Mrs. Palmer's Summer Reading

This post will be a bit atypical from my normal posts.  I typically focus on one text and go into detail about some of it's features.  Today, I plan to highlight several books I've read over the summer since I took a blogging hiatus.

Maus
This book is a graphic novel…to be honest, it's the first graphic novel I've actually read in its entirety.  I guess I always had a preconceived notion that graphic novels were too simplistic and didn't carry much of a story line.  I stand corrected.  Maus was interesting, forced me to use both pictures and words to tell a complete story (something I only do when reading picture books with my children), and actually quite serious in plot.  It is a story about the Holocaust, told from the perspective of a young Jewish boy interviewing his father, a man who survived the Holocaust.  What I was expecting to be an unrealistic cartoon surprised me; it was powerful.  Some of you will have the opportunity to read this later during our multicultural memoir unit this Fall.  If you want to know more, click here.

The Death of Bees
This was the first book I read this summer.  I selected it because it was one of the Alex Award winners, so I knew some students may come in this school year and chose this for summer reading.  The premise of this book was actually quite crazy, and I'm being somewhat vague to avoid spoilers, but here it is: Two girls find their father and mother both dead in their rundown house.  Their parents were horrible to them, so instead of calling the authorities, they decide to bury them in their backyard and just live by themselves, pretending the parents ran off on an adventure when anyone close to them asked.  The girls end up becoming friends with a neighbor…and I have to stop here or I'll spoil something.  I LOVED this book!  Read more here.

The Universe Versus Alex Woods
This was another book title that appeared on the Alex Award list.  This one took me a bit longer to get through than The Death of Bees, though I still did enjoy it.  This title was about a boy named Alex Woods who was struck by a meteor at the age of ten and suffered some health consequences as a result, such as seizures.  The novel starts right in the action of Alex trying to cross a European border with a dead man's ashes in the car.  Then the whole book flashes back to the events leading up to this pseudo-arrest.  There are definitely moments where this one seemed farfetched, but I didn't really mind.  The author kept you interested and the characterization was impeccable.  Another YA book with my stamp of approval!

These were the only three YA books I read this summer.  I can't wait to hear about your summer reading!