Hand-Me-Down Canines, Unite! Secondhand Dogs by Carolyn Crimi

"It's a new dog day. Miss Lottie, who adopts homeless dogs, has driven the whole pack to the park, a thing she only does when there was a new dog to join the pack."

"It'll be great," said Tank, the big bulldog. "It always is."

But Gus, the titular leader of the pack, is not so sure. So far, for a group of one-time strangers, they get along pretty well. Tank is a trustworthy bulldog backup, with some weighty muscle behind him if needed. Roo is smart but a bit flighty, observant but still unsure of herself, and the latest inductee, pug puppy Moon Pie, is enthusiastic about everything and anything. But Gus is a mature dog whose been around the block a few times, and he is wise enough to see the problems of heading the pack, especially when he sees the new dog, Decker, sitting up very straight and still on the leash, giving nothing away as the pack looks him over.

But when they get to Miss Lottie's house, Decker is already on the make, taking over, as Miss Lottie praises him and talks about how much he is like her childhood pet Mr. Beans, and he watches craftily as Moon Pie cajoles tidbits from Miss Lottie.

"Humans are such suckers," he says. He knew Miss Lottie would be easy.

And before the pack knows it, he climbs into the back of Miss Lottie's van, subordinating Gus' position, and when they are back to her house, he gets all the best food and the special place in Miss Lottie's big bed, previously held by little Moon Pie. Gus tries to smooth over his treatment, but the cat named Ghost has Decker's number already.

And the next day, the whole teamwork of the pack is in shambles as Decker has his way with them, and when Gus tries to assert his leadership, Decker bites his own foot to make Miss Lottie believe Gus is guilty. By the end of the day, Gus is in disgrace; Moon Pie is out of the big bed: and the other dogs are quarreling with each other over which side to take. And to make it worse, Moon Pie is made to share his food with Decker, who lays it out to him cruelly:

"YOU, MOON PIE, ARE THE WEAKEST, SMALLEST SILLIEST MEMBER OF THE PACK. YOU ARE LOWER THAN THE CAT!"

"I AM THE TOP DOG NOW."

But Decker is not done with his takeover. He convinces Moon Pie that his former owner, Miss Gertie, is still alive and is searching for him, and then hints that there is a hole in the fence hidden behind some bushes, a good place to escape and find his way back to Gertie's big bed and popcorn. Overnight, the wishy-washy Roo follows Moon Pie into the alley behind Miss Lottie's house--despite the scary scent of coyote there.

But despite her distrust of the dogs, Ghost the cat has it all figured out and finally tells Tank about Decker's plan to take over Miss Lottie's house as the only pet. It's up to Tank to convince Gus to take back his job as leader of the pack. At last, Tank and Gus slip out and brave the outside world, coyotes and all, to try to rescue the lost little Moon Pie and recover and rebuild the family of Miss Lottie and the whole pack.

It's finally all for one and one for all, when the showdown with both coyote and Decker comes, in Carolyn Crimi's latest middle grade novel, Secondhand Dogs (Balzer and Bray, 2021). Gus sees even the fear behind both Decker and indeed even the young coyote, as he retakes his place as leader, stronger and wiser, in an exciting animal tale for middle readers told by veteran author Carolyn Crimi with understanding and insight into both human and animal nature.

Keeping the Germs Away! Disease Control by Susan H. Gray

"Ouch," whimpered Brandon.

"It'll be okay," Alex told his little brother. "This will help you not get sick, right, Dr. Devi?"

"Absolutely. You should feel lucky," the doctor said. "That little pinch was a vaccine--a lot better than some of the diseases people used to get!"

"Like what?" asked both boys.

The list of widespread human diseases is long and the story of how most of them came under control is the subject of Susan H. Gray's Disease Control (21st Century Skills Innovation Library: Innovation in Medicine) (Cherry Lake Publishing). Author Gray covers ancient views of the mysterious waves of sickness that people have dealt with over history. For millennia people thought weather and bad spirits made people sick, but even a thousand years ago they noticed that some diseases seem to sicken not just one person who got the "evil eye" but many of the people in a community or a whole area. Sometimes the disease came when a ill person entered the group, but sometimes if a healthy stranger came into the group, he or she got sick too, so there had to to be something that moved from person to person or place to place that made them sick. People in Italy called the fever that came in warm, humid seasons "malaria," bad air, until one physician figured out that with warm, rainy weather came warm puddles of water from which mosquitoes hatched to transmitted the disease by biting their victims.

