A nonfiction title!

Believe it or not, I really enjoy nonfiction, but it's a very hard sell to my students. I really enjoyed Jim Murphy's The Great Fire(1995) about the Chicago fire in 1871. I kept quoting odd bits of information to my family. This is an especially successful book because it combines facts about the fire with first person descriptions from several different people. The illustrations and photographs are well-placed, and the maps showing the spread of the fire are very helpful. I have several students in mind for this title-- there is a great interest in disasters, and when I tell them that 100,000 people were homeless, maybe they will be intrigued.

Mary Stolz' Coco Grimes will be read because it is short, but for a sports book has very few descriptions of baseball, which is what students seem to want. I did like the story of a boy interviewing a man who played on the Negro Leagues.

It's a Woman's World, a collection of poetry, was very interesting. Covered poems from many different places and times. It seemed sad to me, but I don't think it would seem so to students. Poetry is another hard sell, although when classes do units on it, my shelves get cleaned off.

Would like to say that I read The Carnivorous Carnival, but I only got about a chapter in!