MMGM- Better Than Revenge and some nonfiction

It's

Marvelous Middle Grade Monday
 at 

Always in the Middle 

and #IMWAYR day 

at

Unleashing Readers

West, Kasie. Better Than Revenge
December 31, 2024 by Delacorte Romance
E ARC provided by publisher through Netgalley

Finley is a junior in high school, and hoping to get onto the school podcast team so that she can hopefully get an internship which will lead to college scholarships. She's even given up playing soccer with best friend Deja so that she can focus her efforts on this. Her boyfriend, Jensen, is a football player, and helps her prep for the audition... but ends up stealing her ideas and beating her out for the place! She's devastated, and feels like he has ruined her podcasting dreams. She and her friends plot ways to get back at him, including phoning his boss at work and complaining about him, but she decides the best course of action is to date his nemesis on the football team, Theo, and try out for the team as a placekicker. After finding Theo to be nicer than she imagined, she gets him to coach her, which makes the process fairly easy. Her grandmother is slowly being enveloped by Alzheimers, so Finley has a podcast where she interviews her grandmother about her memories of growing up in their beach community in the 1960s. She finds out that her grandmother surfed, and not only knew a local artist, but dated him. Finley tries to hunt down her grandmother's surfboard, that was painted by the artist, while she practices place kicking and falls for Theo. Will her plan to ruin Jensen's life work out, and will the revenge be as sweet as she imagines? 
Strengths: West does a fantastic job of writing romances with high school characters that also appeal to middle school students. This was a good sneak peek at some of the activities and drama that exists in high school, and Finley has a strong family life, plenty of interests, and career aspirations. While we don't really find out Jensen's motivation for grabbing the podcasting position out from under her, it sets up a good rivalry. Theo is sweet, and sees Finley as an equal; even the football coach doesn't flinch at the idea of Finley being the kicker. West has a good message (that she mentions in the afterword) that karma > revenge, and there's a nice conclusion. My favorite part was hearing about the grandmother's life, and Finley realizing that her grandmother was once her age. 
Weaknesses: Finley and her friends have some fairly mean spirited ideas to get back at Jensen, but I would have liked to know more about his motivations. If he was as equally mean spirited, I wouldn't have blamed Finley for carrying through with some of these, and she does end up backing off. I found it hard to believe that podcasting is a viable career option and that college programs are available, even though a brief internet search shows that this might be true. 
What I really think: This is a good choice for readers who like some drama with their romance and enjoyed Florence's Sweet and Sour or Hubbard's Fool Me Twice... how is that over ten years old already?

Piro Radka. Say What?: How We Communicate
May 28, 2024 by Albatros Media
Copy provided by Young Adult Books Central

Broken down into in different types of in person communication and also long distance communication, this book explore different facets of how, why, and in what manner humans communicate. There are lots of good details about a variety of topics; how humans learn to speak, how speech actually works, how new words appear, and even some information about famous speech makers. There's even several pages on how we communicate through silence, and good examples of how one can tell a story just from a picture, even without words. The pages of what posture communicates should be required reading for middle school students, who don't always understand body language; the "Zone of Personal Space" diagram is one I might need to copy and post at my desk. Gives a whole new understanding to my concept of "personal bubble"! Also to be considered are gestures, facial expressions, and touch.

For sending messages to people who aren't near us, it's important to understand how symbols are used, and there's even a chart of Morse Code. There's a nice spread about the evolution of writing, as well as the history of written messages. Yes, both the newspaper AND the fax machine are there, right next to pigeon post! The two pages on mass communication are very interesting, and start with the first radio broadcast in history in 1906. My grandmother would have been 13! I'm a little alarmed that over half of the innovations occurred during my life time, although I am at least younger than television AND color television! The history of the telephone and the internet is both something that I wish young readers had well fixed in their memories, so the graphics for those are crucial.

There's so much good information here, and it's in a very readable format that would be suitable for both elementary and middle school students. The graphics seemed a little goofy to me, but perhaps their bright, cartoon style will appeal more to young readers.

While I've seen several books on the history of television, the internet and telephones, and even Osborne's Who's Got Mail?: The Story of the U.S. Postal Service, I can't think of any book that lays all varieties of communication out so clearly. This would be great to use with students who struggle with various aspects of communication, but is also just a fun source of facts for general use.

Beever, Alexandra and Linero, Sol (illustrator) How to Be a Detective and Other Crime-Fighting Jobs
October 1, 2024 by Nosy Crow
Copy provided by Young Adult Books Central

This How To Be series from Nosy Crow (which also includes How to Be a Vet and Other Animal Jobs, as well as the upcoming How to Be a Doctor and Other Life-Saving Jobs) has a lot of great information for elementary and middle grade students who want to start investigating career options. Starting with what a detective does, and the equipment that they might use, the book continues to give more necessary details about why this is an important job, how to become a detective, and descriptions of skills that are useful to the job. There's information about how crimes are reported, investigated, and processed, as well as a section on what happens when a person goes to court. There are lots of other related jobs listed, such as SWAT team members, private investigators, Secret Service agents, and more specialized jobs such as those related to vehicles, research, and even animals. For a short time, my daughter thought about being a forensic accountant, so I actually did know about that career path!

All of the information is well illustrated by Linero's bright, infographic style drawings, and the text is well arranged on the pages. There is a lot of information, but it's broken up into shorter segments that older elementary school students won't find too challenging.

I love that there are some tips for young readers who are interested in detective work, and suggestions that they start paying closer attention to things that happen around them. There is also a list of organizations to explore.

I particularly enjoyed the history timeline, which included Kate Warne of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, who became the world's first woman detective in 1856. That, combined with the fact that the first detective novel was by the US author Edgar Allen Poe, really made me wonder why the British have so many more detective shows and books than the US does. The author, Detective Beever, is a police detective in the UK.

This is a bit more advanced than Hische's Who Will U Be, but more focused on a single type of career than MacIsaac and Nelson's See It, Dream It, Do It. So many of my students want to be video game designers or social media influencers that I would love to see a new series like the 1950s Carla Greene Children's Press "I Want to Be a..." books, but with jobs like coders, engineers, and, well, still teachers!

Calling it early on 2024 reading. Don't think I'll get to too much in the next two days!