Category — Middle Grade fiction

My 9 year old son and I just finished readingCrispin: A Cross of Lead, by Avi. I read it to him at bedtime, and I think if you’re going to introduce any 9 year old to this book that is the way to do it. I was able to explain it to him as I read. I doubt most 9-year-olds have the background knowledge of pre-Reformation England to really understand it.

It’s interesting to me that this book won the Newbery award in 2003. There’s been a lot of discussion on the library lists and blogs about the relevance of the Newbery in the past few years and I think this book is a good example of the problems with the award. I’ve read about half of the Newbery award winners (and more than half of the honor books) and in many cases I don’t agree with the selection. Not that I think the choices aren’t deserving, but in many cases I feel the books that were given an honor (as opposed to the top award) are more appealing to kids, faster-moving, and more universal than the actual winner. Now that I’ve read Crispin: The Cross of Lead, I feel the same way about the 2003 winners. I loved both Hoot andThe House of the Scorpion and I usually have no problem booktalking either book or suggesting them on the fly to my 4th and 5th graders – but I don’t feel the same way about this book. That’s probably not the only criteria the Newbery folks use to give the awards – but that’s my #1 criteria: can I sell this book to the kids in my library. And this book, for me, is a hard sell. The same goes for the winners of the last few years – I happened to love The Higher Power of Lucky - but how to get my kids to want to read it? And forget Good Masters, Sweet Ladies! My kids lack the background knowledge to understand this book. When I read it, it’ll be out loud to my son.

That said, I did enjoy this book and we were both on the edge of our proverbial seats during the final confrontation. I did have a bit of a hard time buying the character change from Crispin – he got a lot of confidence awfully fast for a kid who didn’t even have a name until the past couple weeks of his life. But I guess that’s the power of love!

Some resources for using Crispin: The Cross of Lead in the classroom:

• A study guide for Crispin: The Cross of Lead
• Video interviewing Avi, from Reading Rockets, where he talks about the struggle of writing – as a writer myself I love what he says about having trouble deciding what to say next a hundred times a day. From such a prolific author this means a lot! He also talks about his dyslexia. This could be really inspirational for kids who struggle with writing. 
• A great page of suggested booktalks for Crispin: The Cross of Lead.

Scared Witless: Thirteen Eerie Tales to Tell, is by far the best read-aloud I’ve done in my career as a librarian. I found it because I knew I wanted to do scary stories the week before Halloween, and I didn’t want to do stories from the books we already had in the library since so many of the kids had already read them..over and over and over again. So I scoured the Internet for scary stories and this book was recommended – and for very good reason! Every story in the book has a “gotcha” moment – some scary, some silly – and they all worked wonderfully to scare the pants off the kids I read them to!

I really liked the silly stories in the book. “The Ghost with the Bloody Fingers” is a classic, of course, and I ended up telling it to all the kids, from pre-k to 5th grade, but “The Graveyard Voice” got gasps and screams, then groans and giggles, from the upper grades, as did “The Mysterious Rapping Noise.”

A few of the stories were of the plain old scary “BOO!” variety, like “Lost in the Dark,” one of my favorites. I really, really enjoyed reading this book to my kids, and while the stories weren’t great literature, they were great read-alouds!

The author and her husband, professional storytellers who have teamed up for other books, have a great little website: Beauty and the Beast Storytellers.

The only bad thing about this book is that all the kids wanted it after I read it! So now I’ll need another book to read next year…Any suggestions?