New Teacher's Guides!

I'm delighted to reveal three new teacher's guides!

Click here for guide to The Small Adventure of Popeye and Elvis.

 

Click here for guide to The Fantastic Secret of Owen Jester.

 

Click here for guide to On the Road to Mr. Mineo's (coming in October).

Many thanks to Tracie Vaughn Zimmer and Macmillan Children's Publishing Group.

Teacher Guides

My friend and fellow author, Tracie Vaughn Zimmer, has a great new blog up featuring her amazing teacher guides.

Tracie has done guides for two of my books: Moonpie and Ivy and Greetings from Nowhere.

Writing Tip Tuesday

No, you're not going crazy. It is not Tuesday. But this got published today by mistake, so, oh well...heh!

The best writing tip in the world?

READ.

So....I offer this post as a testament to that.

I'm not a book reviewer and I don't play one on TV....so I wouldn't attempt to review this book.

But I AM gonna say how much I loved The Floating Circus by Tracie Vaughn Zimmer.

First of all - the subject is fascinating: historical fiction about a circus on a boat, based on a real boat, called Floating Palace. Who knew?

But it's the writing that grabbed me with this one.

I mean, how can you not love a book that starts out:

I shoulda listened to my brother. Right follows Zach like a shadow, but wrong wears me like a skin.

I definitely had to lock the highlighters away while reading this library book, because my fingers were just itching to mark all the lovely sentences and phrases. (I suffer from OHD: Obsessive Highlighting Disorder.)

• It smelled like dirty boys. And dirty boys are mean boys....
• My family was a pile of rags now - shredded and torn.
• Still, the corner felt safe and good, like vegetable soup on a rainy day.
• Anger and fear took turns with me all night, so sleep did not find me until the pale lavender light wedged its way through the open door.
• I couldn't picture myself in their top-buttoned world anymore. [I love that: top-buttoned world.]

Lovely writing.