Review of A Good Long Way out of San Anto

http://www.mysanantonio.com/default/article/That-pivotal-moment-before-adulthood-981716.php

Here's the latest review. So far so good.

Currently Reading...

Ofelia Dumas Lachtman's The Summer of El Pintor, the first in the Monica Ramos series (apologies: I couldn't find a quick image of this book). A few posts below I write about her other works. Man! How could I not have read her before! She needs to be in classrooms at the older elementary levels (Call Me Consuelo) and middle and high school classrooms.

Not To Be Outdone, Mikah...

Not to be outdone by his older brother, though inspired by him, Mikah, too, does comics and mixed media art. The first he calls "Portrait of Daddy," or something like that. The next is his "comic," though looking carefully at it, you see that there is no storyline from panel to panel, BUT he did tell individual stories, full blown and including rabbit trails, with each panel.

Lukas' First Full-color Comic

Though a bit on the "old" side (meaning, from the end of his Kindergarten year), here's Lukas' first full-color comic. The assignment came with like two weeks to go before the end fo the school year, and it was a kind of free-write/free time the teacher gave the students. Lukas showed up with this after school and told me the story that unfolds from panel to panel. He loves all things Star Wars/Clone Wars, and this is his vision of a battle between the Droids and the Clones Warriors, Captain Rex et al. Just the other day I showed it to him and, once he'd thought about the work some, he was able to tell me the same story, basically. It's grown some since then, but so has he. I should expect huger stories from him.

Audio of The Case of the Pen Gone Missing: A Mickey Rangel Mystery

So here's a first for me: an audio version of one of my books, The Case of the Pen Gone Missing: A Mickey Rangel Mystery, in Spanish and English.

I'm excited. So much so I put it on for my boys to listen to the other day: Lukas was on his DS playing one of his games and I thought he wasn't listening (keyword: thought), and Mikah started out listening (keywords: started out). Mikah maybe listened through chapter one, maybe part of two, but he was more intrigued by the psycadelic images on the computer screen than the story itself. When he wandered away from the computer, I said, "Okay, I guess I'll turn off my story." But Lukas said no, that he was listening to it, and sure enough, he was. There's mention of a trinket bracelet in chapter one, that later becomes a part of the unraveling of the mystery, and when I asked him its significance, he was able to tell me ("No," he said, "she's lying b/c it wasn't her grandmother who gave it to her but the bad guy, her boyfriend."). He was listening. But at just over 40 minutes, even my story wasn't enough to keep him onboard. He, too, wandered away for the final chapter. It's a good read. Get a copy at http://www.loritobooks.com/ or friend Lorito Books on Facebook.