THRIVE Blog Tour!!


by Meenoo Rami
Heinemann Publishers, March 4, 2014

Description from Publisher's Page:
As a novice teacher, Meenoo Rami experienced the same anxieties shared by many: the sense of isolation, lack of self-confidence, and fear that her work was having no positive impact on her students. In "Thrive, " Meenoo shares the five strategies that helped her become a confident, connected teacher. From how to find mentors and build networks, both online and off, to advocating for yourself and empowering your students, "Thrive" shows new and veteran teachers alike how to overcome the challenges and meet the demands of our profession.
 
Join the conversation on Twitter at #edthrive.

My thoughts:
Teachers writing books for teachers is a good thing.  Just like teachers presenting to other teachers is a good thing.  Teachers are real. Teachers are in the day to day trenches. Teachers tell it like it is.  Meenoo Rami is a teacher.  In her book, Thrive: 5 Ways to (Re)Invigorate Your Teaching, Rami gets real and shares the steps that she took to develop into the best teacher she could be.

Rami provides readers with a book that not only inspires but also shares the how-to's of finding and working with a mentor, of joining and building networks, of keeping yourself challenged, of listening to yourself, and of empowering your students.   As she shares her story, she also shares the stories of other educators.  It is this collective voice that brings strength to what she has to say and dispels any myths that she is the only one doing these things.  

In 2010, I ventured onto Twitter. Initially, I was thinking I would follow some authors and publishers and keep up with what was happening in Children's Literature. After several months, I began to find my tribe.  Other teachers and librarians and book people who also had a passion for reading and teaching and learning.  Through 140 characters and #chats, I began to learn about ideas and techniques and strategies for motivating young readers in ways that I had never been exposed to before. There was always someone that I could reach out to who had an expertise in an area that I wanted to learn more, even when I could not find that person in my local community. 

From there, I learned that NCTE was not just for High School English Teachers. I made it a point to join and to also attend the annual conference.  At my first NCTE Annual Convention, I wanted to know why we (my district) were not doing some of the incredible things that I was learning about in the different sessions. I realized that I had allowed myself to become too isolated in my own district and community that I had lost the big picture perspective.  

Despite my own epiphanies that seemed to be coming quickly, and almost daily as I became more involved in this unique online Professional Learning Community (PLC), I was having difficulty convincing others that this was worthwhile, especially worth the time it took to nurture the relationships with other educators.  As I read Meeno's story and how she connected with others through conferences and social media, I was renewed. I now have a book that I can share with other teachers and say "see, it is possible and other teachers are doing it too".

Within the pages of this thin volume, educators who come with an open heart and mind will find practical ways to expand their learning community and reconnect with their passion as teachers. Just as I met Meenoo at NCTE '12 and discovered a teacher who is passionate and caring and thoughtful,  readers of THRIVE will also experience that same teacher.  And in meeting her, they will be challenged to speak up or reach out or try something new. 

Thank you Meenoo for writing THRIVE and for sharing your story in such a real way.     

More About Meenoo Rami:
Meenoo Rami is a National Board Certified Teacher who teaches her students English at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, PA. Mixing moments of joy, laughter, risk and encouragement, Meenoo pushes her students to think critically about their connection to the word and the world. Meenoo did her undergraduate work at Bradley University in Illinois in areas of Philosophy and English and completed her Master’s degree in Secondary Education at Temple University. Meenoo also contributes to the work of school-wide events and professional learning communities at SLA. Meenoo works as a teacher-consultant for the Philadelphia Writing Project. She has shared her classroom practice at various conferences such as: NCTE, ISTE, ASCD, EduCon, Urban Sites Conference for National Writing Project, and #140edu. Meenoo also runs a weekly twitter chat for English teachers called #engchat which brings together teachers from around the country to discuss ideas related to teaching of English. Her first book, THRIVE from Heinemann will be out in March 2014. In her free time, Meenoo can be found on her bike, on her yoga mat or in her kitchen tinkering with a vegetarian recipe.

