DBRLTeen

Bring in your guitar or mandolin and stop by to refresh your knowledge on strings, tuning, chords, picking technique, basic maintenance, etc. Professional musician Thom Howard will guide you in this informal session, sharing tips and tricks and answering all those questions you never knew who to ask. Ages 12 and older, adults welcome. Please call the library at 443-3161 to register.

Photos from the Teen Sidewalk Graffiti program last Wednesday evening, July 1. Click each image to see in larger size.

Don’t try this at home…

Girls growing up in Texas in 1899 weren’t expected to have careers. They were expected to get married. But Calpurnia Tate loves nature, and longs to be a scientist. Her grandfather, an amateur scientist himself, is the only one in her family who supports her.

from page 220 – “I had never thought my future would be like theirs. But now I knew this was untrue, and that I was exactly like other girls. I was expected to hand over my life to a house, a husband, children. It was intended that I give up my nature studies, my Notebook, my beloved river. There was a wicked point to all the sewing and cooking that they were trying to impress upon me, the tedious lessons I had been spurning and ducking. I went hot and cold all over. My life did not lie with the Plant after all. My life was forfeit. Why hadn’t I seen it? I was trapped. A coyote with her paw in the trap.”

As Mr. Darwin wrote, “It is most difficult to remember that the increase of every living being is constantly being checked by unperceived injurious agencies…”  But you will have to read the book for yourself to find out if Calpurnia still feels trapped at the end.

So DBRLTeen recommends The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, by Jacqueline Kelly.  Although fiction, it illustrates the struggles so many young women went through in the past to achieve their goals, blazing the trails that young women today can follow so much more easily.

Read an inteview with author Jacqueline Kelly by clicking here.

Go to http://www.wallwisher.com/wall/dbrlteen and double-click anywhere to leave a stickie on our Teen Comment Wall – suggestions, complaints, likes, dislikes?  Just let us know!

“Homer, Hero, and Zeus were strictly Outside Dogs.  They all knew this, but it didn’t stop them from good-naturedly crowding the front door every time it opened, every single time, despite the fact that they were never – ever - let into the house.  I loved this particularly fine thing about the dogs:  Despite a lifetime of denied entrance, hope never died in their hearts.”

from The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate, by Jacqueline Kelly, page 52, which DBRLTeen hasn’t finished reading yet, but can already tell its a fabulous book (but its not about dogs).

Calpurnia is 11 years old, growing up in Texas in 1899. (But this isn’t a kid’s book – its in our Young Adult collection.)  She is the only girl out of seven children in the family.  She develops an interest in nature, and wants to read Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, but the local librarian tells her “I wouldn’t keep such a thing in my library!”  (Then, as now, evolution was controversial…)  Calpurnia discovers her grandfather, who lives in the same house as her, but who has never spoken to her, has a copy of his own, and thus begins their friendship.

Granddaddy’s story of his encounter with a bat during the Civil War in Chapter 3 is very moving, although the chapter is titled “The Possum Wars”.  Great writers can bring a tear to your eye even when they’re writing about bats! 

What if you only had one year to live…and you knew it?  That’s what happens to 18-year-old Ben Wolf.  He finds out he has a blood disease that will almost certainly kill him in a year.  The recommended treatment may extend his life by a short time, but will be debilitating and ruin his last year.

So, realizing he’d “rather be a flash than a slowly cooling ember”, Ben decides to skip the treatment, and live his last year of high school the best way he can.  Knowing of his impending death, he tries things he wouldn’t have dared to do before,  trying to live a whole lifetime in one year.

Why do his parents let him do this?  They don’t know.  Ben doesn’t tell them; in fact, he doesn’t tell anyone.  Is that a good idea?  Read and find out.

Don’t worry, we haven’t spoiled the book for you.  Chris finds out about his disease in chapter one, but there are lots of surprises to come.  So DBRLTeen recommends Deadline, by Chris Crutcher, because we all need to think about what we’d change in our lives, if we knew we weren’t going to live forever.

This book is one of the 2009-2010 nominees for the Missouri Gateway Readers Award.

See author Chris Crutcher’s website here.

This year’s Teen Reading Challenge is Express Yourself. Teens who sign up for the reading challenge will get a journal to write or sketch in. Complete the challenge by reading for 20 hours and doing six activities such as writing a book review. Finishers will get, beginning July 6, a t-shirt to decorate or personalize and be entered in a drawing for other rewards.

Sign up starting Monday June 15 (but you can always start reading before then…)

And You Thought You Could Do Anything?

Not a new book (published in 1998), but this is a great mystery that shouldn’t be missed!  David, a high school senior and the narrator of this story, has been accused of murdering his girlfriend.  The jury found him not guilty, but did he do it?  Do his parents really believe he is innocent?  The reader can’t be sure, because David only slowly reveals the details of his past.  He moves to a new town to escape the community that still has suspicions about him, and moves in with his uncle to finish high school.  His aunt, however, is not happy that he is there, and neither is his eleven-year-old cousin Lily, who turns out to be much less innocent than she appears.  To make matters more complicated, Lily’s older sister (and David’s cousin) Kathy died tragically three years ago, and she seems to be haunting her old home.  Or is David just imagining things?  This book will keep you guessing right up to the surprising ending.  Which of the three cousins in the book is really the killer?

