GreenBeanTeenQueen

Please welcome Sarah Zettel to GreenBeanTeenQueen! Her amazing historical  fantasy series, The American Fairy Trilogy , concludes with book three, Bad Luck Girl. Add Bad Luck Girl to Goodreads About Bad Luck Girl:  After rescuing her parents from the Seelie king at Hearst Castle, Callie  is caught up in the war between the fairies of the Midnight Throne and the Sunlit Kingdoms.  By accident, she discovers that fairies aren’t the only magical creatures in the world. There’s also  Halfers, misfits that are half fairy and half other—half paper, half steel girder, half electric spark.  As the war heats up, Callie’s world falls apart. And even though she’s the child of prophecy, she doubts she can save the  Halfers,  her people, her family, and Jack, let alone herself. Bad Luck Girl, they call Callie, and she’s starting to believe them. The American Fairy Trilogy is historical fantasy. What about history inspires  you ...

So this past weekend, I was proud to finally give my library's fist digital storytime. We've been working towards digital storytimes for awhile so I was thrilled to have the chance to debut them as part of our Summer Reading Program this year. To set up the storytime, I used an HDMI cable to attach the iPad to a large screen TV. This was very easy to do and a great way to project the apps to the group. It also gave me an easy way control the apps without having to worry about running the apps upside down or moving the iPad around the room so everyone could see. It did make me a bit more limited in my mobility, since I was tethered to the TV, but overall I felt that it worked out well. I decided to go with an animal theme for my first digital storytime. I wanted to use a lot of apps that were very interactive since my goal with our digital storytime is to promote the interactive nature of apps and the benefits of interacting with your child and screen time instead of using...

Today I'm over at the ALSC Blog talking about why I think it's okay to mess up in storytime and a couple of the times I have! Come join me and share your own stories!

 About the Book:   Hopper is just an ordinary pet-shop   mouse —until he escapes. Soon he finds himself below the bustling streets of Brooklyn, deep within the untamed tangles of transit tunnels, and in Atlantia, a glorious utopian rat civilization. But all is not as it seems. Hopper misses Pinkie and Pup, the siblings he lost in the escape attempt. Atlantia is constantly threatened by roving rebels who wish to bring the city to its knees. And there are cats everywhere, cats who would normally eat a rodent in a second, but leave the rats unharmed . . . and no one can seem to answer why. Soon Hopper is caught in the crosshairs of an epic battle, one that spans generations and species. As the clashes rage, Hopper learns terrible, extraordinary secrets. Deadly secrets about Atlantia. Painful secrets about his friends. And one powerful secret about himself. If you work with middle graders, you know that animal fantasy is huge. My middle graders are forever...

Ok, first off, I knew blogging with a baby would be hard. But my goodness, it's tough! Especially when he stops napping well and the moment he goes to bed I want to go to bed too because I've exhausted myself at work. But luckily I've got my handy iPad to blog from whole I'm holding Baby GreenBean, so please excuse any typos! We're almost a week into Summer Reading Program at my library. This is my eighth Summer Reading Program and it never fails that after a few days, I start to feel like a broken record saying the same things over and over again. I can give the Summer Reading spiel in my sleep-and have actually dreamt about it! Yet no matter how many times I go through another Summer Reading Program, there are always things that surprise me that people don't know. Here's my wish list of what I wish people knew about Summer Reading. -Listening to a book counts as reading. Yep, it might seem like a given to people who are avid readers or who work...

My Favorite Thing About Zita the Spacegirl Tour I love the moments when I can recall a book off the top of my head and impress my library patrons with my book knowledge. It's always fun and makes me feel a bit like a superhero. It's easy to remember the popular always asked for series and where they are located, who the author is, or the order of a series. But it's even more fun when you are given just a few details about something and you can come up with the book a patron is looking for. I had a young boy come into my library one evening with his very stumped grandmother. He had been talking about a book where a girl and her friend hit a red box and that's all he could remember. His grandmother said he had been looking for it for awhile and couldn't recall the title. I immediately said "Zita the Spacegirl!" Luckily we had the first Zita book on the shelf that evening and my young patron went hope very happy to rediscover the book he was look...

Please welcome author Sasha Dawn to GreenBeanTeenQueen! Her debut novel, Oblivion, is out this month.  I always ask authors about libraries and reading and the impact it's had on their lives. I love her post-I tell the tweens and and teens at my library that you're never too old to be read aloud to and Ms. Dawn's post proves that!  I LIVE; THEREFORE, I READ. My teen years were among the most tumultuous of my life, and that’s saying quite something, considering some of the challenges I’ve faced since. While I was in high school, in the interest of my safety, I lived with another family. I didn’t often have the power of choice, given I was essentially sponging off the family who’d welcomed me as child #7 in their home. For this reason, I found escape in books and tended to read whatever I could get my hands on—anything from romance novels to sci-fi to classics. While my pseudo-sisters were attending rock concerts and going on vacations, I was reading. Books w...