March Book Madness 2024: Week 2

Announcer: We are ready for Week 2 of March Book Madness 2024. You were introduced to our Mystery and Realistic Fiction genres last week, but now it’s time to move in a different direction. Rachel and Darius will be presenting their selections for Historical Fiction and Biography/Memoir. Rachel is up first with Historical Fiction. Rachel, can you introduce yourself, tell us some about your genre, and give the readers some information about your classic pick?

Rachel: Hi. Yes, I’m Rachel, the Circulation Manager of the Logos, and I’m excited to help introduce this next genre. Historical Fiction is a genre that I read a lot, and simply put, it is a fictional story based during a specific time period or event that took place in the past.  While reading, you must be careful not to mix fact with fiction, though.

Without further ado, my classic pick is Meet Felicity by Valerie Tripp. It is the first book in the American Girl series based in Colonial Williamsburg and is set around the time of the Revolutionary War. Felicity is nine years old. In this book, she falls in love with a beautiful horse named Penny and seeks to save her from her cruel owner. The series continues with five more books, and you will see Felicity learn to manage some difficult choices as she grows up.  This is a series that I owned growing up, and I even had the doll to go along with it. Felicity having a similar hair color to mine has always been something I’ve loved about her.

Announcer: American Girls are a true classic in my eyes. I love that we have so many of the originals in our collection. What is your contemporary pick?

Rachel: My contemporary pick is a book that I often recommend, and it is The War that Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley. Ada, a young girl with a twisted foot, lives in London during World War II. Her mother has often verbally abused her and doesn’t see her worth. When the opportunity arises for the children to be taken to safety in the countryside, Ada’s mother only wants to send her younger brother, Jamie, because she doesn’t think anyone would want to take her with her disability. Ada sneaks away with Jamie, and they end up being placed with a woman named Susan Smith. The story that follows is one that you don’t want to miss.

Announcer: I like that both selections are based around different wars. Which of the two do you think will advance?

Rachel: This is a tough one for me because I love them both. However, I think Meet Felicity being part of a series will help it to advance.

Announcer: Thank you, Rachel. We’ll move now to Darius with the Biography/Memoir genre. Darius, why don’t you introduce yourself and tell us some about your genre, as well as your classic pick?

Darius: I’m Darius, the Evening Circulation Supervisor here at the Union University Library. I’m excited to have the chance to comment on my third March Book Madness! The genre I get to introduce to you today is Biography/Memoir: simply put, these are stories from a person’s life. A biography (or self-written autobiography) aims to tell the story of a person’s life, while memoirs are specific memories from maybe only a portion of a person’s life. Biographies and memoirs are similar enough that we’ve combined them into one category for our purposes.

The classic pick for this category is Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the Little House series. This book is a bit of an outlier in the author’s work, since it’s not about herself, but instead the boy who would become her husband: Almanzo Wilder. I remember my dad reading this one out loud to me when I was probably about the same age as the main character!

Announcer: Sounds like a great pick. What is your contemporary selection? Could you tell us about it and your predicted winner?

Darius: The Biography/Memoir contemporary pick is What to do about Alice? by Barbara Kerley and Ed Fotheringham. This book is a Sibert Honor Book and tells the exciting story of Theodore Roosevelt’s daughter, Alice. We featured it in a What to Read Wednesday last year!

Even though it’s a great one, I think Farmer Boy is more likely to advance into the Elite Eight this year. I think there are probably many readers who, like me, grew up with Laura Ingalls Wilder’s work.

Announcer: We’ll see if either of these predictions hold true when our voting begins in March. Tune in next week for Round 3!

Baking and Books

The holidays are one of my favorite times to bake. My family (Amber) has a tradition of baking new recipes each Christmas along with our tried-and-true family favorites. We gain inspiration from social media, The Great British Bake Off, and family cookbooks. Some of the recipes are flops but more often than not they taste great even if they don’t look great. So, in true librarian fashion, I want to share this tradition with you, but with a book twist. I am pairing a recipe with a book. Let us know how your baking goes!

First off, I’m starting with something fairly easy: Everything on a Waffle by Polly Horvath. This book follows Primrose in the months following her parents’ disappearance at sea. Each chapter ends with a simple recipe, including one for waffles. In honor of fall, here is a recipe for Pumpkin waffles.