So DBRLTeen recommends The Killer’s Cousin, by Nancy Yerlin, because we all need to learn to live with our mistakes, no matter how big they are (and you’ll have to read the book to understand what that means ).

From Booklist Magazine Online, May 14 2009 -

Perhaps reflecting the unease in every society that something darker lurks beneath the veneer of civilization, a growing body of dystopian literature has recently dominated the YA science-fiction and fantasy genres. In the same spirit as Lois Lowry’s now-classic The Giver (1993), these books not only offer teens excellent escapist fare rife with survivalist adventure and grim imaginings of future worlds but also an opportunity to reflect on how the issues in their own lives and societies are mirrored in these worlds gone horribly wrong.

See the complete list of suggested titles by clicking here.

DBRLTeen has previously reviewed Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother – click here to read our review.

Eighth Grader Molly wants to play baseball (BASEball, not SOFTball) on her school’s team.   There is a girl’s softball team, but no girl’s baseball team.  There is a baseball team, but since there are only boys on it, it appears to be the boy’s baseball team.  DBRLTeen loves to read books about teens who do not let obstacles stand in their way!  Molly tries out for the “boy’s” team, and although some (not all) of the boys try to intimidate her, she persists in following her dream.  Fortunately she can (sometimes) pitch a very useful knuckleball…

So DBRLTeen recommends The Girl Who Threw Butterflies, by Mick Cochrane, because we all need to be reminded not to let others keep us from reaching our goals, AND make sure we’re not keeping others from their goals.

Stay tuned for details….

Come in and try DDR, Guitar Hero and the newest addition to our lineup…Rock Band! Don’t worry if you’ve never tried it; come learn with us. Ages 13-18.

So many authors are writing seriously good books for teens/young adults these days, and many of these books are great reading for both teens and adults!  High school student Marcelo has Asperger’s Syndrome.  People notice that he has trouble communicating the way others do, and also has intense interests and knowledge in some particular areas.  His father wants him to be “normal”, and is pressuring Marcelo to leave the private school where he’s happy, to attend a large public high school where he can learn to act like others do.

Marcelo is constantly confronted by those who think he lacks intelligence because of his condition and the way in which he speaks, who think he can’t learn, or can’t understand what’s going on.  Marcelo proves them wrong!  Marcelo has to confront his father in the process, but he stays true to himself and his ethics and grows in the process.

So DBRLTeen recommends Marcelo in the Real World, by Francisco X. Stork, because by seeing what is ugly inside of ourselves, we can learn, like Marcelo, to “forgive, love kindness, walk humbly.”

Read an interview with the author about this book here, and check out the author’s website.

25 books nominated, and 25 weeks before voting begins for this year’s Teens’ Top Ten!  Just read one a week so you can make an informed decision in October.  Or, well, maybe that’s too much to ask, but check the list anyway and see if any of these titles sound interesting.  Click here to see the complete list and a short description of each.

Teens’ Top Ten is a “teen choice” list, where teens nominate and choose their favorite books of the previous year! Nominators are members of teen book groups in fifteen school and public libraries around the country. Nominations are posted in April during National Library Week, and teens across the country vote on their favorite titles each year during Teen Read Week (Oct. 18-24). Readers aged twelve to eighteen can vote online that week.

San is a new eighth-grader at school, and not particularly happy to be there.  He has a somewhat cynical yet humorous way of looking at things, as we see on page 2:

So.  Eighth grade. Second semester. New state. Math was math – algebra, of course.  They always stick the Asian kid in the algebra class.  Science was science.  Fortunately I know how to roll a stupid little metal car down a ramp and use a stopwatch, so no problemo there.  In English, all I could figure out the first day was that the teacher was nuts – so again, same stuff, different time zone.  Gym, lunch – I honed my skills at standing and sitting in the corner.  I also continued my long-standing tradition of eating nothing but pasta and fruit in the cafeteria – I’d never been to a public school that knew how to cook actual meat.  Oh, I almost forgot home economics.  Brownies.  Made with applesauce.  No wonder America’s kids have lost their way.

Great writing, even though your English teacher may object to all the incomplete sentences!  But the author creates a really interesting character that you feel you know right away.  Unfortunately San falls victim to the greatest enemy 8th-grade boys face:  their inability to successfully relate to 8th-grade girls.  We all try to make ourselves look a little better than we are when we’re trying to impress someone, but San carries it to extremes, creating a whole new persona for himself as a Zen master to impress a girl.  Unfortunately San is NOT a zen master, so many hours in the library (Yea!) researching the subject is required.  (Please do not follow San’s example by lying to a librarian in order to use the library computers!)  Lots of library humour, school humour, and zen humour, too.

So DBRLTeen recommends Zen and the Art of Faking It, by Jordan Sonnenblick. You’ll learn a lot about zen.  More important, you’ll have a chance to think about the consequences of lying about yourself to impress others.

Visit the author’s website at http://www.jordansonnenblick.com/

Like the funny-looking woman below, who should not be wasting her time trying to sing. But sometimes those funny-looking people will surprise you…

Click this link to watch on youtube – Britain’s Got Talent 2009 Susan Boyle.