STEAM Rollers Book Club to Read Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures by Kate DiCamillo

STEAM Rollers Book Club is now virtual on FCPL's GoToWebinar platform!  STEAM Rollers is a book club for kids in grades 3 - 5 featuring STEAM crafts, activities, and discussion based around a selected book.

This month's featured title is Newberry Medal winner Flora and Ulysses: The Illuminated Adventures, by Kate DiCamillo, about a comic book-reading cynic named Flora Belle Buckman who rescues a squirrel, Ulysses, that possesses astonishing powers of strength and flight. 

Join us Tuesday, September 22, at 4:30 pm, for a discussion, craft, and to write about superheroes. 

Read the book and register online to reserve your activities supply bag before the live program on September 22nd. Supply bags can be picked up at your preferred Forsyth County branch.  You will receive an email asking you to register with the virtual platform and to let you know when your supply bag is ready for pickup.  You will then receive an email on the day of the program with a link to join in on the fun.

Holly Raus

Youth Specialist

Cumming Library

#WeKnowBooks

Kids' Book Spotlight - It's History! Chapter Books

"History tells us what people do; historical fiction helps us imagine how they felt."
                                                                                 ~ Guy Vanderhaeghe

Beginning Chapter Books (Grades 1-3)

A Dreidel in Time 
by Marcia Berneger

A brother and sister receive a strange Hanukkah gift and family heirloom--a magic dreidel that takes them back in time to learn about the true meaning of Hanukkah.

Anne Arrives
by Kallie George

The charming first book in a new early-reader series, starring the spirited and outspoken Anne Shirley as she first arrives at Green Gables. Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert need help on their farm, so they've adopted what they hope will be a sturdy, helpful boy. Instead, Matthew finds Anne awaiting him at the train station imaginative, brash, redheaded Anne-with-an-e. With her place at the Cuthberts at risk--particularly if nosy neighbor Mrs. Lynde has anything to say about it--Anne will have to learn patience, understanding and what it takes to make Green Gables her true home.

Narwhal on a Sunny Night
by Mary Pope Osborne

The magic tree house whisks Jack and Annie away to Greenland where they discover they've traveled back in time to meet Lief Erikson.

Chapter Books (Grades 3-5)

How I Became a Spy
by Deborah Hopkinson

Thirteen-year-olds Bertie Bradshaw of London and American Eleanor Shea team up to decipher a coded notebook and stop a double agent from revealing secrets about the upcoming D-Day invasion.

Stone River Crossing
by Tim Tingle

Martha Tom knows better than to cross the Bok Chitto River to pick blackberries. The Bok Chitto is the only border between her town in the Choctaw Nation and the slave-owning plantation in Mississippi territory. The slave owners could catch her, too. What was she thinking? But crossing the river brings a surprise friendship with Lil Mo, a boy who is enslaved on the other side. When Lil Mo discovers that his mother is about to be sold and the rest of his family left behind. But Martha Tom has the answer: cross the Bok Chitto and become free.

A Slip of a Girl
by Patricia Reilly Giff

Set during the Irish Land Wars (1879-1882) this novel in verse follows Anna Mallon through a series of tragedies as her mother dies, an older sibling immigrates to America, and she and her father and sister with special needs are about to be evicted from their farm.

The Good Thieves
by Katherine Rundell

In 1920s New York City, a young girl with a deformed foot recruits her new friends, a female pickpocket and two circus performers, to help recover an emerald from her grandfather's mansion in upstate New York after he loses his home to an unscrupulous tycoon.

Goodbye, Mr. Spalding
by Jennifer Robin Barr

In 1930s Philadelphia, twelve-year-old Jimmy Frank and his best friend Lola live across the street from Shibe Park, home of the Philadelphia Athletics baseball team. Their families and others on the street make extra money by selling tickets to bleachers on their flat rooftops, which have a perfect view of the field. However, falling ticket sales at the park prompt the manager and park owner to decide to build a wall that will block the view. Jimmy and Lola come up with a variety of ways to prevent the wall from being built, knowing that not only will they miss the view, but their families will be impacted from the loss of income. As Jimmy becomes more and more desperate to save their view, his dubious plans create a rift between him and Lola, and he must work to repair their friendship.

