A Gaggle of Book Reviews

I wrote about books about quilts and the civil war a while ago. Recently, I was at the library for our homeschool coop, planning to use one of those books, but their internet wasn’t working, so I couldn’t find the book titles from my earlier post.

I asked the librarian if she could think of books about quilts and the civil war/underground railroad, and she instantly thought of a different book than those I had read. Luckily the book was checked in, and she quickly found me an amazing book called Show Way by Jacqueline Woodson, illustrated by Hudson Talbott.

Show Way is a story told through quilts, poetry, and pictures of a family – generations of women who were sold as children (age 7!) from their families, but brought with them fabric and sewing implements. They would learn about the ways to freedom, and sew the route in their quilts. Unlike some other quilts that were an obvious map, these were different – they used established patterns (log cabin, zig zag, etc) to tell of a path.

The illustrations are beautiful, and incredibly striking. The artist has used a lot of skill to bring the focus on the young girls – in one picture everyone else is in black and white, but the (twin) 7 year old girls are in pink. The softness of the quilts is in stark contrast to some of the other images. Each of the quilts in the pictures is a work of art in and of itself. It made me want to take my kids to the next quilt show I could find!

This is in some ways a beautiful story of resilience. It is also a story about loss – I can’t imagine having my 7 year old daughter forced from my arms to go work on a plantation in another state. It also discusses that a few names are missing – they got lost over time because of the disruptions of family. I got quite choked up by the end of Show Way (as did other adults, not the kids, though).

One thing that really resonated me about this book is that it followed the family line from slavery through the civil rights movement through today. Our family discusses the Civil War along with the Civil Rights movement, and it is incredibly moving to see it so clearly linked within one family.

Homeschool activity ideas:

• Make “quilt squares” with unifix cubes/cuisinaire rods/other manipulatives (don’t forget your camera for pictures!)
• Make “quilt squares” with paper cutouts or graph paper and crayons, then glue the family or coop’s quilt squares onto a larger paper to make a complete quilt
• Draw maps of how to get from one location to another without words, just landmarks
• Link to other ways of sending messages that are difficult to intercept – this could tie into math (codes); languages (sign, foreign languages, the Navajo language used as a code in World War II); geography (encoded maps/trying to find something on a map); and science (disappearing ink of various types)
• Genealogical research – this story follows the mother’s line back several generations – can you follow your family back x number of generations?

(Obviously, different activities will appeal to different children and different age ranges! If you have a wide age range, some of these will work better than others)

I tend to group books together by topic. Last night we read about New York city. We read fascinating educational, yet entertaining, books about the building of the Statue of Liberty (Liberty Rising: The Story of the Statue of Liberty) and the Empire State building (Sky Boys: How They Built the Empire State Building). We wish that more books were able to strike such a great balance between educational and entertaining! The illustrations in these books are gorgeous, and the text is incredibly engaging.

After reading about the history of New York, it was really fun to read a book about modern-day New York City – a wonderful picture book called Zoe Sophia in New York The Mystery of the Pink Phoenix Papers, by Claudia Mauner and Elisa Smalley, Illustrated by Claudia Mauner. In the story, Zoe Sophia’s great aunt Dorothy comes to visit from Venice on a book tour and to do research for her new book. They have to search for the story behind a pink phoenix scarab as part of the research – hence the mystery. Zoe Sophia and Dorothy go to a fortune teller, who gives them clues about where they will find the pink phoenix scarab journal. As they search, they see many sights of New York City – the Met, the Circle Line tour around the harbor (passing the Statue of Liberty!), the gorgeous view of the city at night from the Empire State Building, and Greenwich village (they even remind you how to pronounce Greenwich and Houston Street!).

I loved this book because it reminded me of the trips I’ve taken to NYC to spend time with my own Aunt, exploring the sights. My girls loved the book because it was a mystery, but one without any real danger (exactly the type they love!). It was wonderful to have finished books that explained how the NYC skyline was created before reading a story about present-day life in the city, it really gave us all a wonderful perspective.

