I read Meg Medina's Burn Baby Burn for my YA Book Club. It was my selection, but it wasn't an easy choice for me. I rejected some other well-received and well-reviewed books before landing on Burn Baby Burn. I really enjoyed Medina's Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass, so I felt confident in this choice. The fact that part of the title contained "kick your ass" mostly guaranteed my enjoying it. I was enjoying Burn Baby Burn until the specter of stupid rose from the pages an

Today, I spent more time knitting, watching Netflix, and experimenting in the kitchen than I did reading. In fact, other than a few online articles documenting that this is the end times, I’ve read very little, but the day is still young and Meg Medina’s Burn Baby Burn is by my side. I’ve been gorging on books lately and I’d love to share them with you, but the release dates are far into the fall, so it doesn’t seem polite to review them months in advance. I hadn’t really con

In 2013, I was drawn to Bill Konigsberg's Openly Straight. Not because of the plot description, not because I knew of his work as a sports writer, not because of the appealing cover, but because I thought E.L. Konigsburg had a son. I thought she had a son and he had become an author. Why would that matter? It matters because Judy Blume, Richard Peck, E.L. Konigsburg and Beverly Cleary are my Beatles. So, when I thought the author of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Fr

I have love story standards. I don't think I had any standards for romance until I read Rainbow Rowell's Eleanor and Park. Then I read Rowell's Fangirl and reading romance has never been the same. The scene where Cath reads The Outsiders to Levi is a masterclass and I need a scene close to that in every romance I read, or I'm disappointed. Sandhya Menon's When Dimple Met Rishi does not disappoint. Dimple is a smart, middle-class, makeup shunning Indian-American bookworm with

I loved loved loved Becky Albertalli's Simon vs. The Homo Sapien Agenda. It was my favorite read of 2015. I have at least 10 copies in my classroom library, and I book talk it every chance I get. I knew I was going to love The Upside of Unrequited just as much. I wanted to love it. I tried to love it. Until finally I was just trying to like it. The Upside of Unrequited is the story of a girl, Molly Peskin-Suso, who cried a river about having 26 crushes, but not a single one t

Well, here I go. I'm not sure what goes into a first blog post, so bear with me. I want to use The House That Blume Built to share my reading world - my likes, my dislikes, my favorites, my . . . other things. I love books, I read a lot, and I share what I read a lot, so I thought a blog was the best way to keep doing that while reaching more people than just the friends and family I force to listen to me, or the students who hang on my every bookish word because they believe