Looking for Meenoo on-line:  Website | Facebook | Twitter |  Google+ 


THRIVE Blog Tour Stops
4/9/14
Jen Vincent at Teach Mentor Texts
4/10/14
Franki Sibberson and Mary Lee Hahn at A Year of Reading
4/11/14
Alyson Beecher at Kid Lit Frenzy
4/12/14
Kira Baker Doyle at Kira J Baker-Doyle, Ph.D.
4/13/14
Sarah Mulhern Gross at The Reading Zone
4/14/14
Christina Cantrill at Digital Is (National Writing Project)
4/15/14
Kate Roberts and Maggie B. Roberts at Indent
4/16/14
Beth Shaum Use Your Outside Voice
4/17/14
Linda Baie at Teacher Dance
4/18/14
Troy Hicks at Hickstro
4/19/14
Joy Kirr at Genius Hour
4/20/14
Tara Smith at The Teaching Life
4/21/14
Antero Garcia at The American Crawl
4/22/2014
John Spencer at Education Rethink
4/23
Kellee Moye and Ricki Ginsberg at Unleashing Readers

Going Over Blog Tour - Interview with Author Beth Kephart & Giveaway


Beth Kephart stops by to talk about her new book, GOING OVER, and shares with us about her own writing journey, favorite Indie Bookstore, and more.


GOING OVER takes place in 1983. Do you see this as a story that is told in the recent past or historical fiction? Does the difference even matter? 

I love that you ask — does the difference matter. Because I am just the worst of the worsts when it comes to labeling things. I think of GOING OVER precisely as you describe it—a story that takes place in 1983. Because I live inside that space in my imagination, it feels like right this instant.

What drew you to the story of Ada and Stefan? 

I had a conversation with my editor, Tamra Tuller, about Berlin—a city to which we have both traveled and a city with which we both fell in love. We felt it was important to tell a very personal story about the impact of the Wall. The Wall came first, then. And then I began to study geography, character, the historical record. Ada and Stefan emerged from that.

Authors doing research for books have some great tips and ideas for gaining information. Do you have one or two techniques that English teachers could adapt to make writing projects/prompts more interesting for students? 

There’s little I love more than doing the research. My gosh, it breaks my world wide open with the new. I think the trick lies in making the whole thing relevant, making it feel urgent. So, for example, Ada has pink hair. I needed to be sure that she would have access, in 1983, to pink dye, I needed to know how the pink hair would grow out, all of that stuff. I hopped on down to my hairdresser. Sat in her chair. Had her talk to me about hair color and its history. And then she began to talk to me about graffiti, believe it or not. And she gave me the details with which I begin the book.

What is your book story? (What was the book that made you a reader/writer and who was the person who recommended it if there was someone?) 

The book that made me a reader/writer! What a great question. Well. Let’s see. I was a writer (or thought I was) before I was a real reader, I hate to admit (since everything is wrong about that). Then again, I was only nine years old. But I have to say that it was a research project I did when I was sixteen (the subject: F. Scott and Hemingway) that turned me into a reader. You couldn’t stop me after that. For many years, I read only nonfiction—biography and history. (I majored in the History and Sociology of Science at Penn.) When I was in my early thirties I turned to memoir. Then I became a book omnivore.

Is there an author or authors that influenced your writing journey? 

I wish you could come to my house and see the hundreds upon hundreds of triple stacked books on my many shelves. (My house isn’t big, but my shelves are wide and long.) Every single book here has influenced me in some way — either because I loved it or because I didn’t and because, no matter what, I study the pages to understand why. But I happen to love Michael Ondaatje, Alice McDermott, Colum McCann, Chloe Aridjis, and many, many others. Really, the emphasis is on many.

What is your favorite indie bookstore? Where is it located? Why do you like it? 

I have visited many a great independent bookstore in my day. Locally I love, for example, that Children’s Book World, the Spiral Bookcase, Main Point Books, Harleysville Books, and Chester County Book Company are still here and near and proud. In Florence, Italy, I love Paperback Exchange. In California, I love Book Passage, Copperfield, and Kepler’s. In Decatur, GA, it’s all about Little House of Stories. In Larchmont, NY, it’s all about The Voracious Reader. When I’m on the Penn campus I always visit the used bookstore, The Last Word, and always bring something home (most recently Bill Bryson’s Mother Tongue). But I also have to mention the very first independent bookstore I ever frequented, as a young college girl. It’s called Joseph Fox Bookshop. Fabulously small and fabulously smart, in the city of Philadelphia. I bought every single architecture book they had, way back when. And today, at many Philadelphia events, you can count on Fox to be there.

Any new projects that you are working on that you can share with us? 

Gosh, yes. Many new projects. Next year, Chronicle will publish One Thing Stolen, a book that takes place in Florence, Italy, and West Philadelphia. In the fall, Temple University Press will re-release my river autobiography, Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia’s Schuylkill River, as a paperback—excited about that, because it’s such an odd, little book and because my river was just named PA River of the Year (woot) and because, after all these years, schools are beginning to assign the book in their science and literature classes. I’m also at work on an essay/photography collection about Philadelphia, based on my monthly columns for the Philadelphia Inquirer. And I have just started work on a new novel.

