Terrific Titles
We are looking forward to welcoming Keynoter, Juana Martinez-Neal, as we kick off the Young Voices Festival: Changing the World One Voice at a Time. It is fitting that she address parents, students, and educators. Juana Martinez-Neal is an award winning author/illustrator and was selected for weeks 1-4 in Pernille Ripp's Global Read Aloud. She has many terrific titles to enjoy! Amongst those are: Alma and How She Got Her Name, La Princesa and the Pea, La Madre Goose: Nursery Rhymes for los Niños, Fry Bread: A Native American Family Story, and Swashby and the Sea. Please join us in getting these important Read the Way WSRA books into the hearts and hands of students, families, and communities. Happy reading!
Picture book: MY NAME IS ALMA by Juana Martinez-Neal As artist, her mostly black-and-white graphite and colored pencil drawings with splashes of red (suggesting now) and blue (capturing then) provide an additional, enhancing narrative: the family's Peruvian roots, Alma's avian and floral interests, her bilingual drawings, her historically inspired style sense, even a peek at Esperanza's worldly treasures...Names are so much more than a collection of letters and sounds, Martinez-Neal reminds. The book's final words, "What story would you like to tell?" become an invitation for readers to share and claim each of their own, distinctive stories, histories, and identities.—Shelf Awareness for Readers
Picture book: BETWEEN US AND ABUELA by Juana Martinez-Neal "This touching contemporary story sensitively focuses on the U.S.–Mexican border and Mexico's cultural traditions in a heartwarming, informative, and hopeful way. Perkins gently voices some of the challenges families can experience when they are separated by a border . . . Maria’s inventive solution to that distance will make readers cheer, and Palacios’ warm illustrations in saturated colors make the scenes vibrant with feeling and quietly fold in informative visual details about the border and the family’s cultural traditions." —Booklist
Middle grade novel: A HIGH FIVE FOR GLENN BURKE by Phil Bildner “Silas is an engaging narrator, slipping easily and honestly between accounts of his public bravado, his understandable trepidation of worst-case scenario fallout, and his private adoption of a role model in Burke, who both represents Silas’ dilemma and cries out for vindication. Bildner’s closing acknowledgments disclose that Silas’ struggle was also his own, tacitly reassuring readers that, yep, things actually can get better.” ―The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books