Completely Full Bookshelf

So remember last week when I said I had a plan to read so many  books? Well, what happened was that I went out of town with 10 graphic novels in tow, and— I read all 10 graphic novels!!! It was wild! I don't think I've ever actually read all  the books I packed for a trip in my entire  life—this is genuinely bizarre. And I'm kind of beat—I might give my brain a rest and stream some TV for a few days instead! Because I read so voraciously, I'm actually going to split my reviews across two weeks! This week, I'm going to share the first five books I read—and I'm going to get right to it, except  that I wanted to rank my favorite books from my travels, so let's do that first! My favorites of the 10: Skim My Last Summer with Cass  (review coming next week!) Isla to Island Scout Is Not a Band Kid Freestyle  (review coming next week!) OK, now for the reviews! Middle Grade: Isla to Island Written and illustrated by Alexis Castellanos Graphic novel · 2022 Add it on...

I had a wonderful time this weekend participating in the 48 Hour #MGReadathon hosted by Karen Yingling at Ms. Yingling Reads !  I decided to cram in as many picture books as I could manage, and here are my final stats: Total time:  5 hours Total books: 29 picture books You can learn more about everything I read by visiting my main #MGReadathon post or viewing the graphic at the end of this post. Now I'd like to share a few of the books that stood out to me from my reading! I'm going to share 7 today and 7 next week, which means another 15 won't get reviewed, but many of them were wonderful too, it bears noting! Now let's look at some books: What book is it?   Our Little Kitchen  by Jillian Tamaki Who recommended it?   Cheriee Weichel at Library Matters , Linda Browne , and more! What does the publisher say?  " Tie on your apron! Roll up your sleeves! Pans are out, oven is hot, the kitchen’s all ready! Where do we start? In this lively, rousing pictur...

I now have one week of in-person college under my belt, and I'm feeling pretty good! Thankfully, almost everyone is masked (even over their nose—imagine that!), and I'm of course armed with a KN95 mask and Clorox wipes for the desks, so I haven't worried too much about COVID-19 exposure. And my classes seem like they will be a lot of work, but quite interesting too—if I can just find the balance between working enough to actually learn something but not working so much that I can't finish any of my assignments, it will be a good semester! Moving along, it's time for another round of Picture Book Pandemonium! I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that my underfunded public library just doesn't have the latest and greatest picture books on Libby, so I picked out a lot of books that I hadn't seen bloggers recommend just because Libby had them. And I couldn't help myself, so we have 5 picture books today instead of 4—let's get started! The Rab...

OK, before we get to today's review, I have to vent. Today, in our house, we kept hearing a smoke alarm chirping as if the battery was low. Normally, smoke alarms chirp every few seconds, but this one was really irregular. Sometimes it would chirp, and then it would go silent. So my family and I ran around the house, trying to find this alarm every time we heard it. But it was absolutely bizarre: every time we ran toward the sound, it sounded like it was coming from a different place. We went upstairs, but then it was downstairs. We went downstairs, and then it was on the other side of the house. We went to the other side of the house, and then it was upstairs again. We. Could. Not. Find. It. We spent hours  running around, pulling batteries out of five smoke alarms, putting them back in, testing them, wondering if our whole interconnected system was broken, Googling articles about how to find a chirping smoke alarm, and generally agonizing. And then—this is what really kills me—my...