Saint Francis Sings to Brother Sun

 Retold by: Karen Pandell

First line: Throughout his life, Saint Francis of Assisi boldly brought a sense of sacred joy into everyday life.

Why you should read this book: Weaving together autobiographical fables and Saint Francis’s own ecstatic spiritual writings, this volume for younger readers introduces the nature-centric religious life of this most beloved of historic religious figures. The stories illustrate his mystical connection with animals, while the passages from his “Canticle of Brother Sun” illustrate his intense adoration of and connection with the divine. Rich gold-tinted drawings suggest the medieval time period of his life.

Why you shouldn’t read this book: You demand empirical proof, or you hate animals.

The Green Child

Written by: Herbert Read

First line: The assassination of President Olivero, which took place in the autumn of 1861, was for the world at large one of those innumerable incidents of a violent nature which characterise the politics of the South American continent.

Why you should read this book: I thought it was going to be an anarchist fairy tale, but it's really more of a Marxist parable. Oliver, or Don Olivero, depending on which continent he's on, leaves home, magically becomes the leader of a worker's utopia for twenty-five years, then returns home to learn the fate of the green children, a pair of strange creatures who appeared around the time he embarked on his adventures. Then he helps the surviving thirty-year-old "child" return to her magical crystalline origins under the ground, where he finds true happiness in a strange austerity.

Why you shouldn't read this book: More political posturing than magic.

Show Way

 Written: Jacqueline Woodson

First line: When Soonie’s great-grandma was seven, she was sold from the Virginia land to a plantation in South Carolina without her ma or pa but with some muslin her ma had given her.

Why you should read this book: This reconstructed narrative takes the knowledge the author has of her own ancestral history and combines it with a poetic voice and a story about freedom, equality, risk, and quilt making. From the unnamed ancestor who learned how to sew “Show Way,” beautiful quilts that secretly hid in them maps that slaves could use to escape to the north and freedom, the story spills down through the ages, marking the birth of girl child after girl child, learning how to sew, dreaming of a better day. Eventually freedom comes, along with the knowledge of reading and writing, but, in the author’s family, the habit of sewing stars from fabric to create knowledge and history and meaning, is ingrained.

Why you shouldn’t read this book: You don’t have anything to pass on to your kids.

Coming on Home Soon

Written by: Jaqueline Woodson

First line: Mama’s hands are warm and soft.

Why you should read this book: To Ada Ruth’s mama, the hiring of colored women in Chicago, to clean trains, no less, is an amazing opportunity, not just to work with dignity while the men are away at war, but also to make some money she can send on home to her family; to Ada Ruth, it’s a reason for tears; her mother is leaving, and she doesn’t know when she’s coming back. Ada Ruth’s mother stays away a long time, without sending money or even a letter, but Ada Ruth hugs her grandma, keeps writing to her mama, and takes up with a scrofulous black and white kitten her grandmother says they can’t keep, even though they do. Finally, a letter arrives in Mama’s beautiful cursive, with money falling out of it and the sweetest thing of all—the knowledge that she’s coming home soon.

Why you shouldn’t read this book: You’re going away soon.

Songs Only You Know

Written by: Sean Madigan Hoen

First line: The aluminum bat leaned against the garage wall, next to a rake and a hoe and four bicycles with flat tired and rusty chains...

Why you should read this book: A brutal memoir of a family torn apart by alcohol, drugs, and mental illness, it's told through the eyes of a young man whose rage and suffering is so deep that not even screaming lyrics for a punk band can take the edge off his pain. Sean tears his way through road trips and relationships, throwing himself into anything he senses might smooth the path, believing that he can protect his family best by shielding them from his own truths. Through some trick of fate, he survived his attempts to obliterate reality and emerged to pen this eloquent novel, which oozes raw emotion and bleeds heartbreak, all the while propelling its author to the next promise, the next possibility, the next hope.

Why you shouldn't read this book: Substance abuse. Death. Morbidity on every page.

The Book of Dragons

Written by: E. Nesbit

First line: He happened to be building a palace when the news came, and he left all the bricks kicking about the floor for Nurse to clean up--but then the news was rather remarkable news.

Why you should read this book: Although its sensibilities are very firmly rooted in the time and place in which it was written (England, 1900), there is something timeless about this early collection of modern fairy tales, all of which feature, prominently, at least one and sometimes countless dragons, good, evil, and indifferent. Nesbit draws on her young readers' knowledge of myth and adventure to create new worlds, or to simply throw a dazzling veil over the world they already know. I've been reading these stories since I was a little girl, and they never fail to satisfy.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You don't like to see dragons slain, or even to read about threats to slay them.

Dork Diaries 3: Tales from a Not-So-Talented Pop Star

Written by: Rachel Renee Russell

First line: OMG! I think yesterday was probably the BEST day of my entire life :) !!

Why you should read this book: I'm not entirely certain why I read it, except that I spend a lot of time in an elementary school library. This third installment shows the self-deprecating Nikki excelling at yet another artistic pursuit while suffering a few rather outrageous barbs from the local mean girl. If you remember middle school, you remember her self-conscious confusion, her false starts, and her every shortcoming, real or imagined.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You, like my mother, are familiar with the true meaning of the word "dork" and therefore are appalled to hear it used in casual conversation.

Skylark

Written by: Patrician MacLachlan

First line: Papa married Sarah on a summer day.

Why you should read this book: Short and sweet like its predecessor, Sarah, Plain and Tall, this book picks up shortly after the first leaves off. Caleb and Anna adore their new mother, but still live in fear that one day she will abandon the grain-fields of their midwestern homestead and return to the blue-green waters of the Maine coast, from whence she came. When drought threatens their livelihood, they find themselves instead, shipped off to Maine with Sarah, but without their papa, who stays behind to salvage what's left of their farm.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You've ever been abandoned.

The Fault in Our Stars

Written by: John Green

First line: Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.

Why you should read this book: This provocative, heart-wrenching novel features a cast of teenagers afflicted in various ways by cancer, but it is most adamantly not a cancer book. From page one, the savvy reader recognizes that there will be death, but it's not a book about dying; rather it is a book about living, and the events that help us understand how precious and powerful and full of potential it is to be alive. Hazel has been compressed and confined by her disease, until she meets Augustus, who shows her how large and packed with possibility the world is, no matter how long you have in it.

Redwall

Written by: Brian Jacques

First line: It was the start of the Summer of the Late Rose.

Why you should read this book: This fast-paced hero's journey sees the clumsy little novice mouse, Matthias rise to the challenges as he transforms into the avatar of his hero, Martin the Warrior. The creatures of Mossflower Wood and Redwall Abbey live happy, natural lives until a band of cutthroat rats, led by the vicious, whip-tailed Cluny, set their sights on the mice's abundant stores and protective walls. The mice are set in their ways, but Matthias has a fast mind and a brave heart, and helps lead his people to victory by thinking and acting in innovative ways.

Why you shouldn't read this book: You don't like action, adventure, fighting, plotting, or talking animals.