New Books

WHAT’S NEW AT OUR LIBRARY (February 2009)!!!

We have been the fortunate recipient of hundreds of book donations. The largest number coming from Jill Smith Buck and Rabbi Sara Gilbert. We thank both of them as well as the numerous number of individual donors. In addition to donated books, there are several purchased books also available for check out. Some of these are Sidney Taylor Award books for youth from pre-school to high school which is given each year to noteworthy books by the Association of Jewish Libraries. Highlights are:
Young Adult Reading

	Brooklyn Bridge – by Karen Hess (Sydney Taylor Award) – Young Adult This well-told tale -- about a Jewish immigrant family in New York in the early 1900s -- is fascinating and full of suspense.”--The Washington Post "Alternating with this story line is a parallel narrative devoted to abandoned children who forge a life for themselves under the shelter of the Brooklyn Bridge. Readers will have a hard time putting down this compelling story.
	Freefall, by Anna Levine – (Young Adult) (Sydney Taylor Award) Aggie's eighteenth birthday is approaching, and as a teen in Israel, she must serve her time in the Israel Defense Force. Aggie doesn't want a boring job stuck in an office filing paperwork for two years. So she decides to try for a combat unit. FREEFALL is an engaging look at teens facing military service.. Aggie may be in Israel, but her story is one that can resonate with teens everywhere. She has difficulty with her family, she has doubts about her abilities, and she's unsure about the future. It's easy to feel as though you're there with Aggie as she's struggling with her decisions and you want her to make it. The touch of romance with Noah added sweetness to the story and made Aggie's tale seem even more real.
	A bottle in the Gaza Sea, by Valeri Zenatti (Young Adult) (Sydney Taylor Award) Bottle in the Gaza Sea should be THE novel for teens on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. When teen Tal Levine witnesses a bombing in Tel Aviv, she becomes despondent. Like so many people, she wants Israel and Palestine to live in peace. One day she puts her hopes into a letter, places the letter into a bottle, and gives it to her brother, asking him to toss it into the Gaza Sea. A young man in Gaza finds the bottle, and responds. He is critical, angry, annoyed at first, but eventually they both participate in a friendship that ultimately opens their eyes.

Children's Books
	Bed Time Sh’ma by Sarah Gershman (for youngest readers) (Sydney Taylor Award) The beautiful artwork and simple language of this unique book for very young Jewish children provides families with a satisfying bedtime ritual with which to end the day. Sarah Gershman has adapted the collection of psalms, poems and prayers to lovely and serene illustrations.
	Light, by Zalben - Grade 1–4—Zalben's tale was inspired by a 16th-century midrash (a legend based on biblical text). Beginning with "emptiness, like a blank canvas," the Creator made the world and then planned to paint everything with a special light so that it would shine with goodness.
	Mezuzah on the Door (Very Young Readers) Meltzer and Fried demonstrate the practice of dedicating a new Jewish home in this sweet and gentle story of a boy and his family leaving a city apartment for a house in the suburbs. Like most children in a move situation, Noah is anxious and worries about missing all the familiar sounds of his building but adjusts to his new home when they place Mezuzahs around the house
	Sarah Laughs by (Sydney Taylor Award) – (Ages 9 – 12) The beautiful and gentle Sarah married Abraham and joined him on his nomadic life where they led families through the desert, teaching a monotheistic faith in "a God who demanded kindness and good deeds."
	Naming Liberty, by Jane Yolen (ages 4 - 8) (Sydney Taylor Award) - In this wonderfully unique book, Jane Yolen and Jim Burke weave two stories at once, as readers see young Gitl in Russia leaving her home for faraway America, wondering what new name she will choose for herself when she arrives, and young artist Frederic Auguste Bartholdi dreaming of a monument he wants to build to honor freedom. It
	As good as Anybody: Martin Luther King and Abraham Joshua Heschel’s Amazing March Toward Freedom – by Richard Michelson (Sydney Taylor Award) (ages 4 – 8) – This is a good nonfiction picturebook for older children interested in the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s. It compares the lives of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, a Polish Jew who fled the Holocaust as a young man and came to the United States, where he was drawn into the civil rights movement, and became one of MLK's allies in the Jewish community.