Breadcrumbs

Replete with allusions to the best in modern children's literature, while at-heart a retelling of the classic Hans Christian Anderson tale The Snow Queen, Breadcrumbs is a bookworm's dream come true. Meanwhile, it also captures a universal theme: the insecurity of the changing dynamics that beset tween boy/girl friendships, making it appealing to a wider audience. This, my second reading, was as a read aloud to my 6th graders, who were mesmerized. I'm more than a little in love with this book. It will live on a shelf with Cornelia Funke's Inkheart, Anna Quindlen's How Reading Changed My Life, and Jonathan Franzen's essay "How To Be Alone," and I will call the shelf, "Ode to the Reading Life."

The Magic Thief

I go back to school tomorrow after a three week break. (Love that year-round calendar!) My first reading focus lesson will be to share the list of more than 20 books I read while off-track. I’m proud of its diversity: tween fiction, adult fiction, professional, poetry, fantasy, biography, realistic fiction. I’m also looking forward to sharing my online reading: blogs, tweets, and RSS feeds.
The book I’m most excited to share is The Magic Thief by Sarah Prineas (2008). I first read about it on Educating Alice, one of the fabulous blogs I discovered during these three weeks. (A subject for a later post!) Educating Alice’s post linked to 2009 The E.B. White Read Aloud Awards page of The Association of Booksellers for Children. Thanks to “Alice’s” heads-up I got to read all but one of the books on this list, and The Magic Thief outshone them all.
As the award committee noted, The Magic Thief “...started “with a bang,” and just kept on going.” As a Harry Potter fan, I am hesitant to pick up anything having to do with wizards; I just can't believe anything else could measure up! I was thrilled to encounter a unique magical world here. As I read my thoughts did occasionally drift to Hogwarts, but I found there is room in my heart to love both worlds.

With an eye to instruction, I especially loved the text features Sarah Prineas included: the requisite fantasy map, and “A Guide to Wellmet’s People and Places,” which in addition to helpfully organizing the multiple characters and settings for transitional readers, also includes a runic alphabet key, and a few biscuit recipes. I also look forward to discussing the structure of the text, and how having access to two characters’ perspectives helped me have a more objective understanding of the events in the story. Yet, the perspectives both still had the limitations of being first person—so many mysteries remain.
I enjoyed it so much I will be lined up for the next book in this series, yet the HarperCollins website, with its slick interactive map and online games nearly put me off of the book altogether. I wandered across the website before reading. Then it all struck me as too packaged, too glossy, altogether ahead of itself. Shouldn’t the splash of the book come before the over-the-top publicity? It speaks well of the book that it was able to win me over in spite of the presumption of the publisher.