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I published a review of Insignificant Events in the Life of a Cactus by Dusti Bowling on Granite Media and also posted it on Goodreads.

When her dad randomly takes a job as manager of an old west theme park, Aven Green has to move to the Arizona desert for the start of 8th grade. Her armlessness was never a big deal with her friends in Kansas, where she had gone to school with the same group from kindergarten on up. Now at a new large school where she doesn’t know anyone, Aven is self-conscious and the kids she encounters aren’t exactly welcoming or friendly. Can she overcome her fear, make connections with people, and follow her interests and talents, or at least stop eating lunch in the bathroom? And can she uncover the mystery of the absentee owner of the quirky theme park, to which she feels a strange growing connection?

Told in an authentic, hilarious first person voice, this book is filled with life and heart. The author does a great job of showing Aven and other characters as authentic, growing people, making mistakes and learning throughout the book. It provides an empathetic and informative depiction of characters with differing abilities, helping readers understand the real challenges caused by specific disabilities as well as how little those challenges can actually limit a determined and supported person from following their interests and talents to accomplish great things. As an adult reader the story opened my eyes to ways I could improve my interactions with people of differing abilities and be a more considerate support. These are things I wish I had learned at a much younger age so I feel this could be an important book for young people to read. It’s an extremely engaging, easy read that kids will want to pick up anyway. Highly recommended for young people as well as teachers and parents of young people.

Read-alikes: • This book has a similar vibe to Wonder, but is lighter and funnier, without a central bully-villain. It’s a very accessible realistic/contemporary fiction story. • Could be a good next step for fans of humorous diary books like Wimpy Kid or Dork Diaries. It doesn’t have illustrations but it is told in first person and it includes funny entries from the character’s blog. • The quirky theme park mystery element has a similar vibe to small town stories by authors such as Sheila Turnage and Natalie Lloyd.

Review by Joshua Whiting, Media Specialist, Granite Educational Technology Department Rating: ★★★★½ (4.5 stars) Interest Level: Grades 4-8

Insignificant Events in the Life of a Cactus Written by Dusti Bowling Sterling Children’s Books 262 pages Release Date: September 5, 2017

Tags: 2017 Children’s Fiction, Arizona Fiction, Contemporary Fiction, Desert Fiction, Dusti Bowling, Humorous Fiction, Joshua Whiting, Mystery Fiction, Persons with Disabilities Fiction, Realistic Fiction

Standalone post link: Book Review - Insignificant Events in the Life of a Cactus

I published a review of Nightbooks by J.A. White on Granite Media and also posted it on Goodreads.

Alex has an obsession with all things creepy, and he spends his nights writing scary stories. One night he decides he’s tired of being a “weirdo,” so he sneaks out of his family’s apartment with his story notebooks and heads to the basement to burn them in the building’s boiler. The elevator takes him to a different floor instead, where he is illogically lured into a strange apartment and soon finds himself trapped in an actual scary story, enslaved by an actual witch. It turns out the witch needs his stories to keep the enchanted apartment under control, and although he wants to find a way to escape there is a part of him that enjoys the dark, magical surroundings and the appreciative new audience for his tales. Can he keep creating new horror stories to keep the witch happy, or can he figure out a way to use his storytelling as his means of escape?

This isn’t the creepiest middle grade fiction book I’ve ever read, but with its dark fairy tale elements it brings just the right amount of horror, tinged with hope and humor, for young readers. I loved how this book not only spun a good tale but made me think about the power of storytelling, and, quite simply, made me want to write things. I think young readers will recognize and engage with these themes of storytelling, writing, and being true to one’s interests and talents as well. The story also explores friendship/relationship-building rather well, as Alex and Yasmin (another child enslaved by the witch) learn to trust, help, and open up to each other despite the very real possibility of getting separated or hurt by the manipulations of the witch.

This novel would be a perfect next step for fans of scary story collections. The text does an excellent job of integrating many such scary stories, written by Alex, into the larger narrative framework. I especially liked the inclusion of fully-readable pages from books in the witch’s library, complete with secret handwritten notes in the margins. It is a low-key metafictional touch that isn’t too gimmicky and does subtle wonders for the setting, making the witch’s vast library of scary stories seem tangible. They are teasers for a whole world of other books to explore.

Highly recommended for budding writers (which ideally would be any young person) and fans of scary stories and fairy tales, whether fractured, Disneyfied, or traditionally dark. It could make a good read-alike for Neil Gaiman’s middle grade books, Adam Gidwitz’ A Tale Dark and Grimm series, Frank Cole’s Potion Masters series, and for those who enjoy the creepier aspects of Harry Potter. It would be a great step towards more literary/Newbery-ish dark fantasy books such as The Girl Who Drank the Moon, Splendors and Glooms, or Jonathan Auxier, as it has similar moods and themes but reads slightly easier and younger than those books.

Review by Joshua Whiting, Media Specialist, Granite Educational Technology Department Rating: ★★★★½ (4.5 stars) Interest Level: Grades 4-7

Nightbooks Written by J.A. White Katherine Tegen Books, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 294 pages Release Date: July 24, 2018

Tags: 2018 Children’s Fiction, Books Fiction, Fairy Tales Fiction, Fantasy Fiction, Fractured Fairy Tales, Friendship Fiction, Horror Fiction, Joshua Whiting, New York City Fiction, Storytelling Fiction, Witches Fiction, Writing Fiction

Standalone post link: Book Review - Nightbooks

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Revision: February 6, 2019.