What is in your TBR (to-be-read) pile? Can you share a picture of it? 

Well, you just opened up a huge can of words, I mean worms. Because my TBR pile is the oddest one in the universe. I teach memoir at Penn, and so there are some old and new memoirs in there (not to mention my students’ work). I review adult novels for the Chicago Tribune, and so I’ve got some stuff I cannot show you. I’m still fascinated by Berlin and by walls in general, so I’m reading some new texts like Within Walls and Border Patrol Nation. I’m reading about linguistics and environmental science, I want to read several grand new novels like The Flamethrowers. I’m halfway through Andrew Smith’s Grasshopper Jungle. And on my Kindle reader is Boy, Snow, Bird. Yep. I’m one confused, crazy person.


by Beth Kephart 
Chronicle Books (April 2014)

To read a excerpt:



What would Ada and Stefan have listened to on their Sony Walkmen?



Check out the blog tour schedule here

 4/2/2014 My Friend Amy
4/3/2014 The Flyleaf Review
4/4/2014 The Book Swarm
4/5/2014 There’s A Book
4/6/2014 YA Romantics
4/7/2014 Teenreads Blog
4/8/2014 The 3 R’s Blog
4/9/2014 Forever Young Adult
4/10/2014 Kid Lit Frenzy
4/11/2014 Tales of the Ravenous Reader
4/12/2014 Addicted 2 Novels

Enter to win a copy of Going Over - the book and audiobook.  Please enter by completing the Rafflecopter below.  The winner must have a US mailing address and be over 13 years old. 

a Rafflecopter giveaway

I Have a Bad Feeling About This Blog Tour and Guest Post by Author, Jeff Strand


by Jeff Strand
Sourcebook Fire (March 1, 2014)

Description from Publisher:  Everything 16-year-old Henry was dreading about survival camp turns out to be true--or even worse. The only thing to help get him through is his equally unathletic best friend Randy and the discovery of a girls’ music camp just down the path. But they’ll soon have a lot more than obnoxious “drill counselors” and too many push-ups to worry about. The owner of Strongwoods Survival Camp has taken out some loans with very dangerous men to keep himself afloat, and when a trio of them show up to collect, things go bad. Very bad. With a camp now full of armed killers, survival now has a whole new meaning for the campers. 

Kid Lit Frenzy would like to welcome author, Jeff Strand to the blog. Thank you Jeff for sharing about your experience with your first school visit.  

"They're all going to be half-asleep for the first couple of classes," I'd been warned. "So don't take it personally."

I wasn't going to take it personally. I could relate. When I was a high school student, there was nothing in the world worse than having to get up in the morning. I was so tired every morning that I couldn't even summon the energy to put edible items into a bag, and so I never had anything for lunch. ("Couldn't you have made your lunch the night before?" you're probably asking. I guess I could have. The thought did occur to me every single day at lunchtime. Instead, I went with the plan of being ravenously hungry all afternoon, and then coming home and gobbling down the stuff I should have brought for lunch.)

Anyway, I was there for the Great American Teach-In, where I would speak to seven English classes in a row about the life of being an author. Because I was there to inspire young minds, I vowed not to burst into tears at any point during my talk. I dressed nicely, to help perpetuate the myth that authors can afford nice clothes. I went in fully prepared, because even though I hoped to mostly fill the time with Q&A, I had to be ready in case there were no Q's to A.

And...the warning had been correct. The students were as zombie-like for the first couple of classes as I had been in my high school years. I was tempted to walk around with a cattle prod zapping people, but I'd left all of my cattle prods at home, and I figured that as a teenager I'd have been disinclined to buy books by an author who'd given me an intense electric shock.

Fortunately, I had this information going in, so I knew not to ARGH they hate me I'm boring them it's like I'm trying to teach them algebra first thing in the morning and I'm going to have to do this seven times and during at least one of them I WILL burst into tears despite my promise not to do so, and the teacher will report me as a Really Tedious Author and I'll never be invited to speak at a school again!

"That's how it always is," the teacher assured me, as a waterfall of flop-sweat cascaded down my forehead. "The next classes will be more alert."

Teachers had lied to me in the past ("Algebra has lots of uses in everyday life!") but in this case, it was the truth. The next batches of students remained upright, and asked questions, and laughed at my jokes. The teacher also laughed at my jokes, although by the sixth or seventh time she'd heard them I think she was just being polite.

