of Jess and Nicu's voices. It's really well integrated, really well done. Although I'm not sure about Nicu's voice. Naturally, Nicu doesn't have perfect English, and his chapters are written in stilted and incorrect language, which feels authentic but which made the reading voice in my head sound like Borat (yes I know, he's from Kazakhstan). 

Many peoples with much miserable in their heart,

many peoples with little monies,

all walking

up down

down up

stopping

starting 

again

again,

smoking in huddle group,

and

chatting in small circle.

Everyone watching everyone do same things. 

Peoples with no place to go for laughing and be

happy

Same as my old village.

The atmospheres, buildings and peoples 

in London North

is like giant rainbow. 

But

not beautiful colours

with golden treasure at end.

Is the rainbow with

white to grey to brown to black. 

But that is a minor quibble perhaps - even though it does make up half the book. Nico has a kind heart. The story swept me along and I read it in a few short days, even reading some before succumbing to the somewhat inevitable nap post Christmas lunch. 

We Come Apart has lots of great themes. Domestic Violence. Bullying. Hopelessness. Racism. Friendship. Love. Family obligation, and the differences of family expectations in different cultures. 

I can't put on a brave face and pretend that 

at the end of this 

things will be different.

Maybe for him they will be.

But for me 

they won't. 

Nothing's ever going to change. 

Of course Nicu does change things for Jess, but not in the way she, or I, expected. We Come Apart is Highly Recommended. 

Moonrise

I do love a verse novel. Strange to say. But I've really, really come to enjoy them over the past few years. They are so quick to read, they're like a literary palate cleanser. 

I've read a few Sarah Crossan books before, One (see my review), which I enjoyed but not as much as everyone else it seemed, and The Weight of Water, which I thought was ok, but in my slackness I didn't get around to blogging. 

So, I was very intrigued by Moonrise when I discovered the main character, Joe, has a brother on death row. I'm always astonished at the subjects that are contained within literature aimed at a younger audience. 

Joe Moon lives in Arlington, New York. I'd never heard of this Arlington, and always kept thinking of Arlington, Virginia. I wondered if this was on purpose because of Arlington National Cemetery, a place to honour America's military dead. Joe's brother Ed has been in jail in Texas for the past ten years, since Joe was seven. Joe doesn't know the man his brother has become, and only has memories of the young boy he was. 

Joe's is smart and athletic and doing well in school. But his family are poor, and chaotic. His Mum has left, his father is dead, and Aunt Karen has stepped in to fill the void.

Everything turned to shit
when Ed got put away;
nothing worked any more. 

But now Ed has been given an execution date and Joe travels to Texas on his own to visit his brother on death row in the weeks leading up to the scheduled date. The story alternates between current day Texas and Joe and Ed's childhood in New York. It is masterfully done. 

See, we aren't the people anyone pities.

Issues of justice, guilt, innocence, inequality, the social costs of drugs, alcohol and poverty are all dealt with, as well as the more personal stories of Joe, Ed, their family and friends. 

Cos it all depends on

who you kill

and 

where you kill them

too.

Sarah Crossan's views are fairly easy to see, she wears her heart on her sleeve- she tells us it costs $4 million dollars to go through with an execution, eight time more than the cost of imprisoning someone for life. Yet she suffuses her words with humour too, it's not all overly earnest. 

In the Author's Note at the back of the book Sarah Crossan tells how she first came to be interested in the issues about the death penalty when she was required to watch a documentary, Fourteen Days in May, as a fifteen year old schoolgirl. I'll be watching it soon. 

You can watch Sarah Crossan recommending some of the books she used in her research for Moonrise. 

We live in such strange times. You can also watch someone (TheBookishManicurist) make nail art for nails to match the cover of Moonrise. She actually does an amazing job of it. 

One

I'm not really sure why I became so desperate to read One, a book I hadn't really heard of all that much. I did see it on a number of end of year lists out of Britain. Actually I do think this one from the Guardian may have tipped me over the edge. Various authors recommended it- including Katherine Rundell (who is high on my To Read radar herself, and who had many recommendations of her latest The Wolf Wilder on the list). Who can go past this:

Mine is One, by Sarah Crossan. It's a book that shouldn't be possible- a blank verse novel about conjoined twins that never once dips into sentimentality- but Sarah Crossan makes it look so easy. It's a book about love, and courage, and I adored it.

I've come so far in my Verse Novel Journey that this was an added incentive, and soon it was landing on my doorstep. Perhaps because it featured so much on an English list I thought it was an English book. But it most definitely isn't. One is set in Hoboken, New Jersey. I see now that Sarah Crossan was born in Dublin, and currently lives in England, but she did live in New York while working as an English teacher before she became a full time writer. I believe that her other books are set in the UK, I wonder why One is set in America then?

Grace and Tippi are 16 year old conjoined twins who have been homeschooled to hide them from society's prying, and often cruel, eyes. But now the family circumstances have changed and the girls need to go to school for the first time. Hoping that it won't be terrible, hoping to make friends, even perhaps hoping to find love. 

'Are you kidding?

You are normal.