Standalone post link: Addenda to My Twitter Bio

A few weeks go I was at my wife’s family’s cabin and I was lurking around in a bedroom browsing my in-laws' old bookshelf.  Hidden in the midst of a notable collection of Louis L’Amour novels, with an old framed photograph sitting on the shelf in front of them, I discovered copies of the original Earthsea Trilogy by Ursula LeGuin: A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore.

I believe I have read the first chapter of A Wizard of Earthsea at least three or four times over the course of my life (the first time was probably when I was about 10 years old.)  For whatever reasons it never took and I never continued and finished, but it has always been on my list to get back to sometime (right up there with Moby Dick, Swann’s Way, and the Old Testament.) So, it appeared the time had finally come for this book, and I spent a good chunk of my cabin weekend reading that old copy of A Wizard of Earthsea.  As the time came to leave the cabin, I still had about 15 pages left and the story was completely unresolved.  What else could I do but steal the book and take it home? And then since I was already stealing, I might as well steal the whole trilogy.

Although I had various other reading plans, I put them aside to focus on this trilogy.  And now that I’ve finished, I am having a hard time finding anything else from those other reading plans that engages me and forces me to make reading a priority like these books did.

So, rather than a review (because I’m [bored with book reviews](http://kidlit.froztfreez.com/bored-with-book-reviews/ ““Bored with Book Reviews”")), here are five things I noticed and learned from these books, mostly from a would-be writer’s perspective:

1. You don’t have to show everything.  You can tell some things.  And you don’t even have to tell everything.  You can skip time, even and especially across volumes of a trilogy, across years, across great deeds only alluded to or sketched out briefly.  You don’t have to share the whole history of the world you build or the whole lives of the people you bring to life.  You can cover wizard school in three chapters rather than seven books.¹

2. You don’t have to end books with cliffhangers. Not even the second volume of a trilogy.  Each book in a series can be a stand-alone snapshot of a much larger world.²

3. You don’t have to write high fantasy that is obsessively Euro-centric; you can have high fantasy with people of color.  These books actually set a precedent for this 40+ years ago that I didn’t know existed. Our hero and the majority of the characters are dark-skinned people.  For the most part this isn’t a major focus of the narratives, but it is definitely there and it is intentional.  It’s just one subtle detail of her world and character building, which makes me love it even more.  I didn’t realize this when I started reading A Wizard of Earthsea as a child; it certainly isn’t reflected in any of the cover art I have seen for these books over my lifetime. Depressingly, that downplay was probably a sound marketing decision for the times.  Hopefully the #WeNeedDiverseBooks meme is changing the calculus for those types of decisions and will result in new book covers even for old books such as these. I’m definitely not well-read in fantasy and most of what I have read was a long time ago, so I recognize that I am ignorant and maybe others authors have been engaging in diversity in fantasy for a long time as well.³

4. The varying ethnic and cultural details are just one example of how LeGuin is a master of using fantasy and other speculative fictions to explore, describe, confront, come to terms with, and rebut ideas we have about culture, race, social norms, politics, religion, sexuality, etc.  I had learned this years ago from reading her The Left Hand of Darkness as a teenager, but I had forgotten since then or taken it for granted.  Speculative fiction provides such capability and opportunity to explore these kinds of issues in a very real, emotional way without the potential for the story and ideas to get bogged down by all the messiness, politicization, and need for research and accuracy that can come with tying a story or character to a particular place and time in the actual historical or contemporary world.  LeGuin is practically an anthropologist of new cultures of her own creation, and I like her approach.⁴

5. I love reading paperbacks from the 70s.  They just don’t make them like that anymore.  But more than just the physical-ness of the books themselves, it is good to read something from a different era with a different writing style that is not really trending. A nice widening of perspective from the more contemporary middle grade novels I have been focusing on in the last year or two.  I am reminded that there is so much more to read and learn, I can’t just try to keep up with the new stuff.  I need to read what I need to read, even if it is old mass paperbacks hidden behind a picture frame on a bookshelf in someone’s cabin.⁵

Footnotes

Standalone post link: 5 Things I Learned by Stealing and Reading the Earthsea Trilogy

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Standalone post link: Books

Standalone post link: Favorite Albums of 2023

This file exists solely to respond to /search URL with the related search layout template.

No content shown here is rendered, all content is based in the template layouts/page/search.html

Setting a very low sitemap priority will tell search engines this is not important content.

This implementation uses Fusejs, jquery and mark.js

Initial setup

Search depends on additional output content type of JSON in config.toml ``` [outputs] home = [“HTML”, “JSON”] ```

Searching additional fields

To search additional fields defined in front matter, you must add it in 2 places.

Edit layouts/_default/index.JSON

This exposes the values in /index.json i.e. add category ``` … “contents”:{{ .Content | plainify | jsonify }} {{ if .Params.tags }}, “tags”:{{ .Params.tags | jsonify }}{{end}}, “categories” : {{ .Params.categories | jsonify }}, … ```

Edit fuse.js options to Search

static/js/search.js ``` keys: [ “title”, “contents”, “tags”, “categories” ] ```

Standalone post link: Search Results