Happy new year!  I’ve enjoyed having the month of January off, but am ready to get back to work!  I’ve started reading 2017 books, and will start reviewing them tomorrow morning.

Thank you for all your messages!  I got many emails and comments, and it was gratifying to hear how many people out there are using the reviews on this blog to choose books for kids, whether it’s for a library, classroom, or family.

As many suggested, I may slow down the pace, possibly taking a day or two off each week, and going on an occasional vacation.

What did I read in January?  I finished up some 2016 books, like Slacker by Gordon Korman, I Am Jazz by Jazz Jennings, and Life in Motion by Misty Copeland.  I was planning on posting reviews of these, but I spilled water on my laptop, and am pretty sure the reviews I wrote are gone.  I recommend all three, although read I Am Jazz first if you’re planning to put it in a school library.

While I was gone, ALA announced all its award winners.  What did you think?  I was pretty happy overall, although I was disappointed The Wild Robot and Some Writer! didn’t get any recognition.

Well, onto 2017!  I do enjoy hearing from you, so feel free to comment or email me (jkdhamilton@gmail.com) any time.

I’ve been posting daily book reviews since February 20, 2015, and I’m ready for a break.  I love doing this blog, but as you can imagine, it’s time-consuming to read and review a book every day.  For the last few weeks, I’ve been thinking about shutting down, but I’m not ready to call it quits for good.

I’ve decided to take the month of January off.  It’s a good time, since I’ve read and reviewed most of the 2016 books I want to, and it will be a few weeks until I can start getting my hands on 2017 books.  I’ll use the time off to decide whether or not I’ll continue reviewing in 2017, and get back to you no later than February 1.

In the meantime, I’d love to hear feedback about the blog, so please feel free to leave a comment or email me at jkdhamilton@gmail.com.  Thank you so much for reading my reviews, and I will be back in a few weeks!

In case a book review a day isn’t enough for you, I’m now reviewing books for Boston Parents Paper blog.  To see this month’s column, go to http://www.bostonparentspaper.com, scroll down to “Halloween Spooktacular!”, then click on “Best Kids Books for Halloween”.  (It’s under my other name, Janet Dawson).

The staff here at A Kids Book A Day will be camping for a week.  In the A Kids Book A Day family, “camping” means sleeping in tents, and does not–some would say, unfortunately–involve any sort of generation of electricity.  So blog postings will be suspended for the duration.  We will return to our regularly scheduled programming next Monday.

A little personal history:  a few weeks after starting this blog in 2015, I separated with my husband and moved out of my house with my two daughters.  We’ve lived in an apartment for a little over a year.  Six months later, I started a new job 60 miles away in western Massachusetts.  I stayed in the apartment to let my younger daughter finish high school.  In April, I closed on a house, and today is moving day.  It’s been an eventful year to say the least.  I’m not sure what my Internet status will be for the next few days, so I’m taking a bit of a vacation, and hope to be back later this week.

A year ago today, I started A Kids Book a Day with a review of the aptly titled A Wonderful Year by Nick Bruel. This morning I published post #365, making it truly a kids’ book a day for a full year!  So what do you think?  Have the reviews been helpful to you?  Anything you’d like to see different for year 2?  Leave me a birthday comment!

You may think it’s the end of January, but here in Kid’s Book a Day land, it’s New Year’s Eve.  Some of you keen-eyed blog readers might have noticed that last night I changed the year in the subtitle from 2015 to 2016.  Starting tomorrow, all books reviewed will be published in 2016.  Here’s hoping for as many wonderful books as we saw in 2015!

Here’s the link to this year’s winners.  The Newbery winner was a total surprise to me!  What do you think of the selections?

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/american-library-association-announces-2016-youth-media-award-winners-300202055.html

I’ve recently finished adding categories to all the book review posts.  You can see the categories on the right-hand side of the screen (you may need to scroll down).  If you click on a category, you will get all the books I’ve reviewed from that genre.  This suggestion came from a reader.  Please let me know if there are other ways I can make this blog more helpful or easier to use!

I’m very excited to be starting this blog!  I’m a school librarian at two elementary schools, and for the last year or so, I’ve been writing a weekly book review for teachers there.  Every week I find there are more books to review than can fit in a weekly email, so I’ve decided to start this blog with the goal of posting a new book review every day!  All the books I review will be brand new, published in 2015.

I’d like to review books in all different genres and for different grade levels.  In case you’re looking for something specific, and you don’t want to have to check every day, I’ll have a few days of the week when I always do the same genre.  They will be:

• Middle Grade Monday – Chapter books recommended for grades 4-6
• Third Grade Thursday – Early chapter books, good for grades 2 and 3 (nothing against second grade, it’s just that Third Grade Thursday is a little more alliterative!)
• Factual Friday – Nonfiction!
• Story time Sunday – Read-aloud picture books, mostly for the primary grades

The other days of the week will be a mix of all of the above.

I usually write reviews with teachers in mind, but I’d love to spread the word to parents and anyone else who enjoys children’s books.  Please feel free to pass on a link to this blog to anyone you know that may be interested!