In another famous case, Joseph Jenner noticed that dairy workers often had a minor sickness called "cow pox," but were never sick during epidemics of the deadly smallpox. He tried "vaccinating" a boy by transferring some of the fluid in a cowpox lesion to a small scratch on the skin of the healthy boy, who got a mild sickness but was then immune to smallpox.

And when a deadly cholera epidemic struck London during the rule of Queen Victoria, a young doctor named John Snow noticed that victims only complained about pain in the digestive system and concluded that the cause must be something in food or water. People were eating many different foods, but everyone was drinking water, and Dr. Snow traced the source of the epidemic to one water pump in all of London, and when the authorities closed that well, the disease quickly disappeared. Dr. Snow found the cause to be in sewage found in the water from that pump, and as London's new health department worked to provide clean water to all, the cholera vanished.

From those discoveries the science of epidemiology gained three of its major tools, tracking and mapping victims, finding the vector, and stopping the transmission became one of medicine's most useful tools for stopping an epidemic. Preventing harmful cases of a deadly disease by inducing a minor exposure from a harmless but related disease or a weakened (attenuated) or killed version of the disease particles, soon called "germs," prevented transmission and ended epidemics.

Humankind is in a on-going war on disease. For middle readers who love a real-life mystery and those who are interested in medical mysteries, Disease Control (21st Century Skills Innovation Library: Innovation in Medicine) provides both basic background information and how medical science works to stop an epidemic or a pandemic like COVID-19. Author Gray points out that the roles once played by Dr. Jenner and Dr. Snow are still being played out on an individual, national and international levels in agencies like the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO). These agencies provide protective information and research, from "wash your hands" to the development of vaccines that bring new diseases under control or even, as in the case of smallpox, to become as extinct as the dinosaurs.

Other intriguing books in this Innovation in Medicine series are Emergency Care (Innovation in Medicine), Vision (Innovation in Medicine), and Transplants (Innovation in Medicine).

John Lewis: Getting to Know the Statesman Who Marched for Civil Rights by Jehan Jones Radgowski

In 1965 John Lewis organized a peaceful protest in Selma, Alabama,... to improve voter rights. The first protest took place on March 7. John planned to march from Selma to Montgomery (the state capital). As they crossed the bridge just outside Selma. Alabama state troopers demanded they turn around. Those who did not do so were beaten by police officers. John Lewis's skull was fractured.

Journalists called it "Bloody Sunday." News stations broadcast the images around the world. People were horrified to see violence used against peaceful protesters. Bloody Sunday was a turning point in the civil rights movement. President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965.

John was born in Troy, Alabama, where he attended a two-room school for black children when he wasn't need to help on his family's farm. As he grew up, Rosa Parks' arrest led the Montgomery bus boycott. Black students led the "sit-ins" which tried to integrate eating places. As a student participated in the "Freedom Riders," who attempted to integrate public accommodations such as buses and trains. One bus was hit and by a firebomb. "Burn them alive," the attackers yelled. But the Riders were sworn to non-violence and they persisted until segregation in public facilities was made illegal by Congress.

John was willing to risk everything for equality. But it was only the beginning of his battle.

There was much more to be done. John Lewis went to college and finally was elected a congressman from Georgia in 1986, where he has served since.

George Lewis has been there through it all, and he still serves in Congress, the last surviving member of the "Big Six," civil rights leaders who worked with Martin Luther King. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011 and helped bring about the National Museum of African American History opened in 2016. Jehan Jones-Radgowski's John Lewis: Get to Know the Statesman Who Marched for Civil Rights (People You Should Know) (Capstone Books, 2019) is a brief biography of Lewis which also incorporates the significant moments in the civil rights movement. Brief and succinct, this 32-page non-fiction book covers a lot of ground in American history.  With ample historic illustrations, and names, dates and places, this entry in Capstone's People You Should Know series puts the biography of John Lewis in its historical setting, and includes a glossary, a short bibliography and list of internet sources, and an index to help young researchers in those Black History Month presentations and reports.

Ice Will Suffice: Twelve Kinds of Ice by Ellen Bryan Obed

BLACK ICE is water shocked still by the cold before the snow. For black ice, Dad took us in the car a half-hour's ride to Great Pond, where on our summer dock we tied up our winter skates.

We sped to silver speeds at which lungs and legs, clouds and sun, wind and cold, raced together. Our blades spit out silver. Our lungs breathed out silver. Our minds burst with silver while the winter sun danced silver down our bending backs.

