LARS'S LIBRARY: THREE RECOMMENDATIONS

For fifth graders and up:

Belle Prater's Boy by Ruth White

Belle Prater is the aunt of the narrator, a pretty sixth-grader named Gypsy Arbutus Leemaster. Belle's son Woodrow is her seemingly ungainly and cross-eyed cousin.

Apparently abandoned by his mother, who has mysteriously disappeared from "way far in the head of a long, isolated holler," Woodrow comes to live with the cousins' grandparents, residents of the tony part of Coal Station, Virginia. They live right next to Gypsy and her mother and step-father.

Woodrow is a surprising and endearing character, one of the best I've come across in children's books. And Gypsy has her own unexpected aspects as well. I really liked it that although we learn what happened to her father (needed a hankie there), other mysteries are left unresolved.

I'm a sucker for the novel's time frame, the late 1950s. The references to politics and culture, and in particular, the music--mostly old country songs like "On the Wings of a Dove," but also Dinah Shore singing "See the U.S.A. in a Chevrolet"--really resonated with me. Not only for old guys, though--a friend just read this with a seventh grader who loved it.

Those allusions to a time gone by are just bonuses to a rich tale full of magic and emotion, a tale where the poetry of Rumi is as important an underpinning as the lyrics to a Ferlin Husky song.

For fourth graders and up:

The Kane Chronicles, Book One: The Red Pyramid
by Rick Riordan

OK, I'm hooked on the whole Riordan phenomenon. Bought this one the week it came out and ripped through it. If Riordan can keep it going, this series will be even better than the Percy Jackson books. Let me back that up.

As with the PJ books, first person narrator, but there are two of them, switching every two chapters. One is a girl. Sadie and Carter Kane are siblings who squabble but are fiercely protective of each other, despite being raised separately. I enjoyed the slightly nerdier-than-PJ cast of Carter, and Sadie is wickedly irreverent.

The kids are African-Americans. Carter's dark skin gets him identified that way. Representatives of officialdom, like airport police, see the light-skinned Sadie as white, unrelated to her brother, and less likely to cause trouble. That infuriates Sadie, and is likely to intrigue readers. Certainly a change of pace from Harry Potter and Greg Heffley (and for that matter, Percy Jackson).

The Red Pyramid made Egyptian mythology and history fun. A bonus for me, because the Greek legends and myths found in the PJ series are more familiar (and already fun). After reading Pyramid, you'll want to investigate further. I went back to the wonderful Graphic Universe comic book, Isis and Osiris: To the Ends of the Earth to get into source material, and for sure I'll be looking for other non-social-studies-textbook books.

The three kingdoms of Egypt are never going to be a dry research subject again. And I'll never see Mickey Mouse in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" section of Fantasia in the same way I used to.

For first graders and up:

Stinky by Eleanor Davis

All of the Toon Books, high quality children's comics, are first rate. But Stinky, the story of of a smelly monster who eats pickled onions for breakfast has been extensively field-tested by me. I haven't worked with a kid yet who didn't enjoy reading it. And there have been quite a few.

Stinky lives in a muddy swamp and stays far away from the kids in town who don't like swamps and like to take baths.

Then a kid named Nick fearlessly enters the swamp, builds a tree house, and adopts Stinky's pet toad, Wartbelly. If that weren't enough, he renames it Daisy. You can see why Stinky might be upset.