All three books were wonderful, and we highly recommend them. Kids who are interested in construction (though my girls love construction, a lot of books for boys are written about it) will adore the factual yet wonderful books about building the Statue of Liberty (Liberty Rising: The Story of the Statue of Liberty) and the Empire State building (Sky Boys: How They Built the Empire State Building). Since the Zoe Sophia book has exclusively female characters, this may be more of a book for girls (aimed at the 5-10 year old girl set), but the mystery is a safe, fun one that engaged all three of my girls (3, 6, and 8 years old) as well as myself.

More about the two building books will appear in a future entry

My girls never became dinosaur-obsessed like most kids. I honestly think I find dinosaurs more interesting than they do most of the time. However, they do love science and mysteries/detective stories. So even though it was about dinosaurs, they were fascinated by Did Dinosaurs Eat Pizza?: Mysteries Science Hasn’t Solved, by Lenny Hort, illustrated by John O’Brien. It is an entertaining book that talks about dinosaurs, rather than a dinosaur book that tries too hard to be entertaining, so a great storytime book.

We’ve now read in 3 times in less than a week. The cover picture of a T-Rex eating a little dinosaur pizza is so eye-catching, and the pictures inside the book are just as wonderful. There’s a great picture of two reddish dinosaurs courting, making their bodies in the shape of a heart. And you can’t beat a page that has the plates on a Stegosaurus serving as a billboard!

This book asks many more questions than it answers. The lack of concrete information made one member of the family a little anxious, but the approach taken by the book is to encourage asking questions and thinking outside the box when coming up with answers. The combination of the information written and the enchanting pictures makes this a book you want to keep picking up. I even caught my husband reading it this afternoon!

This book entertained all members of the family (3-35), and earns 5+ stars.

You might also want to check out my post on Dealing with the Death of a Grandparent for other books to help your child.

Our family recently dealt with the death of one of our dogs and a beloved great-grandfather in the span of a couple weeks. We turned to books, of course, because we read every day. Reading brings you information, and if you have information, you can cope. Or at least you have more tools for coping if you have more information.

There are a lot of books that are specifically designed to help children cope with the death of an animal, but some may be too wordy, others too graphic, and still others that don’t help your specific child. These are books that helped our family, and I hope they help yours, too.

The first book we read after our dog needed to be euthanized was Dog Heaven by Cynthia Rylant. It’s a classic, and deservedly so. Seeing the angel dogs running happily helped my girls sleep – they missed the dog they had grown up with. Dog Heaven is a beautiful book with soothing writing and vibrant illustrations. We’ve enjoyed so many of Cynthia Rylant’s books, I’m not surprised that we were comforted by her work.

We read several other books, such as A Dog Like Jack and The Accident, but a much simpler book captured my children. Sunny the Death of a Pet is an older book by Judith E. Greenberg and Helen H. Carey, with photographs by Barbara Kirk. The book follows a boy named Ken as his cocker spaniel (Sunny) starts to move slowly as she gets old. He takes her to the vet and finds out there isn’t anything that can be done because she is simply getting old. (This is what happened with us, which is a reason why this book touched us so much) The simple text and black and white pictures don’t distract from the emotion – how sad Ken is, and how sad the reader is when Sunny dies. My one complaint with this book (and several others) is that the child got another dog quickly – there are several situations when that won’t happen, and it would be nice if the story ended before the child got a new dog. However, I understand that a new dog will make the ending happy.

There are many other books available at your library or bookstore about death – I hope this will help you begin your search.

Our family lives with Celiac Disease. This auto-immune disease means that our family cannot eat foods with wheat, rye, oats, or barley. In our house, this means that we eat a lot of home-made treats using my recipes.

There aren’t a lot of books about kids with Celiac Disease, but the ones we have seen talk a lot about what the kids can’t have, whereas my kids think that you can eat anything with Celiac Disease, you just have to be patient for Mom to make it. The picture book Bagels, Buddy, and Me tells the story of a boy with Celiac Disease, but with a focus on the positive. It also talks about the family changing their diet, not making special meals for one person – this book showed something very similar to our lives in a book! If you live with food allergies, you might also want to check out this review of a peanut allergy book.