Ice is not always nice for most of us. But author Ellen Obed was favored to grow up in a time and place and family in which the coming of ice was the best part of the year. In Maine ice comes early, first a thin skin on top of the water bucket, so fragile that it shatters with a light finger touch. But soon winter’s power begins to promise more:

THE SECOND ICE was thicker. We would pick it out of the pail like panes of glass. We would hold it up in our mittened hands and look through it. Then we would drop it on the hard ground and watch it shatter into a hundred pieces.

Soon the whole pail is frozen, promising the ice they have been waiting for–FIELD ICE.

If the fields are wet and the night is cold enough, the bare fields themselves freeze with a layer of ice, a patch just big enough for the intrepid skater for an impromptu skating rink. And then before the first snow fall, there is STREAM ICE, turning the creeks where they waded and fished in summer into highways through the wood for the skating kids.

But then comes the best ice–GARDEN ICE. The whole family turns out to pack the snow over their empty garden spot, to build up snow berms and plank walls, and at last to [pull the water hose from its warm spot in the cellar to flood their homemade rink–and there it is–Bryan Gardens–the famous ice that provides for months of hockey and figure skating for kids from all over. But there are still two more kinds of ice that make the best memories–THE ICE SHOW for which relatives  and fans pack the snow bank stands and everyone performs, even Dad in his annual clown routine–and the warmest memory of all, the LATE NIGHT SKATE.

After lights were out in neighbors’ houses, my sister and I were alone with our dreams. We would work on our figure eights, ...our jumps and spins. We would put on music and pretend we were skating before crowds in a great stadium, practicing for some distant Olympics.

Ellen Bryan Obed’s memoir of her Maine childhood, Twelve Kinds of Ice (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012), is a prose poem to winter’s joys that will make even Sun Belters long to hear the sound of silver blades on silver ice beneath them, skating on and on, never tiring, through the cold days and nights of a winter warmed by memory. Obed’s lyric narrative and Barbara McClintock’s homey and evocative line drawings make this a book that kids in all climes can savor.

Back to the Future: Blast from the Past (Allie Finkle's Rules for Girls) by Meg Cabot

The minute Mrs. Hunter said we were going on a field trip, everyone in room 209 went bananas.

Because Room 209 had never been on a field trip before. At least, not while I had been there.

The girls all squealed with delight. The boys all fist-bumped one another. Patrick Day, who sits on the end of my row, jumped up on top of his desk and played air guitar until Rosemary pulled him down by the belt loops of his jeans. Joey Fields began barking like a dog.

The truth was, however, I was pretty excited myself, due to one simple but embarrassing fact.

I had never been on a field trip before.

Allie Finkle had thought her worst problem was that even though she had been completely responsible and earned $36 to buy her own cell phone, her parents said no. No cell phone until sixth grade. Period.

And then comes the field trip. At first Allie is thrilled. At last she gets to ride on a school bus, a lifelong dream, denied her because of chicken pox. floods in the nature park, and the perfidy of her former friend Mary Kay Shiner, who offered to turn in Allie's permission slip for the trip to the Children's Museum and then conveniently lost it. Finally, Allie will get to climb on one of those mysterious big yellow buses, sing those goofy bus songs, and if she's lucky, get one of those seats over the rear wheels that bounces you up in the air whenever the bus hits a pothole. Even if the trip is just an educational outing to boring old Honeypot Prairie Recreation Village to culminate their Pioneer Life unit, she just knows she and her three best friends are going to have a blast in the past.

But field-trip disaster strikes again. No, the trip isn't cancelled, which would have been preferable! But to conserve funds, Allie's class has to share the bus with Mrs. Myers' fourth grade class from Walnut Knolls Elementary--Allie's "old school" with her worst frenemies, Brittany Hauser and her devoted followers--and Mary Kay Shiner! And to make things even worse, her new class's version of Brittany, Cheyenne O'Malley, shows up in a rented theatrical costume version of pioneer dress in yellow silk, complete with parasol, and Brittany & Co. are decked out in specially made pioneer garb with matching bonnets to boot.