And normal is good.

Normal is my goal,'

I tell him.

The story was always relatable even though unusual, and the characters, especially Grace and Tippi were well written, our narrator Grace was clearly her own persona, and different from her sister. There were just too many issues for my liking. Everyone in the twins immediate family had major stuff going on. So did their friends. While perhaps we all do have our own stuff, it just seemed a bit much at times. One is not Sarah Crossan's first novel in verse, it seems that The Weight of Water was also a verse novel, she also writes in prose. She started One in prose, but it wasn't working, even after 30,000 words, until she swapped to verse. 

Conjoined twins are a rare phenomenon, and not something I've thought about all that often. Every now and then a set of twins will come to prominence as efforts are made to separate them, although sometimes this is not possible of course. I've never thought about what it would be like to be conjoined. I don't think it's something that is actually all that easy to imagine but One gives us some small insight into the internal world of conjoined twins. And even the ethics of it all. 

Gorgeous people strut down catwalks

in dresses made of string

loll half naked on sandy beaches

and no one seems to mind

that they do this for money

no one finds it

distasteful

at all. 

But when Tippi and I consider cashing in on our

 bodies,

everyone frowns.

In an Author's Note at the back of the book Sarah Crossan says that she modelled the physiology of Grace and Tippi on the bodies of Masha and Dasha Krivoshlyapova, particularly tragic Russian conjoined twins, taken from their mother in 1950 Russia, who were to live a tragic life and die of alcoholism. Although, Sarah tells us

It might be astounding to a singleton, but conjoined twins do not see themselves or their lives as tragedies. 

Grace tells us too. 

It really isn't so bad.

It's how it's always been. 

Two of Sarah's previous books The Weight of Water and Apple and Rain were nominated for The Carnegie Medal. Clearly she is an author to explore.

Update June 2016 One has won the 2016 Carnegie Medal.

Sister Heart

I hadn't heard of Sister Heart when I picked it up recently at my local book shop. I'd heard of Sally Morgan of course. Indeed I've been meaning to read her seminal book My Place for probably decades now. I know that I've boorrowed it from the library on occasion, and still not managed to read it. So of course I was sorely tempted by a new pretty hardback- even better, a verse novel for children. I still can't quite believe that I like verse novels now, and even actively seek them out. Thanks to Steven Herrick for that. You never know one day I might get mature enough to read poetry...

Sister Heart may have sat unread in my humungous TBR were it not for Lisa at ANZLitlovers running her Indigenous Literature Week  last week. The timing was too good to pass up. 

Sister Heart is the tale of a young girl forcibly removed from her family, from her country.

I hate the bully policeman
for snatching me
from the station
when Mum was working
at the out-camp

This young girl is taken by boat to her new home far away, although it is not a home based on family, it is the cruel, rather inhospitable home of institutional care with corporal punishment and stinky soup, where she is left alone and bewildered, until she is befriended by another girl Janey.

I breathe deeperpretend I am biggertaller olderI walk like I'm not afraidlike I am brave

There are many things we don't know about this young girl. We don't know where she is from really, although she is referred to as a norwester, implying that she is from remote North Western West Australia. We don't know her real name. She is give the name Annie by the Reverend who travels with her, but she already has two other names. 

I already have an english name
Lots of people on the station
have english names
Boss won't say language names
but I have one

My language name
is the name Mum whispers
when I'm sick
The name she croons
when she strokes my hair

Annie struggles with many things at her new home. She misses her home, her family, her country. She also struggles with English. 

There is too much english in this placeenglish hurts my headenglish is hard on my tongueenglish is missing good wordsenglish is lonely

Annie is lonely too and for a while she loses her voice too.

SometimesI feel my voicerattling inside melike a trapped thingtrying to get out

I'm certainly glad to have heard Annie's voice. Stories of the Stolen Generations are powerful and important to remember, these forced removals of children still affect families now. After all they were official Australian government policy into the 1960s and 70s. 

You can listen to Sally Morgan talk about Sister Heart on Radio National. It's a fascinating background to the book. In Western Australia the Aborigines Act of 1905 made the Chief Protector of Aborigines the legal guardian of all Aboriginal children under 16 years of age, and so he had the power to move any of them at any time. Sally Morgan dreamt the first page of Sister Heart, and feels her great grandmother gave the story. 

See the Teaching Notes from Fremantle Press. 

P.S. I can't fix the formatting of some of the poetry. I have tried multiple times, it can't be corrected. Sorry. 

http://australianwomenwriters.com

Newbery Medal 2015

The 2015 Newbery Award was announced last night in America. One winner and two honour books. Three interesting books. Two verse novels and a graphic novel. No traditional prose fiction! The world is certainly changing. Perhaps verse novels are really becoming cool?

Kwame Alexander's Crossover was named the Newbery Award winner 2015 at the American Library Association Midwinter Meeting and Exhibition in Chicago. The full list of awards and winners are here.

Crossover is a verse novel about 12 year old basketball playing twins. Really.
May 2017 I've read it now (review coming soonish)

Honour books.

