If you’re not a subscriber of Just One More Book! podcast, you’re missing a WONDERFUL treat!

Andrea Ross and Mark Blevis, the AWESOME hosts of Just One More Book!, visit a coffee shop in their neighborhood three times a week to promote literacy and celebrate great children’s books! While at the coffee shop they podcast 5 to 30 minutes about all the books they’ve read and enjoyed with their children.

We want to ‘THANK’ Andrea and Mark for including our Hotline Voices review of Little Lion Goes to School written by Kellie Magnus and illustrated by Michael Robinson in their EXCELLENT podcast review of Bird, written by Zetta Elliot, illustrated by Shadra Strickland last Friday, November 21, 2008.

Their discussion about Bird’s gift for drawing which helps him deal with some very difficult emotions surrounding the deaths of his grandfather and drug-addicted brother is a powerful one and expresses what our book club thought about this book as well. So visit Just One More Book right now to hear the podcast: Everybody Got Their Somethin’: Bird




Bird
Written by Zetta Elliot
Illustrated by Shadra Strickland
Lee & Low Books, October 2008
$19.95 US; ISBN: 160060241X

Reading Levels: Ages 9-12

About the Book

Young Mekhai, better known as Bird, loves to draw. With drawings, he can erase the things that don’t turn out right. In real life, problems aren’t so easily fixed.

As Bird struggles to understand the death of his beloved grandfather and his older brother’s drug addiction, he escapes into his art. Drawing is an outlet for Bird’s emotions and imagination, and provides a path to making sense of his world. In time, with the help of his grandfather’s friend, Bird finds his own special somethin’ and wings to fly.

Told with spare grace, Bird is a touching look at a young boy coping with real-life troubles. Readers will be heartened by Bird’s quiet resilience, and moved by the healing power of putting pencil to paper.

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