We give out a LOT of bookmarks here at Brazos, and we are always looking for new ideas for their design. This spring we’re asking kids to lend their artistic expertise to our annual Bookmark Contest! Download the official entry form here and return it to the store by Wednesday, April 29, 2020. We’ll announce the winners at our Summer Reading Kick Off Party!
Triskaidekaphobia! Fear of the number 13th. As in Friday the 13th! What better day to recommend some mildly scary reads for your middle grade readers (which we define as ages 8 or 9 through 12, or for everyone, to be honest!)?
So scroll through and find something fun. And for those Middle Grade readers who crave the creepy, stay tuned for our Creepy Reads display this October, filled with our Children's Specialist, Laura G's favorite thrilling and chilling reads!
We're so excited to invite you to our Fall Kids programs! Printed postcards with our events listing are in store for you to pick up as well. Check the events below to see what's coming up and make sure to stop by!
Zahia Rahmani's "Muslim: A Novel" is at its core a warning of the danger and violence of distilling human life down to a single identity label: religion, gender, or nationality. It also warns against the violence of erasing any part of one's life that encompasses those identities and cultures: the colonized who are forced to stop speaking their language, or oppressed groups who are forced to assimilate into the dominant culture while their own cultural practices are demonized and marginalized. This is the tension of the novel, pulling between multivalent life and erasure.
Talking crows. Troublesome earth spirits. The worlds Max Porter weaves in his fiction are fantastical ones, where myth bleeds constantly into reality. Yet the concerns of his prose--even as he reinvents the concept with his poetic and formal experimentation--are always completely human. Dead parents. Missing children. The need for an explanation. The need to place blame. With Lanny (out 5/14 from Graywolf Press), these concerns come to a head when an odd child meets an implacable and timeless force.
I have been a huge fan of Rosanne Parry’s work since her first middle-grade novel, HEART OF A SHEPHERD, arrived back in 2009, when she and I were both debut children’s authors and occasionally appearing together at book events. Rosanne’s books are frequently set in her home state of Oregon and are heart-warming, lovely, and honest. Rosanne beautifully evokes both character journeys and the landscape in which they take place. They’re perfect middle grade novels! A WOLF CALLED WANDER is just out and it’s based on the real story of the journey of wolf named OR7.
We’re big fans of Emily Duncan’s debut YA Slavic folklore-inspired fantasy, WICKED SAINTS here. Laura G has a blurb for it featured in the current kids’ issue of INDIE NEXT. And I found it such a fun page-turner that I begged Emily’s publicists for an interview and was delighted when they said yes! WICKED SAINTS is the story of warring kingdoms, blood magic, unlikely heroes, and a girl who hears the voices of any number of gods, all of whom provide her with guidance and magic. And oh yes, a healthy dose of forbidden love, because really what is a YA fantasy novel without a bit of that?