sonderbooks.com

I indeed understood better what was going on in the second book, and appreciated the richness of the background that her way of writing the first book gave us. In this book, Essun has lost track of her daughter Nassun, but the reader gets to follow both. In this book, they each also discover an ability to sense magic – silver threads in the world and people and creatures around them. Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Fiction/obelisk_gate.html Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

If it hadn’t been the first day of school, and if my mother hadn’t been crying her eyes out the night before, and if the fuel pump on the Jeep had been doing what a fuel pump on a Jeep is supposed to be doing, and if it hadn’t been raining like an Australian tropical thunderstorm – and I’ve been in one, so I know what it’s like – It turns out that Carter’s grandfather has died, and in his will, he provided a generous endowment for Mr. Bowles-Fitzpatrick to now serve his son’s family. But the family can definitely use his services, though Carter’s not so sure he wants someone calling him “Young Master Jones” and requiring him to behave with good manners. The whole idea of a proper English gentleman’s gentleman dealing with an American sixth-grade boy is what gives this book layers upon layers of humor.

As I started to share it with others, I found that many people felt the impulse to seek joy in their surroundings but had been made to feel as if their efforts were misguided. As she studied joy and sought out the aesthetics of joy, she was able to make connections and put them into ten categories. In all, I identified ten aesthetics of joy, each of which reveals a distinct connection between the feeling of joy and the tangible qualities of the world around us: Energy: vibrant color and light Abundance: lushness, multiplicity, and variety Freedom: nature, wildness, and open space Harmony: balance, symmetry, and flow Play: circles, spheres, and bubbly forms Surprise: contrast and whimsy Transcendence: elevation and lightness Magic: invisible forces and illusions Celebration: synchrony, sparkle, and bursting shapes Renewal: blossoming, expansion, and curves a Joy Toolkit with worksheets to fill out to help you fill your own life with joy.

The Walter Awards are sponsored by WeNeedDiverseBooks.org and named in honor of Walter Dean Myers. Elizabeth Acevedo was the 2019 Walter Award Winner in the Teen category for The Poet X. Elizabeth Acevedo began her acceptance speech talking about when she was an 8th grade English teacher in a school with many African American kids and many Latinx kids. Then in 2014, Walter Dean Myers wrote, “Where are the people of color in children’s books? Since I already had a copy of almost all the books from my year on the Newbery committee, I didn’t purchase any more, but hung out behind the official photographers taking pictures of the awardees.