What I mostly took from this experience was the wonderful discovery that, if you're having lunch with a bunch of teachers in the teacher's lounge, they use the F-word. A lot. I'm not saying that all teachers make frequent use of the F-word when the students aren't around, but these teachers did, and there was no evidence that it was a rare occurrence, and it was the greatest thing ever.

Did I personally inspire 175 (25 x 7) students to become authors? Not necessarily. Did they all rush home and share tales of the amazing Famous Writer who shared his life experience with them? Dunno. But they MIGHT have, in my mind, and ultimately that's what matters.

After hearing about Jeff's experience with his first school visit I had to ask “What was your favorite question from the day?” 

Jeff's response: My favorite question was “How much does school help you become a writer?” Obviously, with the teacher sitting right there, it was very important to give the correct answer! I explained that even though writers have editors, it is absolutely essential to learn grammar and all of the other writing basics, or you’ll never make it past the submission stage to get an editor. The teacher seemed to approve of this answer.

Thanks Jeff for stopping by and sharing your experiences.  And if you are reading this, check out a copy of Jeff's book at your local public library or pick up a copy at your favorite independent bookstore.


About the Author: JEFF STRAND is a three-time nominee for the Bram Stoker Award, and both of his YA books, A Bad Day for VooDoo and I Have a Bad Feeling About This are both Junior Library Guild Picks. Jeff lives in Tampa, Florida, and would last approximately three seconds in a true survival situation. But he's okay with that, because he mostly just types stuff in a safe bear-free environment. jeffstrand.com  You can also follow him on twitter: @jeffstrand

Nonfiction Picture Book Wednesday: Weeds Blog Tour, Interview & Giveaway


Today, I have something a little bit different for Nonfiction Picture Book Wednesday.  I am celebrating weeds. Yes, those things that grow when you don't even try, and more often you spend time pulling them up and tossing them away rather than enjoying them.  Here is Cindy Jenson-Elliott to tell us about her new book, Weeds Find a Way. 

by Cindy Jenson-Elliott; Illustrated by Carolyn Fisher
Beach Lane Books (February 4, 2014)

Thank you Cindy Jenson-Elliott for stopping by Kid Lit Frenzy and sharing about your new book and some other fun stuff. 

Thank you so much for reading my book and being interested in weeds! The natural world needs a voice. The Lorax spoke for the trees, and I am speaking for the weeds!

I love that you created a book about weeds and that you actually celebrate weeds in the book. Do you have a “green thumb” or instead, like me, the only thing I can successfully grow is weeds? 

I don’t think anyone really has a green thumb. Actually, that term kind of bothers me, because it assumes that either you can or can’t grow plants. Given the right support, anyone can grow plants. For me, the support I need is automatic watering, since it doesn’t rain much here. My system isn’t fancy—just a timer on a hose bib. But it gives people the impression that I do have a green thumb. But don’t knock it if you can grow weeds! It means you have soil that they like, water they like, and are letting things go a bit wild. Not a bad thing.

What inspired you to write about weeds? 

As a school garden teacher, I am often faced with weeds. The first year our garden was up and running, I felt despair over the weeds, and began the hard work of pulling them out—until I realized what a valuable resource I was wasting! I could be teaching about the weeds, not just composting them! I began to appreciate their tenacity and ingenuity—the very qualities we like to inspire in our students! I went to the library to get a book and prepare a lesson, and discovered there were no books for kids about weeds. So, after contemplating just what I wanted people to appreciate about weeds, I wrote the book.

It seems that every author or book lover has a book story, the one book that turned you into a true reader. What is your story?

I fell in love with reading when I read a little book called Annie Oakley, Little Sure Shot. It had an orange cover and was one of the books in the Childhoods of Famous Americans series. I remember where I was standing when I realized that something had changed for me. I was in the basement of my family’s house in suburban Philadelphia, and was struck by—love! It was one of those heart-opening moments when you realize you LOVE something. I loved the story so much. I was IN the story, heart, soul and mind. After that, I could not stop reading. When we moved the next year to the desert of California, I would trek through the 120 degree sun to the library and get stacks of the orange books. I could not believe they had them all the way across the country—a shelf of orange books about kids I could relate to who had lived long ago.

When you think about your journey from writer to published author, who are some of the people that your credit for influencing your work? 