Bagels, Buddy, and Me is written and illustrated by Melanie Krumrey about her bagel-loving family, her son Cooper, and their journey to his diagnosis with Celiac Disease. Like many kids with Celiac, Cooper didn’t have just one symptom – he had several that were difficult to diagnose. The book shows the many medical tests and procedures Cooper goes through – including getting an MRI in what looks like a giant bagel!

When the Celiac Disease blood work is described, it is explained on a level so children can explain, but it’s not condescending. There is a great picture of a scientist looking at Cooper’s blood in a microscope, showing the antibodies attacking the gluten. It was wonderful to have such a vivid explanation. I was also very impressed by the images and explanations of the damage to the villi from Celiac Disease. We’ve watched the The Magic School Bus – Human Body episode a few times, and that describes the villi in the small intestine very well (the The Magic School Bus Inside the Human Body book is good, too). My kids had never seen an image of the healthy villi on one side of the picture, and damaged villi on the other side, though! Melanie Krumrey definitely made an impact with that image!

After Cooper has all the tests, he finds out that he cannot eat gluten. His family keeps a food diary and finds that his symptoms are slowly going away, and after 2 weeks, they’re gone! A month later, they’re still gone! As with most kids who have to change their diets, at first Cooper is really upset – he can’t have bagels! In the beginning, Cooper focuses on what he can’t have. But after a little while, his mom discovers cookbooks that can help him have all the foods he loved before, including bagels!

Also like many kids with Celiac Disease and Gluten Intolerance, Cooper finds out that there are other people in his family who need to be gluten-free. His mom finds out that she feels better without gluten, and his sister ends up with stomach-aches similar to what Cooper had before going gluten-free, and her tests show that she needs to be gluten-free, too. This is pretty common – in our family we have 4/5 people gluten-free, there’s a strong genetic component of Celiac Disease.

In an unusual twist of events, it turns out that Cooper’s dog, Buddy, is also sensitive to wheat! When they change Buddy’s diet, his digestive problems go away. My youngest daughter liked telling our new-to-us dog, Jack, about that. Our dogs food has gluten, but any treats (bones, chews, etc) are gluten-free so that the girls can give treats to the dogs without worrying about gluten cross-contamination. (As an aside, if you’re looking for inexpensive GF dog treats, we found Milk-Bone Deli Bites at Amazon and the grocery store)

Our family loved the story of Cooper’s Celiac diagnosis, and the change in his whole family’s diet in Melanie Krumrey’s book Bagels, Buddy, and Me. It was wonderful for all of us to find a family like ours in a book! Finding a book that talks about Celiac, kids, and the yummy treats you can have even if you are gluten-free was wonderful for us. If your family is dealing with Celiac Disease or if you know people who are dealing with Celiac, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Cooper’s story! You can buy a copy on their website.

This review is part of a MotherTalk blog tour, and I received the book from the publisher to review.

I signed up to read The 24-Hour Pharmacist: Advice, Options, and Amazing Cures from America’s Most Trusted Pharmacist, by Suzy Cohen, R.Ph. because of my status as a person with multiple chronic ailments, multiple medications, and multiple supplements used by me and the rest of the household.

This book is written by the author of the nationally syndicated column “Dear Pharmacist”. Sine the book is written by a pharmacist, rather than a doctor, there is a unique perspective on medications (both over the counter and prescription) as well as supplements. (more…)

This review is part of a MotherTalk blog tour, and I received this book from the publisher to review.
When you are a new mother, you tend to believe you have found the One True Way of parenting. If you have an easy baby, you say that it is because of your parenting. If you have a difficult baby, you either look for other parenting styles or decide “(s)he would be even more difficult if we didn’t do it this way”. In an ideal universe, your next child is the complete opposite of your first, and you learn about hubris first hand. And not for the last time, either! In time, through friendships with other mothers and with children that follow your first baby, you learn about different baby types, how they respond to different parenting styles; children who are outliers on every curve; the exceptions to every rule; and that what you do as parents of babies is rarely important when they are 8.

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