📚 Title: Don’t Check Out This Book!
📚 Author: Kate Klise, M. Sarah Klise
📚 Publisher: Algonquin Young Readers
📚 Publish Date: March 10, 2020
📚 Book Form: E-ARC
📚 Pages: 160
📚 Genre: MG, Humor
📚 Dates Read: Mar 7
📚 Rating: 📚📚📚.5
Thank you to Algonquin Young Readers for a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and feelings are my own.
In Don’t Check Out This Book!, Appleton Elementary School has a new librarian, Rita B Danjerous. Not everyone in Appleton likes her unconventional methods or her infamous Green Dot Collection, which allows students to borrow books discreetly, without actually checking them out. Under Rita’s influence, students like Reid Durr and Ben Thinken, and even the absent-minded principal, Noah Memree, are staying up way too late reading. While Rita inspires the students and faculty alike, the new school board president and impeccably mannered shop owner Ivana Beprawpa is busy working to shut down the library and force students into uniforms available only at Beprawpa Attire. But what’s behind Ivana’s school uniform policy? A team of fifth-grade sleuths is determined to get to the bottom of Appleton’s juiciest scandal ever.
Author Kate Klise’s books are “fresh, funny, and a delight to read” (School Library Journal). Here she uses her skill and wit to introduce kids to serious topics, such as censorship and abuse of power. “I was really motivated to cook up a book-banning character who could embody all the pettiness and corruption we see in the world today,” Klise says. “I also wanted to create some book-loving characters who could prevail in the end.” Beneath Appleton’s mystery, there is a pure, unabashed celebration of words, and the rights of all readers to choose their own books. Hilarious, empowering, and exciting, Don’t Check Out This Book! is filled with clever winks to the audience, as if to say “You’re a reader. You get it.” And by the end, we do.
Big thanks to Algonquin Young Readers for inviting me to take part in this blog tour! This was a funny, yet touching MG about the power of books and standing up for what’s right.
This book was so funny! A lot of the names were puns – like Rita B. Danjerous, Etta Toryal, and Gladys Friday. It is also an epistolary format which is my favorite format to read!
In Don’t Check Out This Book, you get memos, emails, letter, and newspaper articles that document the school hiring a brand new librarian. She has a ‘green dot’ collection of books that you don’t need your library card to check out and this is just unacceptable to the superintendent of the school. She is very against books in general. She thinks children should follow the rules.
Rita, the librarian, is trying to teach the kids to question rules and who made them. Always do what you think is right and stand for what you believe in.
This novel is a laugh-out-loud story of the power of books and loud, mean people don’t win! I think it’s a great, important read for kids aged 8-12. Perfect for a classroom!
Kate Klise is the award-winning author of more than 30 books for young readers, many of which are illustrated by her sister, M. Sarah Klise. On her way to becoming an author, Kate Klise worked as a babysitter, waitress, ice-skating instructor, and rosebush pruner. She was also a journalist and spent 15 years reporting for People magazine. When she’s not working on a new book, she enjoys traveling around the country, sharing her best writing tips and tricks with aspiring authors of all ages.
M. Sarah Klise has always had a fondness for creating colorful book reports, which began in elementary school with yarn-bound volumes on states and countries. In college, she enjoyed writing heavily illustrated letters home to her mother. Years later, she still does variations of all that when she illustrates books for young readers. She also teaches art classes in Berkley, CA.
Is Don’t Check Out This Book on your radar? Let me know in the comments below!
Until next time…
Mithah Reads 