Reading Youth Literature

  Looking for Alaska by John Green Summary: Miles “Pudge” Halter is looking for "the Great Perhaps" when he leaves the predictable life with his parents in Florida to attend a Culver Creek boarding school in Alabama. Miles is an introvert whose hobby is collecting famous last words.  His roommate, the Colonel, gives him the ironic nickname Pudge since he’s rail thin.  Pudge is introduced to Alaska, the intelligent, beautiful, highly energetic and emotional girl that he develops a huge crush on.  But Alaska has a boyfriend outside of Culver Creek. She is the center of Pudge’s new group of friends that also include Lara, a Romanian girl, and Takumi. The five of them hang out on Strawberry Hill smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap wine, but also learning together.  Additionally, Alaska and the Colonel are notorious pranksters and lead the group into several carefully planned schemes.   Alaska bears the burden of her mother’s death when she was a ...

The Popcorn astronauts and other bitable rhymes by Deborah Ruddell, Joan Rankin (Ill.) Summary: The Popcorn astronauts and other bitable rhymes by Deborah Ruddell (2015) uses verse to describe the four seasons humorously.  Each season has five story poems to describe it with the exception of Fall that has six poems.  In Spring there is the Strawberry Queen, that needs to be addressed as Ma’am, “but don’t say a word about strawberry jam” (p.1); a picnic, a doozie of a smoothie with pickles, snails, a “nubbin of fish,” (p. 4).  Summer includes swimming in a watermelon lake, the story of a picky Ogre that eats only corn on the cob, a recipe to make raisins like “wrinkled rubber rocks...of well-worn pirate socks (p. 9), and don’t forget the summer peaches.  Fall welcomes canoes made of potatoes, a café that serves only toast, a list of 21 things to do with an apple, a menu to eat on a rainy day, and a chance to become a hero by eating the last hardened brownie....