I was very influenced by Mrs. Barnhouse, my 2nd grade teacher at Gladwyne Elementary School in Gladwyne, PA. She introduced me to poetry, and I decided I wanted to be a poet. Of course, no one was a poet that I knew of, so I didn’t believe it was possible. In fact, I didn’t believe it until I saw this book on the shelf of a bookstore for the first time last week. What a miracle! I was also very influenced by my mother, who would take my hand-written stories and poems, from age eight onward, and type them up on a portable manual typewriter, so that I would feel like a real author, with my words in print. She was amazing. In college—Bowdoin College, in Maine—I was on a wonderful literary magazine, The Quill, and my fellow writers and editors would sit around a dinner table and hash over the week’s submissions. It was a rich, funny community of writers and learners, and allowed me to try out writing different things in a safe space. Emotional safety is so important to writers! Poet Steve Kowitt, with whom I took a poetry class many years ago, made writing poetry an exploration of the world. Diane D’Andrade, a former editor at Harcourt who used to teach writing courses at UCSD extension, really kicked my butt and made me write and write and write again each time I took her class. And now, my students influence me. Their enthusiasm for books of all kinds inspires me every day!

If you can spend the day with a character or characters from any book (that you did not write), who would it be and what would you do?

I know this sounds totally nerdy, but I would love to go to Narnia and hang out with Lucy and her siblings and learn to do archery and sword fighting, to run and leap and explore the world. Or, I would love to meet and travel with Lafcadio Hearn. The book about him, Wandering Ghost, is one of my favorite biographies I’ve ever read. It’s an amazing book about an amazing person.

Any new projects that you are working on that you can share with us? 

I am writing about a couple of subjects that I have encountered in my own neighborhood—natural history subjects—one about the ocean, as I am a distance ocean swimmer—and one closer to home.

What has been the funniest or most special question that a student has asked you whether in a letter or at a school visit? 

The thing I like best as both a teacher—I teach every day—and as a writer is when kids share what they have written as colleagues. We are all on this journey of learning to write together, and kids really understand that they are learning and I am also learning. One thing I’m sure every writer has been asked is if we have to color in and type up each book. A good question!

What is currently in your to-read pile?  

On my to read pile is an adult book: Quiet—about introverts. My father gave it to me, as we are both in that special club. I am also reading, at the recommendation of several students last year (and like everyone else on the planet) The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. I also have a stack of books about Chinese dynasties, as I have a contract to write a book about them for an educational publisher. Also, Mama Built a Little Nest by Jennifer Ward—which is out soon, and I can’t wait to see it! And I am re-reading my favorite book for working with kids, How to Talk So Kids Will Listen, and Listen So Kids Will Talk.

Check out the official book trailer for Weeds Find a Way:



For more information about Cindy Jenson-Elliott:
She is the author of fourteen books of nonfiction and hundreds of articles for newspapers, magazines and educational publishers. She is a teacher and environmental educator with an MA in education and a passion for connecting children with nature. In her free time, she enjoys swimming in the ocean and spending time outdoors in San Diego, where she lives and gardens with her family of four humans and three Buff Orpington chickens. Visit her at CindyJensonElliott.com.



To check out all of the stops on her Weeds Find a Way blog tour:

Mon, Feb 24
Growing with Science
Tues, Feb 25
As They Grow Up
Wed, Feb 26
Kid Lit Frenzy
Thurs, Feb 27
Sharpread
Fri, Feb 28
Children's Book Review
Mon, Mar 3
Let's Go Chipper!
Tues, Mar 4
Just a Little Creativity
Wed, Mar 5
Unleashing Readers
Thurs, Mar 6
5 Minutes for Books
Fri, Mar 7
Archimedes Notebook

One lucky reader has a chance to win a copy of Weeds Find A Way by completing the Rafflecopter below.  Please US mailing addresses only and you must be 13 or older to enter.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Don't forget to link up your nonfiction reviews:

Storm Watcher Blog Tour: Guest Post from Maria V. Snyder & Giveaway

The Storm Watcher Blog Tour

Feb 19 - Mar 5, 2014

Join us for interviews, guest posts, reviews, and giveaways!

Thank you Alethea and Maria for organizing the blog tour and sponsoring the giveaway!

Time to Geek Out! 
 By Maria V. Snyder

An aspect of writing that I've discovered to be lots of fun is research. I'd never would have thought that when I was in high school and college, searching through microfilms and smelly ancient books for a research paper on a topic I had no interest in. Back then I hated the R word :). But now I can research things that I'm interested in and the knowledge can be incorporated into my novels. Bonus!

