Brewer's Book Reviews

  1. Bibliography: Fox, Mem. Possum Magic. Illustrated by Julie Vivas, Harcourt, 1983. 2. Plot Summary: In Possum Magic, Grandma Poss is a bush magic-wielding possum living in the Australian outback. She uses her powers to protect her granddaughter, Hush, by making her invisible, with her main goal of keeping her safe from the dangers of the world, specifically snakes. It has other unintended outcomes, allowing Hush to play unseen among her bush friends. At first, invisible life is fun and carefree, but as Hush gets older, she wants to know what she looks like, so she asks her grandma to make her seen again. Grandma Poss is happy to oblige, but quickly realizes that she doesn’t have the spell in her books to turn Hush visible again. One evening, she remembers that the visible spell has something to do with eating HUMAN food, not possum food, and so begins their journey across varying cities in Australia. The grandma and granddaughter possum search for the magical foods that will...

  1. Bibliography Gomi, Tarō. 1993. Everyone Poops. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books. ISBN 9780916291457. 2. Plot Summary Let’s not beat around the bush: Everyone Poops is EXACTLY what the title says. No metaphors here!!!! It literally goes from the tiniest of bugs to the biggest elephants, all the way through to humans. This classic Japanese picture book puts it ALL out there; if something eats, it poops. (Which I mean biologically, we know. It’s science. But definitely not something that is talked about so frankly, and with added pictures usually in our culture). With matter-of-fact text and simple illustrations, Tarō Gomi strips away the taboo and gets kids and young readers thinking about the one thing nobody really talks about but everybody does. Yes, I do mean EVERYBODY. It goes into detail describing how different animals have different size poops, different smelling poops, and even so far as to say that while some animals poop on the go and don’t’ care WHERE they go...

 This summer has been such a whirlwind; I feel like I definitely experienced both growth and frustration when trying out new tools as we went through this summer. The technology aspect added a deeper and more challenging addition to some of the ideas that we've been talking about throughout the course of our SHSU Library Science studies.  The AI assignment was probably one of my favorites for this semester, and one that I see myself utilizing what I learned. For example, just this week, I had another teacher ask me if I would be willing to help her with her bulletin board. This ended up being me doing the bulletin board, as this teacher is close to retirement and has little ability to move around easily, climb on ladders, etc. I wanted to go ahead and get it done since I have a lot on my plate coming back to work. I had sent her screenshots of several different ideas for a board, and she picked the one she liked, which was centered around the theme "You are the author of your ...

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 Some of the guidelines that I am already using in my library include the engagement and access point. I have worked hard in the last year to cultivate a better, more well-rounded, relevant and up-to-date collection, because the average age of our collection was 2000 when I started last summer. I'm hoping that even when it is nonfiction our kids/students are after, they will feel more empowered and self-sufficient with a better collection to browse through for their reading needs.  Because we had lost many books during two separate floods, any of the books that happened to make it through the previous two librarians were hesitant to weed, which means out of the small amount of books we had in the nonfiction section, many of them were irrelevant. There were even science and medical nonfiction books that should have been replaced regularly, and instead had an average age of the 1990's. I've also worked to minimize distractions in the area so that students are able to focus, a...