Professional Reading

In this clear and accessible guide, Booth offers practical, hands-on advice for connecting with teenagers through readers’ advisory. A brief history of teen reading and a chapter exploring the positive connection between pleasure reading and lifelong literacy offer a valuable defense of literature and library services tailored specifically for young adults. The author goes on to provide strategies for conducting readers’ advisory, including ways to approach teen patrons, key questions and tactics for the RA interview, advice for helping students with homework needs, and tips for working with parents seeking books for their children. The final two chapters, which provide suggestions for creating YA resource lists for staff and for conducting indirect outreach to teens through displays and book lists, are particularly useful. Appendixes include lists of popular YA authors, “sure-bet” books for teens, and teen-selected book awards. Aimed primarily at public-library generalists with little experience working with young adults, this book could also serve as a useful refresher for school or YA librarians looking to keep their readers’ advisory skills up-to-date.–Meredith Robbins, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis High School, New York City

Crew’s guide to print and online sources documents women’s roles in wars over the centuries and throughout the world, divided by time periods. Each annotated entry includes full bibliographic information. Further chapters list primary sources and articles from online databases that are available in many school districts. Appendixes include “Classroom Activities, Lesson Plans, and Book Talks” and “Building a Core Collection.” Information can be accessed through author, title, subject, geographical, and grade-level indexes. This is a great addition for libraries looking for a way to move Women’s Studies beyond the month of March.–Lori E. Donovan, Thomas Dale High School, Chester, VA

Stellar advice on running book clubs is presented in a friendly format. The authors use the expertise and contacts they gained as they toured with their first book, The Book Club Cookbook (Tarcher, 2004), to provide tips on everything from setting up clubs to themed menus for meetings. The first section covers types of clubs, recruitment, organization, location, and duration. Peppered with savvy snippets of advice, it provides background for anyone wishing to get a club off the ground or to polish an existing one. In the second part, comprising the bulk of the text, the authors describe the top 50 recommended books arranged by grade level. Entries include biographical information for each author, themed activities to complement the readings, as well as related recipes that can be prepared by young members with adult supervision. Lists of questions that have generated the best discussions for each book are particularly helpful. While this book would be helpful to anyone who runs extracurricular book clubs for children and young adults, it is not geared to classroom teachers who use student-led clubs as part of their academic curriculum.–Nicki Clausen-Grace, Carillon Elementary School, Oviedo, FL

This work is an update of Schall’s Teen Genre Connections (Libraries Unlimited, 2005) and includes books published from 2001 to 2006. A new section in each chapter, “Read Aloud/Reader Response,” suggests passages for discussion, dramatic readings, or performing. Each title is covered in two pages and also includes bibliographic information, suggested grade level, themes or topics, a summary, a sample booktalk, learning opportunities, and related works. This is a useful guide to presenting books to teens, but the author does warn that ideally one should read a book before booktalking it.–Corinda J. Humphrey, Los Angeles Public Library

In an effort to “provide children with a bridge from Mother Goose rhymes of preschool to the classic poems they will likely encounter in high school, college and beyond,” Vardell has created a comprehensive survey of 62 contemporary children’s poets. Each of the one- to three-page entries begins with a brief biography and includes Web sites, bibliographies, suggestions for use and reading of specific poems, plus connections to other children’s literature. The author suggests, for example, connecting Alice Schertle’s How Now, Brown Cow? (Harcourt, 1994) with Doreen Cronin’s Click, Clack, Moo (S & S, 2000) and provides ideas for student discussion and writing. The valuable appendixes include promotion activities, a calendar of poets’ birthdays, awards the different writers have won, and a bibliography of poems about libraries and reading. This book will be welcomed by all adults interested in connecting children with poetry.–Lee Bock, Glenbrook Elementary School, Pulaski, WI

The author astutely observes that contemporary American libraries–including young adult librarians–often provide services without considering that what they offer might have an intrinsic female bias. Teen males, he posits, need something different in the way of collections, programs, and interactions with the institution. Welch offers lots of brief lists of guy-friendly magazines, programs, fantasy novels, comics, and the like, and ends the book with an appendix that has an extended list of good titles to have on hand. The book has several weaknesses that prevent it from being the essential guide that it promises to be–and that Welch successfully convinces readers that we need. Most of his analysis seems to be pinned to his own experiences, with little reference made to other practitioners’ observations. His references to specifics seem to have occurred in public libraries in one geographic area (Northeast Ohio), and no references are made to such trenchant issues as the diverse needs of guys who are people of color, immigrants, gay, or living in such specific places as inner cities or rural areas or states with no extensive school-library presence. Also, asides seem to assume that the readership is new to the field and happens to be working in situations that don’t support teen services much at all. All in all, though, The Guy-Friendly YA Library serves well to get the discussion started about how teen boys can be better served by libraries.–Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA