Jody's LIS 721 Blogorama

Mystery and adventure go hand-in-hand. Many good adventure stories involve a mystery to be solved, and often a mystery involves characters going on an adventure. These books differ from realistic fiction and fantasy by bringing the focus toward solving a problem or escaping some event. The two books below have adventure and mystery elements, as well as horror elements.  Heidecker, Christian McCay. Scary Stories for Young Foxes . Henry Holt, 2019. 320 pages. Tr. $16.99, ISBN 978-1-250-18142-8 Seven fox children gather around an elder fox, in order to hear scary stories. Each story follows the experiences of two young foxes, Mia and Uly. Throughout the stories we see Mia and eventually Uly (a disabled fox) learn to survive in the world against the odds. Mia's story starts with an attack against Mia's family by an infection that spreads and causes any foxes caught to lose control of themselves and become violent. Uly's story starts with learning about his disability (a malform...

Science Fiction and Fantasy are often lumped together, as they have similar feelings to them. Both take aspects of reality and shape them into something extraordinary. Fantasy tends to focus more on magic, swords, and sorcery, while science fiction tends to focus more on futurism, science, and technology. Both have connections to fairy tales (and often are retellings and adaptations of stories told throughout countless generations) with a focus on inner strength, community, and sense of belonging. Higuera, Donna Barba.  The Last Cuentista .  Levine Querido. 336 pages. ISBN  978-1646140893 In The Last Cuentista , Higuera tells the story of twelve year old Petra, who is chosen to be part of a group who leaves a doomed Earth to colonize a new world. After being put in stasis for the trip, Petra awakes to find that the Collective, a group of people who were originally deemed the ones to monitor those in stasis, have commandeered the ship and attempt to erase the memories of t...

Contemporary realism is much like historical realism, only instead of taking place in a time period in the past, it takes place approximately when the book was first published. It is one of the more popular sections in my school library. A total of 21.09% of the fiction books in our library are classified as contemporary realistic fiction. Conversely, historical fiction accounts for 10.34%. (The second highest below contemporary realistic fiction is fantasy, with 15.51%.) While this is only one library, it shows the prominence of contemporary realistic fiction for the elementary school range. Contemporary realistic fiction allows for children to explore the world through characters like themselves, through times like they themselves are living in, focusing on realistic experiences that people their age face. As elementary school children are in the process of discovering themselves and their world, and developing their personalities, these stories give a window to a wider experience....