Spatulatta is a cooking site for children that has recipes for foods that are real. So the recipes are child-friendly and so is the food, but adults will want to eat it as well.
They have a great cookbook out right now too:
Check out the Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs recipe to get your kids loving turkey meatballs with their spaghetti. Even better, they get to smush the mixture together with their hands, something my 6-year-old considers the essence of culinary skills.
Red Truck by Kersten Hamilton, illustrated by Valeria Petrone.
Red Truck is a hard-working tow truck, especially on a rainy, slushy day when the school bus is stuck on a slippery hill. Red Truck zooms, pulls, and roars its way through the puddles and ice to save the day.
A perfect book for toddlers and young preschoolers, this book reads aloud like a dream. So many truck books for small children are just a list of parts and noises, but this book has a story, action and will be popular from the moment it gets into children’s hands. It is the red truck on the cover and the bright vehicles that pop on the grey background that will have small hands reaching for it. The pictures are very child-friendly and marvelously bold and simple. Perfection for reading to a large group.
Zooooom over and pick this one out. It’s a guaranteed hit with the preschool set. Recommended for ages 2-4.
A Curse Dark as Gold by Elizabeth C. Bunce.
Drawn in immediately by the cover image, I found myself captured by the intricate world I entered and the strength of the characterizations.
Charlotte Miller’s father has just died and she finds herself as a young woman with a younger sister caring for the family’s woolen mill. Without a male running the business, she fights for respect among the other millers and within the textile industry. Threatened with ruin when a mortgage on the mill is discovered, she turns to a strange man who simply appears and offers to spin straw into golden thread in return for her deceased mother’s ring. Charlotte fights to ignore the strangeness of the mill, the string of deaths of boys in her family, and her own growing knowledge that something dark and horrible happened in her family’s past.
I am often not a fan of retellings of tales like Rumplestiltskin as teen novels, but this one really works, primarily because the setting of a woolen mill is so vibrant and moves the story along a different line. Bunce has created not only one strong heroine, but the younger sister serves as a foil for Charlotte, allowing readers a second strong female character to enjoy. But neither girl is a saint. They both have their own problems, personality quirks, and their own responses to desperate times. It is their humanity that breathes such life into them.
This book engulfs the reader, spinning such a tale of curses, death, courage, cunning and strength. Bunce has created one of the best fantasies of the year with her first book. I look forward to seeing what her next one will bring us.
Highly recommended for lovers of fantasy and dark tales. Don’t sell this as a retelling of Rumplestiltskin, rather let the cover speak for the treats that await inside.
NPR has a fairly lengthy piece on the latest installment on the newest Dark Tower graphic novel The Long Road Home. There are simply gorgeous images from the book on the NPR site, nice and large, bright but dark.
If you are a King fan, you can also follow links to other conversations with King on NPR.
Waking Brain Cells 