It's Monday! What are you reading?

 It's Monday! What are you Reading? is a meme hosted by Kathryn at Book Date. It's a great way to recap what you read and/or reviewed the previous week and to plan out your reading and reviews for the upcoming week. It's also a great chance to see what others are reading right now...you just might discover your next “must-read” book! 

Kellee Moye, of Unleashing Readers, and Jen Vincent, of Teach Mentor Texts decided to give It's Monday! What Are You Reading? a kidlit focus. If you read and review books in children's literature - picture books, chapter books, middle grade novels, young adult novels, anything in the world of kidlit - join us! We love this meme and think you will, too. We encourage everyone who participates to visit at least three of the other kidlit book bloggers that link up and leave comments for them.

If you want to see more of my reading, visit my StoryGraph account here. 

I haven't posted for #IMWAYR since November. I knew it had been a while, but didn't realize it was so many months ago. Eek. As noted above, I have moved from Goodreads to Storygraph, so if you're over there, you can find me at crystalreading. I have also moved from Twitter/X to Bluesky with the same handle I had before @librarygrl2. It's tedious to start over again, but I'm slowly finding people and reconnecting with some people that I had formerly interacted with many, many years ago on Twitter so that's nice.

Read recently:

Yesterday I reviewed We Miss You, George Floyd by Shannon Gibney with illustrations by Leeya Rose Jackson. It's an excellent picture book for sharing with young ones who are having a hard time processing his murder or any similar death. Gibney shares his life and death, but also shows how the community mourns and what people can do in the aftermath. 

I also reviewed Bingsu for Two at Rich in Color. It's a cute YA Rom-com and I had a fun time reading it. 

Recently I was reading a ton of picture books because I did mock award units at school. My four sixth grade classes read Sibert contenders, my four fifth grade classes read Coretta Scott King contenders, and my five fourth grade classes read Pura Belpré contenders. You can see our results at the Mock YMA page here. 

The biggest stand out of my recent picture book reading recently was Chooch Helped by Andrea L. Rogers illustrated by Rebecca Lee Kunz. It's simply gorgeous and totally deserving of the Caldecott Award, but the story is also beautiful and made my heart happy. 

Currently Reading: 

I'm reading a graphic novel called Fake Chinese Sounds, I'm listening to The Enigma Girls, I'm reading The Book of (More) Delights for a book club, and I'm also doing a slow read of Beloved with a group of people on Bluesky (hosted by @heymrsbond.com and @marcusluther.bluesky.social) which is kind of amazing. What are you reading? Have a great week.