Librarians share their recent reads for the Reading Challenge

The Hassenfeld Library’s Spring 2018 Reading Challenge is almost halfway over, and your friendly school librarians have been reading some great books to match the challenge categories. Here are four book recommendations, just in time for Spring Break. Come to the library to check one out.
Library Director Mary Buxton: In the category of books with a blue cover, “Truly Devious” by Maureen Johnson delivers a great middle school mystery. Brilliant kids are selected to attend a boarding school on top of a mountain in Vermont in a mansion that is beyond belief and shrouded in the unsolved disappearance and murder of the wife and young daughter of its original owner. Quirky kids go on a quest to solve this mystery, and it hooks you from the beginning.

Library Assistant Kristin Frank: For category No. 3, a book about a culture different from your own, I am reading one of our new Middle School books, “I Will Always Write Back: How One Letter Changed Two Lives” by Caitlin Alifirenka and Martin Ganda. Caitlin is a middle-class American girl, and Martin is an impoverished boy living in the slums of Zimbabwe. The story of their pen pal relationship is told through alternating first-person chapters and is a beautiful story of two people from different worlds and how they become lifelong friends.

Library Assistant Kayla Lindsey: I read a graphic novel called “Pashmina” by Nidhi Chanani, about a girl named Pri who feels like her mom keeps too many secrets from her. Who's her father? Why did her mom leave the rest of her family behind in India and move to the United States? One day, Pri finds a magic scarf called a pashmina that lets her see beautiful visions of India, which make her want to visit India and meet her family. I loved this book because the art is beautiful, and I got to learn more about India right along with Pri. If you're running short on time, read a graphic novel for any of the categories. They're fast reads.

Librarian Kate Pritchard: For the Biography category, I read “The Invention of Angela Carter” by Edmund Gordon. Angela Carter, one of my favorite authors, was a British writer best known for her collection of retold fairy tales, “The Bloody Chamber.” It was fascinating to read about how she changed, pretty dramatically, as a person and a writer over the course of her too-short life, and to be reminded of what I loved about her gloriously weird and unsettling stories.
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