BIG DIGS: AMAZING UNDERGROUND CONSTRUCTIONS — Review

Thought for the Day:

“Caminante, no hay camino, se hace camino al andar.”
[“Traveler, there is no path, the path must be forged as you walk.”]
~ Antonio Machado ~

Gifts for My Writer Friends:

Laura Lyndhurst, writing for The Story Empire Blog, has an interesting post HERE called Size Matters and discusses book lengths. This is a big concern for me. I have a MG novel that is now at 66,000 words, and I’m told it’s too long. My favorite line in Lyndhurst’s post is “it’s as long as it needs to be.”

I often think about reading how we need tension on every page. HERE K. M. Weiland has a great post called Microtension in Writing Explained: How Small Details Create Big Tension. She always includes such great examples.

Sarah “Sally” Hamer has a great post HERE on Writers in the Storm called Do Characters Have a Nervous System? This should not be missed.

Sacramento summer is upon us, and there is not much else to do but read. (Yes!) I have been trying to make a dent in my staggering TBR pile this week, and found two Gary D. Schmidt books I hadn’t read before. My reviews of these books will come soon. I think of all the middle-grade writers I’ve read — and that is a LOT of writers — Gary D. Schmidt is my favorite. His writing is wonderful, but his storytelling is downright spectacular. And his characters jump off the page and quite often capture your heart. But one of the interesting things I found as I read these two books is that Schmidt recycles characters. I don’t have a fantastic memory for details, but I kept thinking, “That name sounds so familiar.” I looked back at a few prior books of his I’d liked, and there were the same names. Different time frames, different places, but the characters pop up again. I had seen some characters carried through the THE WEDNESDAY WARS series, but hadn’t remembered this from other books. Maybe I will gather all his books and read them again in the order they were published. It would certainly be a reading treat, and it would be interesting to see how they all connect.

Last week, I offered a gently-read ARC of FIFTH GRADE TOP DOGS by Jerry Spinelli to one of you. This week’s winner is Jenni Enzor. Congratulations, Jenni! I’ll get your book out to you soon. If you don’t know Jenni, she is a children’s writer and blogger who often participates in Marvelous Middle Grade Monday. You can see her site HERE and learn more about her.

My love of middle-grade picture books continues. I’m always keeping my eye out for them when I get review lists. I found my latest score on the San Francisco Book Review list. This week, I’m happy to feature a really great non-fiction picture book for middle graders. It is called BIG DIGS: AMAZING UNDERGROUND CONSTRUCTIONS, and it is written and illustrated by Kiko Sánchez. Here is the review I wrote for SFBR.

For thousands of years, people have been building great structures, such as the Egyptian pyramids and the Golden Gate Bridge, but there are equally great structures that are mostly out of sight. Some underground structures are every bit as grand and difficult to build as any on earth. This book looks at 20 incredible underground structures around the world and explains what is known about their use and methods of construction. Some of those shown are expected, such as the Chunnel Tunnel and the Big Dig in Boston, but some are not commonly known, such as the Drammen Spiral and the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. All are fascinating. Each has its own spread with several paragraphs explaining why the structure was built, some of the methods used, and, in some instances, the discovery of it. Beautiful, detailed illustrations show the structures in cutaway views to give readers a real sense of the size and difficulty of building such a thing. The writing is conversational and appropriate for young readers. A glossary at the end will help middle-grade readers with some of the unfamiliar terms. This is a real winner.

Please don’t forget to check for other Marvelous Middle-Grade Monday posts at Greg Pattridge’s blog HERE.