Stephani Lindsey
Youth Specialist
#WeKnowBooks

Kids' Book Spotlight - It's History! Teen Books

"After all, that's why we read historical fiction-to be transported to another time, and to be astonished at ancient people's lives and traditions, just as they would probably be astonished at ours."  ~Michelle Moran

Teen Middle (Grades 6-8)

Stolen Girl
by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch

When Nadia arrives in Canada in 1950 with Marusia, the woman she calls mother, she is glad to finally be out of the displaced persons camp where she has lived for five years, but is troubled by confused memories of World War II. She speaks Ukrainian, but she seems to remember living with a German Nazi family who called her by a different name, and as she tries to settle into the Canadian-Ukrainian community of Brantford she is haunted by one question: who is she, and where was she stolen from.

Red Menace
by Lois Ruby

During the summer of 1953, thirteen-year-old Marty's parents are suspected of communist sympathies, upending his life and causing him to question what it really means to be a patriotic American.

A Place to Belong
by Cynthia Kadohata

Twelve-year-old Hanako and her family, reeling from their confinement in an internment camp, renounce their American citizenship to move to Hiroshima, a city devastated by the atomic bomb dropped by Americans.

Bone Talk
by Candy Gourlay

More than a hundred years ago, a boy named Samkad thinks he knows everything about the world. He knows the mountains he lives in. He knows his people. He knows his blood enemy, the Mangili. And he wants to become a man, to be given his own shield, spear and axe to fight with. His best friend, Luki, wants all the same things - but she is a girl, and no girl has ever become a warrior. But everything changes when a new boy arrives in the village. He calls himself Samkad's brother, yet he knows nothing of the ways of the mountain. And he brings news of a people called 'Americans', who are bringing war and destruction right to his home...

Becoming Beatriz
by Tami Charles

1984, in the barrios of Newark. Beatriz Mendez is looking forward to dancing at her fifteenth birthday, because dancing is her true passion in life. When her brother Juni, leader of the Puerto Rican gang the Diablos, is killed by the rival Haitian Macoute gang she finds herself thrust into the role of gang leader and drug dealer. She meets Nassar, a dorky Haitian boy who shares and reignites her passion for dancing. Will Beatriz choose the life decided for her-- or the one she creates for herself? 

   Teen High (Grades 9-12)

  

   The Weight of Our Sky
   by Hanna Alkaf

Melati Ahmad believes that she harbors a djinn inside her, one who threatens her with horrific images of her mother's death unless she adheres to an elaborate ritual of counting and tapping to keep him satisfied. On the evening of May 13th, 1969, racial tensions in her home city of Kuala Lumpur boil over. The Chinese and Malays are at war, and Mel and her mother become separated. With the city in flames and a curfew in effect, it will take the help of a Chinese boy named Vincent and all of the courage and grit in Melati's arsenal to overcome the violence on the streets, her own prejudices, and her djinn's surging power, if she wants to make it back to the one person she can't risk losing.

   

   Let Me Hear a Rhyme
   by Tiffany D. Jackson

When a young black teen is murdered, his two best friends decide to keep his memory alive by promoting his music-rhymes that can turn any hangout into a party-with the help of his younger sister, Jasmine, who is out for justice. As the buzz builds, it forces Quadir, Jarrell, and Jasmine to each confront the death in their own ways.

They Went Left
by Monica Hesse

Zofia, a teenage Holocaust survivor, travels across post-war Europe as she searches for her younger brother and seeks to rebuild her shattered life.

Kent State
by Deborah Wiles

Told from different points of view-protesters, students, National Guardsmen, and "townies"-this book recounts the story of what happened at Kent State in May 1970, when four college students were killed by National Guardsmen, and a student protest was turned into a bloody battlefield.

Where the World Ends
by Geraldine McCaughrean

In the summer of 1727, Quill and his friends are put ashore on a remote sea stack to harvest birds for food, and only the end of the world can explain why no boat returns to collect them.






Stephani Lindsey
Youth Specialist
#WeKnowBooks