Category: booktalk

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I Am Someone Else

I Am Someone Else: Poems About Pretending
by Lee Bennett Hopkins (Editor) and Chris Hsu (Illustrator)

Booktalk: Kids can imagine pretending and dressing up in this poetry collection as fifteen poets write about who they might like to be, musing what life would be like as a wizard, a firefighter, a video-game inventor, and more.

Snippet:
Cool Creations
by Darren Sardelli

Wearing a hard hat,
boots on my feet,
I’ll smooth out each sidewalk,
pave every street!

Driving a dump truck,
bulldozer, too.
Laying down train tracks.
I’ll love what I’ll do.

A 2019 Cybils Poetry nominee

Copyright © 2019 Anastasia Suen All Rights Reserved.

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All of Me

All of Me
by Chris Baron (Author)

Booktalk: Ari has body-image issues. After a move across the country, his parents work selling and promoting his mother’s paintings and sculptures. Ari’s bohemian mother needs space to create, and his father is gone for long stretches of time on “sales” trips.

Meanwhile, Ari makes new friends: Pick, the gamer; the artsy Jorge, and the troubled Lisa. He is also relentlessly bullied because he’s overweight, but he can’t tell his parents–they’re simply not around enough to listen.

After an upsetting incident, Ari’s mom suggests he go on a diet, and she gives him a book to help. But the book–and the diet–can’t fix everything. As Ari faces the demise of his parents’ marriage, he also feels himself changing, both emotionally and physically.

Snippet:

When you are fat,
you get picked on.
It’s just how it is,
especially if you’re the new kid.
I don’t know what to say
most of the time.

I just want them to like me.
I want to fit in.

A 2019 Cybils Poetry nominee

Copyright © 2019 Anastasia Suen All Rights Reserved.