The early life story of author and illustrator Cece Bell unfolds across the pages of El Deafo in comic book style panels. We first meet Cece as an energetic preschooler who loves to wear her poka-dotted bathing suit everywhere. Then we watch her get sick and lose her hearing as speech bubbles fade to blank.

Outside their classroom, seventh and eighth graders at Rutland Town School are bounce passing and showing off their basketball moves, including the move their latest read was named for – the crossover. When we asked them how they liked the book, they raved about the book. They’re not alone. The Crossover is flying off library shelves like a half-court sinker. It’s a novel-in-verse about identical twins – Josh and Jordan – who are basketball stars at their middle school. Their dad is a former

For this month's Dorothy's List , seventh graders at Green Mountain Union in Chester have been reading the novel Unfriended by New York author Rachel Vail.

In 1944, a disastrous explosion rocked a Naval base in California called Port Chicago. The racially segregated Navy base had dangerous and unfair working conditions for African American sailors there. After the explosion, a large group of sailors refused to return to work loading ammunition under the same dangerous conditions. They were tried for mutiny. Those men were called the Port Chicago 50.

The fifth and sixth graders file down the stairs and into the school library, like they've done hundreds of times before. They're the big kids at Beeman Elementary , and library time isn't just about read-alouds and checking out books anymore. Librarian Nancy Custer Carroll has a lesson for them on characters in Laura Marx Fitzgerald 's book Under the Egg . Theo is the girl at the center of the story. Her grandfather has died, and now it’s up to her to feed the chickens, tend the garden, make

The students at St. Etheldreda's School for Young Ladies are there to learn to behave as proper maidens should. The girls' lives are mundane under the care of their miserly headmistress. But despite their dreary situation at school, there is one fate that all the girls agree would be far worse. And that is being sent home. So when their headmistress and her brother drop dead at Sunday dinner, the young ladies decide to bury the bodies in the back garden and keep the murders a secret. Thus is

Sharon Colvin, Vermont's new Youth Services Consultant for the Vermont Department of Libraries, recently had the honor of announcing the winner of the 2014-2015 Dorothy Canfield Fisher Children's Book Award to a room full of Vermont teachers and librarians. However, many of them had already heard the award is going to Chris Grabenstein, author of Escape form Mr. Lemoncello's Library. It's hard to keep a secret from a good librarian.

Prisoner 88 is among a handful of historical fiction titles nominated for this year's Dorothy Canfield Fisher Book Award. It's the story of 10-year-old Jake Oliver Evans who, in 1885, is sentenced to five years in the Idaho Territorial Penitentiary for fatally shooting a man who threatened his father.

For New Hampshire sixth grader Ruby Pepperdine, the "center of everything" is up on the rooftop of Pepperdine Motors, stargazing with her grandmother, Gigi. In Vermont author Linda Urban's book The Center of Everything , after Gigi dies, Ruby has one big regret. She didn't listen to the last thing her grandmother tried to tell her.

P.S. Be Eleven takes place in a very different time and place from modern-day Moretown, Vermont. The book's three sisters live in Brooklyn, New York in the late-1960s with their Pa and grandmother, who they call Big Ma. But, their mother lives in Oakland, California where she's involved with the radical civil rights group the Black Panthers.