Have You Filled A Bucket Today? is a great book to read the first week of school, but it's also a good read to re-introduce throughout the year. This is a great book for 1st-4th grade. This book encourages positive, kind behavior and it reminds students how easy it is to be kind to one another. A sweet idea for this book is to have kids create their own personal bucket and have every one write positive and kind things in everyone's bucket. You could hang these up in the classroom for an entire year for a nice reminder!

 

Lexile:AD710L

Chrysanthemum would be a great read for 2nd or 3rd grade during the first week of school. Chrysanthemum begins school and loves her name, but when she gets to school, classmates begin to make fun of her name, hurting her feelings. But, when the other students in her class are introduced to another teacher, things begin to change for Chrysanthemum and she blossoms. This book deals a lot with hurt feelings and being kind to one another. An idea during a read aloud, would be to cut out a paper heart and have the students crinkle the heart every time they hear something unkind. After the book is over, have your students put band aids on the heart to help them understand that mean words are hard to forget about. This could lead to a class promise and agreement.

 

Lexile: 570L

January was a meh month for me. 

 

Favorite book/s: The Sandcastle Girls and The Cuckoo's Calling

Worst Book/s: The Goldfinch

 

The rest were just OK.

 

I am currently reading Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler and Red Rising by Pierce Brown.

 

I'm trying to read 1 classic a month for a new book club at my library. February's book will be The Trial by Franz Kafka. If anybody has any must read and/or favorite classics please recommend. I'm new to reading classics so I'm open to suggestions!

 

Happy February!

This is an over dramatic expository novel, but it was entertaining. It was poorly constructed, the characters are all very transparent and nothing is really surprising or all that compelling. The text is very preachy in the sense that the reader is repeatedly told things like, "we Rands don't do that" or "no one in the family ever talks to each other."

I found it annoying that they could supposedly read each other's minds so easily, but then Terry was always worried that Collie was lying to him. I was frustrated that ultimately the plot twist was that Alzheimer's makes you crazy (which it doesn't, not really and not in the sense of the "underneath").

The text was frequently overwritten as in: "That angry child's cry of want, I want. Mine. Mine. Mine. Thieves were a covetous lot by definition, but I wondered if anyone in my family had ever been as green-eyed and greedy as I was now." Blecch. Besides the bad description, I was really (and I mean really, really, really) tired of hearing about what thieves are and what they do by about the 10th page of the book. I was also rather fed up with all the self-pity and "I've failed my family yet again" garbage.

Overall there is nothing fabulous about it, but the story flows and it was a quick entertaining light book (well, except for the fact that the content isn't all that light).

Terry, our flawed hero, struggles with his complicated realtionships with his family. Having deserted the family after a tragic incident (or two), Terry finds himself bein called back home after five years of no contact. Not quite sure what he hopes to achieve, Terry tries to reconnect to family, including his brother on death row. From the very first page, you know things aren't going to end well. I was on the edge of my seat just waiting for something horrible to happen. Piccirilli does not disappoint.

This story tears down the romanticized notions many of up have about mobsters, thieves, and killers. Not everyone is a good person at heart. All of the characters here have secrets and parts of themselves they dare not share. No one in this story gets away completely clear except for Terry's mother. No, now that I think about it, she's not innocent either. She chose to marry a career criminal and have children with him. How did she think that was going to turn out?

This was my first novel by Tom Piccirilli and I'm looking forward to reading more by him.