It's Allie's worst nightmare. Cheyenne and Brittany, double trouble, are drawn to each other's glow like moths to the flame, and she, Allie Finkle, is assigned to be trip buddy with none other than Mary Kay Shiner. And Allie thought the only problem on the bus was the de rigueur field trip barfer (Joey Fields-who else?--who takes care of that job right away). But now she has to deal with the augmented clique's barbs and putdowns, including the whole bus's being treated to a revival of the hated nickname Brittany hung on her during her last miserable days at Walnut Knolls--ALLIE STINKLE!

Even Allie's accumulated notebook of Rules for Girls has a hard time covering the contingencies of this new experience. But Allie gets surprising help from an unexpected source--George Washington--when she notices his own set of rules, made up when he was a boy--posted on the one-room school's walls. Allie discovers that George has some of the same rules she does, and she puts most of them to use to get her through the day, in Meg Cabot's sixth entry in her popular series, Allie Finkle's Rules For Girls #6: Blast from the Past (Scholastic, 2010), and this time Allie rises to the occasion when she even volunteers to stay in the first aid cabin with the bee-stung Mary Kay and proves herself the most responsible one in either class.

"It wasn't as fun as the Children's Museum would have been, I said finally. "But I think I learned a lot of new stuff."

"But learning new stuff is actually the point of field trips, Allie," Mom said.

I had never thought about it that way before. I had sort of always thought of field trips as just being about having fun.

"Yeah," I said. "I guess it sort of is."

Shirley U. Jest! Till Death Do Us Bark by Kate Klise

There once was a rich man who said,
While lying on his deathbed:
"I'm really too ill'
To write a new will."
So he wrote some verses instead.

When multi-millionaire Noah Breth breathes his last, he leaves behind quite a mystery--a mystery which soon involves the whole town of Ghastly, including the residents of 43 Old Cemetery Road.

Seymour Hope, the hopeful adopted son of mystery writer Ignatius B. Grumply and his spectral co-author and everyone's favorite ghost writer, Olive C. Spence, has always wanted a dog. When a large, shaggy wolfhound named Secret adopts him, Seymour takes him home, neglecting to mention to Olive and Ignatius that the dog recently was the beloved companion of the recently deceased town millionaire, Noah Breth. Noah's offspring, the greedy Kitty Breth and brother Kanine Breth, only want to get their hands on their father's money, and Seymour hopes that neither would give a dime of it for the now ownerless dog, since they come to town purely to harry lawyer Rita O'Bitt into giving each of them all of the estate.

And then strange things begin to happen around Ghastly. M. Balm, town librarian, finds a rare wheat penny worth thousands at the back of a bookshelf; Then town restauranteur Shirley U. Jest discovers an even more valuable 1872 two-cent piece in her counter tip jar, and the proprietor of Ghastly Grocers, Kay Daver, finds an even rarer yet half-dime worth $25,000 in the green beans. Now that's a lot of long green!

Meanwhile, back at Spence Mansion, things aren't going well. Secret's all-night barking keeps everyone in town awake. Ignatius, beset by loss of sleep and a sudden-onset of cat allergies, is not a fan of Seymour's hound, and Olive, fearing the dog has driven her missing cat Shadow away, is no fan of Secret either. Seymour is wracked with guilt for lying about the dog's former owner, and decides that he is a bad son and must run away.

Meanwhile, Kitty and Kanine Breth are spreading nasty rumors about each other all over town. Everyone else is looking for valuable coins, and when they're not, they remember to help Sheriff Mike Ondolences search for Seymour, too. Olive feels so badly about Seymour's flight that she writes Ignatius a farewell letter and does a ghostly vanishing act. But in her postscript she mentions that she's leaving a funny gold coin dated 1796 found in front of the house on the dining room table for Ignatius, hoping that they will happily ever after without her.

Things are even stranger than usual in Ghastly, and only Rita O'Bitt has the information that will explain all of these ghastly goings on, the will of the late Noah Breth. And when the ghost of Noah summons Seymour and Secret, still barking, to sit in on the reading of the will, the dear deceased shares the wisdom of his 95 years of life and his one week of his ghostdom:

You make a SMALL CHANGE. It's a grand arrangement that you have there when you're living.

Now start all over when you have to. Make a second draft. Or even a third. Embrace the chance you have to do things over again while you're still alive.

At last everyone gets what Noah Breth was up to when he sold all his property and converted it all into "small change," those aptly chosen rare coins which showed up in chosen places around Ghastly. Now there's just the final and fifth coin to find and those small changes in the lives of Ignatius, Seymour, and the battling Breth scions to be made to make their lives, if not their bank accounts, much richer.

