Ms Rush Reads

BOUNCE by Natasha Friend copyright date: August 2007 primarily marketed for: young adult (7th grade up) Bounce by Natasha Friend has sat on my shelf for years.   Because it is nominated for the Rebecca Caudill Young Readers’ Book Award this February, I finally picked it up and cracked open the cover.   And, boy, am I glad I did.   In its pages I not only discovered reasons to laugh and reasons to get choked up, I also discovered a new favorite author.   Since reading Bounce , I have been on a mission to read all of Natasha Friend’s books. Bounce is the story of a girl named Evyn , who, although her mother died years ago, is not ready to see her father move on.   While she and her brother were away at camp for the summer, her father has met a new woman and plans to marry her.   To make matters worse, Evyn’s future stepmom has 6 children for Evyn and her brother to embrace as siblings.   With hilarious scenes th...

copyright date: March 2013 primarily marketed for: young adults (high school) Dr. Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets by Evan Roskos begins “I yawp…” and ends, “Yawp!”   And if that isn’t enough to love, the middle is filled with quotes from Walt Whitman scattered amongst wise words from a pigeon therapist, and a story that is both genuinely funny and heartachingly real.   It is one of those stories that seems as if it was written simply for my own delight, but perhaps you, too, will fall in love with it. James is a teenager who suffers from anxiety attacks and a depression that is possibly part of bipolar disorder, though no official diagnosis is named in the book.   His older sister was recently kicked out of the house by his emotionally detached parents after she is expelled from school for an outburst that resulted in a fight.   As a means of coping with his mental state and the instability in his home life, James invents a pigeon ...