El Deafo is a graphic novel about a deaf girl written by a deaf author, Cece Bell. (see my review)

I still love this cover.
Beautiful. 

I loved Jacqueline Woodson's brown girl dreaming, an amazing verse memoir. See my review here. It also won the National Book Award

I'm moderately certain that the Newbery Committee didn't set out to make all three books to be diverse books, but they certainly achieved it with diversity in authorship and diversity in format. Awards like these are so important. I certainly wouldn't have heard of any of these books if they hadn't won significant awards like these. I look forward to reading them all.

http://weneeddiversebooks.org

Cinnamon Rain

Sometimes you don't remember how you heard about a particular book, sometimes you do.  I first heard about Cinnamon Rain when I read Brona's review back in 2012. Sadly, I don't think I've seen it blogged anywhere since, although Buzzfeed did recently include it in their list of 27 Awesome Australian Books Every YA Fan Should Read. But I remembered it, and was keen to read it still, and recently I picked up a copy at my library.

Cinnamon Rain is an excellent novel, that just happens to be in verse. I'm so glad that Steven Herrick taught me to read verse novels last year. It has really opened up the format for me. Previously I would have rejected it simply because it was a verse novel. Now, I'm becoming bolder, reading verse novels by different authors- and really enjoying them. I don't think that there's been one that I haven't liked so far.

Cinnamon Rain tells the story of six friends as they traverse the last 2-3 years of high school. The story is of the six friends, but told in the voice of just three- Luke, Casey and Bongo. The six are growing up in the fictitious Australian coastal town of Pebble Beach. These kids are facing much bigger problems than I ever have. Domestic violence, drug abuse, first loves, family breakdown and homelessness all whilst trying to finish up at school and work out what to do with their lives.


The he goes off
to buy some leaf
so he can get bombed.
I used to think
the reason he doped up
was to stop himself sinking
in all the pain.
Now,
I think that clouding the pain
is what's making him sink.

Emma Cameron has done a great job capturing this often difficult transitional time in the life of our young people. Their school life, family circumstances and friends all impact on the direction they take and whether they succeed or not. As a parent reading Cinnamon Rain it's often so painful watching several terrible parents set up their children to fail. Perhaps some of them don't do it intentionally, but it seems some of them do. The adults don't come out of things too well actually- of course some of them are normal parents, working and doing their best by their family, but others are making terrible choices that are played out on their children's lives.

Cinnamon Rain is published as Out of This Place overseas. Rather incredibly Cinnamon Rain was Emma Cameron's debut novel, it was a CBCA Notable Book for Older Readers 2013. I hope it continues to be read far into the future.

http://australianwomenwriters.com

Brown Girl Dreaming

Isn't that cover gorgeous?
It's gorgeous.
I hope the cover wins a prize.

Is it wrong to be somewhat thankful for a racist gaffe? I know it is. But it was lucky for me in a way that Daniel Handler made a racist remark to Jacqueline Woodson at the National Book Awards, otherwise without the ensuing controversy I may never have heard of this remarkable book, or ever read it. For Brown Girl Dreaming is an extraordinary read. You can read Jacqueline Woodson's powerful response to Daniel Handler in the New York Times here.

Brown Girl Dreaming is a remarkable memoir told in verse (yes, again with the verse novel for me) that blends slavery, race, history politics, geography and the familial/personal from the very first page.

I am born not long from the time
or far from the place
where
my great-great-grandparents
worked the deep rich land
unfree
dawn till dusk
unpaid
drank cool water from scooped-out gourds
looked up and followed
they sky's mirrored constellation
to freedom.

I am born as the South explodes,
too many people too many years
enslaved, then emancipated
but not free

I was surprised to read on page 3 that Jacqueline's parents race was recorded on her birth certificate. That is not something I've come across in Australia or New Zealand, either with relatively modern certificates or older ones that I have found in family history research. In some ways I can see that as just another piece of information like eye colour or height, but it's interesting that it's there in the first place. Race is still far from a perfect issue in Australia, but it is quite a different experience to that of America.

Brown Girl Dreaming weaves a family memoir set against the turbulent political times of the 60s and 70s, with Jacqueline's clear attraction to words, writing and story from a very young age. She is a slow reader even so.

I am not my sister.
Words from the books curl around each other
make little sense
until
I read them again
and again, the story
settling into memory

But even then she recognises the lack of children who look like her in books.

If someone had been fussing with me
to read like my sister, I might have missed
the picture book filled with brown people, more
brown people than I'd ever seen
in a book before.

Another thing that was surprising to my Australian self was her repeated use of the term brown people. It's in the title, it's repeated throughout the book. I'm not sure at all of why brown is used in preference to black, if that is significant, or if either term would have different racial overtones in the US.

Jacqueline Woodson is an accomplished author who has written many books for children and young people. I hadn't heard of her before she won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature 2014, but after Brown Girl Dreaming I'm definitely looking forward to reading more of her work. I'll be donating my copy of Brown Girl Dreaming to my local library in the hope that it will be more widely read here. It deserves to be.

http://diversebooks.org

Diversity on the Shelf 2015