We can now travel to England with Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.If you have been to England, you know they eat several foods that are very different than a typical American cuisine. With the popularity of Harry Potter, there are many recipes out there for foods and drinks specific to the series. I want to continue with the breakfast theme and a full English breakfast would include eggs, sausage (black pudding or blood sausage), tomatoes, mushrooms, buttered toast, beans (Heinz variety), and bacon.

Staying in England, we can visit The Secret Garden where Mary and Dickson use an outdoor “oven” to roast potatoes. Roasted potatoes are a great option that offer lots of variety for flavors. You can try Southern Living’s crispy potatoes recipe or simply preheat your oven to 400° F, spray a baking sheet or cover with parchment paper, dice your potatoes (1 inch cubes), coat in a light layer of olive oil and add seasonings to your preference (salt, garlic, pepper, turmeric, chili powder, etc.). Bake until the potatoes are tender. You can change the seasoning and add cheese if you desire.

We can’t forget another iconic British character, Winnie the Pooh. This cute yellow bear loves honey. We can’t make honey ourselves, but we can make hot honey. Remember, natural honey has a different taste depending on the types of flowers the bees were pollinating. So, you may just want to try different honeys in honor of Winnie-the-Pooh.

As we journey back to the United States, I want to share a tradition my family has at Christmas time of making tamales. We first made tamales when my sister was reading the American Girl series about Josefina. Several years later, we moved to San Antonio and discovered tamales are a traditional holiday meal, so we now make them every year. My family tends to buy premade masa, but you can make it from scratch too. We cook the meat and roll the tamales ourselves. We also like to serve ours topped with chili and cheese; other people put queso or salsa on top. Making tamales can be a bit time-consuming and you need to start soaking the corn husks 24 hours before you roll them, so the husk is soft.

To finish our baking and books, we will end with a blueberry crisp inspired by Charlie and the Chocolate Factory because who could forget the scene when Violet turns into a giant blueberry? I prefer crisp to pie, but pies would pay homage just as well to this hilarious food and candy-filled novel.

Genre Starter List: Children’s Books

My love of books started at a young age. Both of my parents are readers, and I was fortunate to have teachers that also loved to read to us. Reading a variety of genres can help to strengthen your knowledge and broaden your worldview.

As we begin to introduce you to some of the genres we have in the Logos, where else would we start but with children’s literature? While you may think that you’re “too old” for these books, I feel as if children’s literature is something that library patrons of all ages can read, learn from, and enjoy.  Our children’s collection is housed in the Family Room, and the room is divided into three sections: easy, non-fiction, and fiction. Please know that this blog is merely scratching the surface of what we have available.

The easy section is filled with picture books that help to form the foundation of lifelong learning. Some will teach simple lessons like ABCs or counting like in Miss Bindergarten Gets Ready for Kindergarten or in Feast for 10. There will be times when they are helping you cope and understand emotions like grief in The Rough Patch, or they may be introducing you to people you’ve never heard of before like the musician Juan Garcia Esquivel in Esquivel! Space-Age Sound Artist. Occasionally, there are wordless picture books like Journey where the illustrations and your imagination are what leads the way. If you’re looking for specific authors, we have several books by Eric Carle, Mo Willems, and Dr. Seuss to name a few.

Non-fiction will cover a variety of subjects. You may want to start learning a new language, and the First Spanish Picture Dictionary is a great place to start. Math and science may be harder concepts for you to grasp, and books like Science Lab in a Supermarket and Fractions, Decimals, and Percents will help you look for those teachable moments in everyday life. If you’re an animal lover, you should look at Even an Octopus Needs a Home or The Eagles Are Back. History is another popular topic, and you may want to learn more about what happened at The Alamo by reading Inside the Alamo or hear from some of the survivors aboard the ship Titanic in  Titanic: Voices from the Disaster.

Fiction is the last section to discuss, and I have a feeling this is the area that you will know the most about already. You will see several popular series in this room including Chris Colfer’s Land of Stories, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Series, and Valerie Tripp’s American Girl Series about Felicity, Josefina, and Molly. You will also be introduced to characters like Rose in Rain Reign who has high functioning autism, or to Knox in New From Here who deals with racism as he had to move from Hong Kong to California, or you may even be transported back in time to the Revolutionary War with Isabel in Ashes as she seeks her freedom.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this glimpse into children’s literature. What will you choose to read today? 

Rachel Bloomingburg’s reviews reflect her personal opinions and not necessarily those of the library or university.