Saturday, February 15, 2020

What's New? Stacking the Shelves

Stacking the Shelves is a weekly meme hosted by Tynga's Reviews. Hop on over there to ogle what other bloggers got this week.

For Review:

Image: Penguin Random House

Harry versus the First 100 Days of School by Emily Jenkins. illustrated by Pete Oswald. 210p. Scwartz & Wade Books/ Random House Children's Books/ Penguin Random House, June 30, 2020. 9780525644712.

Publisher synopsis: An acclaimed author and a #1 New York Times bestselling illustrator team up to bring us a funny, warm, and utterly winning chapter book that follows, day by day, the first hundred days in one first grader’s classroom.

In just one hundred days, Harry will learn how to overcome first-day jitters, what a “family circle” is, why guinea pigs aren’t scary after all, what a silent “e” is about, how to count to 100 in tons of different ways, and much more. He’ll make great friends, celebrate lots of holidays, and learn how to use his words. In other words, he will become an expert first grader.

Made up of one hundred short chapters and accompanied by tons of energetic illustrations from bestselling illustrator of The Good Egg and The Bad Seed, this is a chapter book all first graders will relate to–one that captures all the joys and sorrows of the first hundred days of school.


Purchased: The hub and I both received BN gift cards from my brother and sis-in-law for Christmas, so we went on a BN date. This is what I bought.
Image: Holiday House
Itch by Polly Farquhar. 252 p. Holiday House, February 4, 2020. 9780823445523.

Publisher synopsis: When everything around you is going wrong, how far would you go to fit in?

Isaac's sixth grade year gets off to a rough start.

For one thing, a tornado tears the roof off the school cafeteria. His mother leaves on a two month business trip to China. And as always. . . . there's the itch. It comes out of nowhere. Idiopathic, which means no one knows what causes it. It starts small, but it spreads, and soon—it's everywhere. It's everything. It's why everyone calls him Itch—everyone except his best friend Sydney, the only one in all of Ohio who's always on his side, ever since he moved here.

At least Itch has his job at the pheasant farm, which is tough but cool. And most of the guys at school are okay to hang out with, even if they're crazy about college football, and Itch could care less. He's doing the best he can to get along—until everything goes wrong in the middle of a lunch swap. When Sydney collapses and an ambulance is called, Itch blames himself. And he's not the only one.

When you have no friends at all, wouldn't you do anything—even something you know you shouldn't—to get them back?
Drawing on her own experiences with idiopathic angioedema and food allergies, Polly Farquhar spins a tale of kids trying to balance the desire to be ordinary with the need to be authentic—allergies, itches, confusion and all.

For everyone who's ever felt out of place, this debut novel set in the Ohio heartland is a warm, funny, and sometimes heartbreaking look at middle school misfits and misadventures. Whether you root for the Buckeyes or have no clue who they are, you'll be drawn into Itch's world immediately. This engaging debut is perfect for fans of See You in the Cosmos and Fish in a Tree.

Image: Little Bee Books
Jelly by Jo Cotterill. 266 p. Yellow Jacket/ Little Bee Books, January 7, 2020. 9781499810066.

Publisher synopsis: Twelve-year-old Jelly hides her true self behind her humor and keeps her true thoughts and feelings locked away in a notebook. Can she find the courage to share who she really is?

Angelica (Jelly for short) is the queen of comedy at school. She has a personality as big as she is, and everyone loves her impressions. But Jelly isn’t as confident as she pretends to be. No one knows her deepest thoughts and feelings. She keeps those hidden away in a secret notebook.

Then her mom’s new boyfriend, Lennon, arrives. He’s kind and perceptive, and he is the first person to realize that Jelly is playing a part. Jelly shares her poetry with him and he convinces her to perform one of her poems as a song at the school talent show. Can Jelly risk letting people see the real her? What if it all goes wrong?

Image: Disney
Fowl Twins by Eoin Colfer. 354 p. Disney Hyperion, November, 2019. 9781368043755.

Publisher synopsis: One week after their eleventh birthday, the Fowl twins—scientist Myles, and Beckett, the force of nature—are left in the care of house security (NANNI) for a single night. In that time they befriend a troll who has clawed his way through the earth’s crust to the surface. Unfortunately for the troll, he is being chased by a nefarious nobleman and an interrogating nun, who both need the magical creature for their own gain, as well as a fairy-in-training who has been assigned to protect him. The boys and their new troll best friend escape and go on the run. Along the way they get shot at, kidnapped, buried, arrested, threatened, killed (temporarily), and discover that the strongest bond in the world is not the one forged by covalent electrons in adjacent atoms, but the one that exists between a pair of twins.

Image: Macmillan
A Galaxy of Sea Stars by Jeanne Zulick Ferruolo. 330 p. Farrar Straus Giroux/ Macmillan, February 4, 2020. 9780374309091.

Publisher synopsis: A Galaxy of Sea Stars is Jeanne Zulick Ferruolo’s second middle-grade novel—a heartwarming story about family, loyalty, and the hard choices we face in the name of friendship.

Sometimes, the truth isn’t easy to see. Sometimes, you have to look below the surface to find it.

Eleven-year-old Izzy feels as though her whole world is shifting, and she doesn’t like it. She wants her dad to act like he did before he was deployed to Afghanistan. She wants her mom to live with them at the marina where they’ve moved instead of spending all her time on Block Island. Most of all, she wants Piper, Zelda, and herself—the Sea Stars—to stay best friends, as they start sixth grade in a new school.

Everything changes when Izzy’s father invites his former interpreter’s family, including eleven-year-old Sitara, to move into the marina’s upstairs apartment. Izzy doesn’t know what to make of Sitara—with her hijab and refusal to eat cafeteria food—and her presence disrupts the Sea Stars. But in Sitara Izzy finds someone brave, someone daring, someone who isn’t as afraid as Izzy is to use her voice and speak up for herself. As Izzy and Sitara grow closer, Izzy must make a choice: stay in her comfort zone and risk betraying her new friend, or speak up and lose the Sea Stars forever.

If you leave a comment, leave the link to your stack. I will pop by and to check it out!

No comments:

Post a Comment