My research is done in one of three ways: the Internet, books/magazines, and hands-on. If possible, I'll do as much hands-on as I can. There is no better way to learn and translate that experience for the reader. Some examples of my hand-on research are learning how to ride a horse, how to fence, and how to blow glass. The books I use are usually juvenile non-fiction because I usually only need a basic understanding of the subject (for example bats) and they have big color pictures, which help when I'm describing things (like bats) in the story. Doing research has also sparked ideas for stories or helped with a plot problems. Fist pump!

However, fiction writers just can't dump in all this cool information we've learned. No that would be boring. I've learned that the needs of the story come first. I learned how to blow glass and work with molten glass after deciding Opal Cowan, my main protagonist in the Glass series would be a glass magician. She works with the equipment and the glass during the story so I needed to know how to do this the correct way. Her actions teach the readers about glass blowing. And I want to get it right. A reader once emailed me after she visited Murano, Italy (known for their glass artists). She went on a tour, but already knew everything from reading my books. Score!

With Storm Watcher I had a great deal of prior knowledge. I'd earned my BS degree in Meteorology from Penn State University and I worked at a dog kennel for four months. Again, I didn't want to dump in all this technical knowledge about storms and weather instruments and put my readers to sleep. Instead, the main protagonist, Luke is a weather geek and he mentions a few facts to his friend during a bad thunderstorm. He also builds weather instruments for a science fair project, which helps him re-connect with his father. Awww...

One of the fun things for me was putting together the appendix for Storm Watcher. It's called, Luke's Weather Notebook and I was able to geek out and put in a ton of cool weather information, facts, quizzes, and doodles (I drew about half of those graphics). The appendix also includes an article my sixteen-year-old daughter wrote on why hurricane's have names. Sweet!

Writers do a ton of research for their stories, and we have to be careful not to spend all our time researching and not writing. I'll research the big stuff like glass blowing first, but then I'll start writing and will make a list of research topics as I work through the story. I'm not going to stop to find out what an indigo plant looks like while I'm in the middle of writing. That's something that can be added in during revisions. Yes!

So I'm finally enjoying research and I use it as an excuse to do new things all the time. Ziplining? Research for a clan of people living in the tree canopy. Participating in a mud run? Research for a character being chased through a swamp. Photography class? Needed for a story about a fashion photographer. See how easy it is? I'd bet you can come up with a number of “research” topics, too. Boo Ya!

Storm Watcher is Maria V. Snyder's first middle grade novel.  It was released on October 19, 2013 with Leap Books.

Description from GoodReads: Luke Riley is lost. His mother's recent death has set Luke and his family adrift. Even though his father, twin brothers, and their three Bloodhounds are search and rescue volunteers, they have been unable to rescue themselves and become a family again. The summer after sixth grade looms in Luke's mind as a long, lonely three months where the only thing he can look forward to is watching The Weather Channel. Luke is fascinated with the weather, but since his mother's death in a storm, he is also terrified. Even the promised 13th birthday present of a Bloodhound puppy fails to lift Luke's spirits. He would rather have a different breed - a petite Papillon, but his father insists he get a Bloodhound.

When Luke decides to get the Bloodhound from Willajean, a dog breeder who owns Storm Watcher Kennel, he works out a deal to help at her kennel in exchange for the expensive dog. Thrilled to have a summer with a purpose, Luke befriends Willajean's daughter, Megan and together they plan how Luke can get a Papillon puppy instead of a Bloodhound. But nothing seems to work as they struggle with stubborn fathers, summer storms, unhelpful siblings, and hidden guilt. Can one little white dog really save both families?


For more about Maria V. Snyder: website | blog | facebook | goodreads

To check out all of the interviews, guest posts, and reviews, see the schedule below...

Tour Schedule

Wed 2/19 - The Book Monsters - review & giveaway
Thu 2/20 - I Am a Reader - interview & international giveaway
Fri 2/21 - Unleashing Readers - guest post & giveaway
Mon 2/24 - Bookalicious - review & international giveaway
Tue 2/25 - Kid Lit Frenzy - guest post & giveaway
Wed 2/26 - Sharpreads - review & giveaway
Thu 2/27 - The Mod Podge Bookshelf - guest post & giveaway
Fri 2/28 - The Windy Pages - review, interview & giveaway
Mon 3/3 - Teenage Reader - review & giveaway
Tue 3/4 - Read Now Sleep Later - review & international giveaway
Wed 3/5 - The Brain Lair - review & giveaway


Complete the Rafflecopter below for a chance to win a copy of Storm Watcher and see how Maria put all of her research to use in creating this great story.

a Rafflecopter giveaway