Club announcements
- Book Club is running the foyer Concession Stand from 5-8 p.m. Tues Feb 15. Please help work and earn money for our continued hot chocolate habit.
"We <3 Books" book swap
- Our club is all about sharing: each week, we share about the books we're reading or want to read.
- Today, we put that sharing into pratice by swapping books with each other!
- Club members who brought wrapped books (and a few extra copies from Mrs. Stevens and Ms. Tolva) played a game to swap for a new-to-them book. S/O to Silvia for her stellar wrapping job!
- All was politeness and "don't rip the wrapping paper" ... UNTIL:
- Ashleigh won the final round of book swapping and nabbed Caste by Isabel Wilerson from Emily
- Emily then swiped The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefavter from Ryleigh
- Ryleigh ended the game with book 1 of The Last Apprentice series by Joseph Delaney.
- Also swapped:
- Room by Emma Donoghue
- Genre: realistic
- Summary: Five-year-old Jack has spent his life living in an eleven-by-eleven foot space his mother calls Room and while Jack uses his imagination to create wondrous fantasies to entertain himself, his mother dreads the day her son begins to question why they must remain in Room and tries to find a way to escape.
- Blurb read *with emotion* by Silvia
- This Poison Heart by Kalynn Bayron
- Genre: fantasy
- Summary: Briseis has a gift: she can grow plants from tiny seeds to rich blooms with a single touch.When Briseis's aunt dies and wills her a dilapidated estate in rural New York, Bri and her parents decide to leave Brooklyn behind for the summer. Hopefully there, surrounded by plants and flowers, Bri will finally learn to control her gift. But their new home is sinister in ways they could never have imagined--it comes with a specific set of instructions, an old-school apothecary, and a walled garden filled with the deadliest botanicals in the world that can only be entered by those who share Bri's unique family lineage.
- Summarized by Sara, who lost the book jacket
- You Laugh, I Win: The Ultimate Try Not to Laugh Joke Book by Serena Webster
- Genre: non-fiction
- Summary: Here is a game the whole family can love! You Laugh, I Win! The Ultimate Try Not To Laugh Challenge Joke Book - Family Edition is not only full of great family-friendly jokes, but it's presented in a competition format. The player or team that smiles, grins or laughs the most are actually the losers! Try not to laugh as you are presented with some funny jokes. The team that can hold in their laughter will be the winners, but it won't be easy.
- Ananya may bring her new book back so we can challenge each other not to laugh.
- Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
- Genre: non-fiction
- Summary: Wilkerson [presents] . . . a portrait of an unseen phenomenon in America as she explores, through an immersive, deeply researched narrative and stories about real people, how America today and throughout its history has been shaped by a hidden caste system, a rigid hierarchy of human rankings. Beyond race, class, or other factors, there is a powerful caste system that influences people's lives and behavior and the nation's fate. Linking the caste systems of America, India, and Nazi Germany, Wilkerson explores eight pillars that underlie caste systems across civilizations, including divine will, bloodlines, stigma, and more, . . . shows the ways that the insidious undertow of caste is experienced every day, . . . [and] points forward to ways America can move beyond the artificial and destructive separations of human divisions, toward hope in our common humanity.
- When You Reach Me by Rebecca
- Genre: sci-fi
- Summary: As her mother prepares to be a contestant on the 1980s television game show, "The $20,000 Pyramid," a twelve-year-old New York City girl tries to make sense of a series of mysterious notes received from an anonymous source that seems to defy the laws of time and space.
- Revenge of the Witch by Joseph Delaney, book 1 in The Last Apprentice series
- Genre: horror
- Summary: Young Tom, the seventh son of a seventh son, starts work as an apprentice for the village spook, whose job is to protect ordinary folk from "ghouls, boggarts, and all manner of wicked beasties.
- The Scorpio Races by Maggie Stiefavter
- Genre: mainly realistic with some magical realism
- Summary: It happens at the start of every November: the Scorpio Races. Riders attempt to keep hold of their water horses long enough to make it to the finish line. Some riders live. Others die. At age nineteen, Sean Kendrick is the returning champion. He is a young man of few words, and if he has any fears, he keeps them buried deep, where no one else can see them. Puck Connolly is different. She never meant to ride in the Scorpio Races. But fate hasn’t given her much of a chance. So she enters the competition — the first girl ever to do so. She is in no way prepared for what is going to happen.
- Room by Emma Donoghue
What we're reading
- The Great Destroyers by Carolyn Tung Richmond
- Genre: sci-fi
- Summary: Jo Linden lives in a world where there are no atomic weapons, and the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union is played out in the Pax Games, fought with powerful robotic mecha war machines operated by young pilots; Jo needs the prize money to save her father's mecha repair shop, and keep what is left of her family together, but when competing pilots start dying from poisoning, Jo finds herself caught up in Cold War politics and political conspiracy and she discovers that it is not only her family's survival at stake--she may have to prevent World War III.