In her Kate Klise series, aptly titled Till Death Do Us Bark: 43 Old Cemetery Road: Book 3, (Harcourt, 2011, forthcoming in May) author Kate Klise and illustrator M.Sarah Klise share the honors in another delightful epistolary novel, leaving no graveyard pun unturned along the way.

With a several interwoven mysteries, even that of Grumply's sudden cat allergies even as the cat Shadow is nowhere to be found, there is plenty to keep the reader turning pages. The text, told totally in letters between the principals and news stories about the coin-cidences about town written by Cliff Hanger, editor of the Ghastly Times, make good use of design and fonts to move the mystery along, but a great deal of the fun is in the black-and-white drawings and the funny funereal wordplay along the way. Previous titles in this series are Over My Dead Body: 43 Old Cemetery Road: Book 2 and Dying to Meet You: 43 Old Cemetery Road: Book One, This is a series that elementary readers will definitely, er, dig.

News Hounds! News for Dogs by Lois Duncan

"Get away from the window," Bruce said. "I'm going to try to get a picture of the dognapping."

He barely had time to step into place before it happened. One moment Lola was lolling on a beach towel in the shade of a striped umbrella, and an instant later she was gone.

"I got it!" Bruce cried. "I caught the dognappers in the act."

Bruce and younger sister Andi have a good thing going. Andi's idea to publish a local newspaper, The Bow Wow News, for dogs and dog owners is a hit. Andi's writing, Debbie's newshound reporting, Tim's desktop publishing skills, and Bruce's photographs are a winning combination, and with the fifty cents per copy they are earning, Bruce feels sure that his share will soon cover what he stills owes his abusive neighbor Jerry for his dog Red Rover.

But then the dogs featured in their first issues mysteriously begin to disappear from their own well-fenced backyards. Ransom notes soon follow, all asking that the grieving dog owners leave hundreds of dollars inside library novels such as Old Yeller and The Incredible Journey if they want to see their pets again.

Luckily, the kids are temporarily staying with their Aunt Alice, a retired private detective, who is more than eager to freshen her sleuthing skills on this case. Assuming that the kidnappers are selecting their victims from the pampered pets featured in The Dog News, she persuades the reluctant Andi to shave her shaggy pet Friday into a close imitation of an exotic hairless crested Chinese dog, whom Andi rechristens Lola. Aunt Alice, well known to be allergic to dogs, exults in a planted Bow Wow News interview that she is ecstatic to have realized her lifelong dream of dog ownership with a non-allergenic dog bought on e-Bay. Then, with decoy dog Lola complete with tracking collar as bait, the trap is set for the suspected Jerry and his con man cousin Connor, and the sleuth team sits back and waits for the perps to pick up little Lola. And the chase is on!

Published almost simultaneously with the hit movie based on Lois Duncan's earlier Hotel For Dogs, her sequel News For Dogs (Scholastic, 2009) brings the familiar characters together again in a humorous and fast-paced mystery which elementary readers will find just doggone good fun.

Auld Lang Syne: Happy New Year, Julie by Megan McDonald

True to the format of the earlier American Girls series, Julie Albright's wish for a merry holiday season appears to be impossible. Her divorcing parents seem too wrapped up in their own transitions to think about their children's Christmas. Her mom borrows a tree, but her gifts are homemade crafts from her new business, and Julie and her sister miss the carols and treats and cheery decorations from their old suburban home. Christmas at Dad's is also bleak, with diminished trappings and no good smells of traditional foods to look forward to.

To make things worse, big sister Tracy has a teenage drama queen attack when their father tries to compensate with dinner at a fancy downtown hotel. Fourth-grader Julie turns to her best friend Ivy Ling, who thoughtfully involves Julie in her family's preparations for the Chinese New Year just ahead, but although Julie appreciates the kindness of Ivy's warm extended family, it only makes her own broken family life seem more bleak.

When Ivy's parents invite Julie's sister and parents to share the holiday festivities, Julie fears the worst, but to her surprise, she finds that coming together on a neutral ground makes the challenges of living with her family in the new year a little less daunting.

Although the plot is not unique, in Happy New Year, Julie (American Girls Collection) Megan McDonald's sure voice and skillful writing take the reader right inside Julie's head and heart in this third book in the story of Julie Albright, an American girl growing up in the maelstrom of change that was the
1970's. As always in this historical fiction series, the illustrated appendix adds to the reader's understanding of events and everyday artifacts as Julie's world moves into the new year of 1975.