Richie's Picks: Great Books for Children and Young Adults

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"...She was wearing pajamas and cowboy boots and was holding a dictionary and a lunch box.
'Hello,' Mrs. Pidgeon, the second grade teacher, said. 'We're in the middle of our spelling lesson.'
'Good,' said the girl in pajamas. 'I brought my dictionary. Where's my desk?'
'Who are you?' Mrs. Pidgeon asked politely.
'I'm your new student. My name is Gooney Bird Greene--that's Greene with a silent 'e' at the end--and I just moved here from China. I want a desk right smack in the middle of the room, because I like to be right smack in the middle of everything.'"

I was right smack in the middle of BookExpo. When I walked away from the Houghton Mifflin booth, I smiled a cheery goodbye to the woman there, who had just provided me with a few things to take back home. But inside, I was crestfallen--the advance copy of the new Lois Lowry book that she had handed me was an eighty-eight page story with large type that sported a little girl in a pink tutu on the cover. A cover--I grumbled to myself--that only a first or second grade girl could love. It was clearly not what I had been hoping for from the author of such powerful tales as THE GIVER and GATHERING BLUE.

But, since I had promised to read the book, I shut my eyes and gritted my teeth as I grabbed it from the stack. And guess what? GOONEY BIRD GREENE is, in fact, an absolutely clever and extremely funny story. Second and third grade teachers will find it the perfect book with which to lead off the new school year. It's a rollicking tale, set in Mrs. Pidgeon's second-grade classroom, that's got both a touch of brashness and a whole lot of charm.

In GOONEY BIRD GREENE, Lois Lowry introduces young children to the art of creating stories. Throughout the book, Gooney Bird Greene and Mrs. Pidgeon unobtrusively slip in valuable concepts such as beginning/middle/end, characters and secondary characters, description, pacing, and cliffhangers. Lowry's skillful use of puns and other forms of word play throughout the book will have students tripping over each other to emulate Gooney Bird's style of telling "absolute true stories" that, despite their veracity, always contain more twists than the winding road to Dead Man's curve. The author's portrayals of the students in Gooney Bird's second grade class are so dead-on that teachers will be as anxious to share the book with their friends as they will be with their students.

Since it won't be available until late August, I strongly recommend that teachers order a copy of GOONEY BIRD GREENE now, or risk missing the boat come the fall. (If you don't order it, you also risk failing to hear the story of how she got that name, or the story of her cat being consumed by a cow, or the story of...)

Richie Partington
http://richiespicks.com
BudNotBuddy@aol.com