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Question of the
Day:
If people who read books on paper are called bookworms,
then are people who
listen to cassette books called tapeworms?
Listen Up!
Audio books are
considered to be the fastest-growing segment in the publishing industry, growing
75 percent since 1995 and representing $2 billion in annual sales, according to
the Audio Publishers Association (APA).
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Yolanda's Genius
Carol Fenner
- A Newbery Honor Book!
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Yolanda is a great big girl and strong for her age, bigger
and stronger and smarter than anyone else in the fifth grade. She is cool
and streetwise, too, and afraid of no one. It's easy for her to watch out
for her little, first-grade brother, Andrew. But their mother, a legal
professional and a widow, is concerned about crime and drugs in her
children's Chicago school. She moves them all to a smaller and, she hopes,
smaller town.
Yolanda, at first, is scornful of her new town. And
Andrew, who never talks much, is having trouble learning to read. What he
loves to do is play on the old harmonica given to him as a baby by his
father to teethe on and which he's kept blowing ever since. He can imitate
any sound he hears, like bacon sizzling, or express any mood he feels, like
the freshness of an early morning. Yolanda understands that that's the way
he "talks." She is convinced Andrew is a true genius with a great musical
gift. But no one else believes it--not her mother, nor Andrew's teachers,
not even wonderful Aunt Tiny in Chicago. Yolanda sets out to open up adult
eyes, a task whose strategies will call on far more than her physical
toughness. Her plans crystallize on a visit back to Chicago to enjoy the
great annual blues festival with Aunt Tiny. |
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