Cover Characteristic: Elephant(s)

The Cover Characteristic meme is hosted at  Sugar and Snark.   Here are the guidelines:

Each week we will post a characteristic and choose 5 of our favorite covers with that characteristic. If you want to join in and share your 5 favorite covers with the weeks particular characteristic, then just make a post, grab the meme picture (or make your own) and leave your URL in Linky (so we can visit).
You don’t even need to participate, just stopping by and saying hi would be great! Don’t forget to stop by the other participants!

So I found just about exactly 5 for this.  I think in no particular order.  These are all books I've read.

1.

2.

3.

Now these next two are mammoths, so kind of elephants.

4.

5.

So, I'm guessing that everyone doing this will end up with the Water for Elephants cover.  Can you think of any other covers? 

A to Z April: Z Reviews: Zach's Lie by Roland Smith/Zombie Blondes by Brian James

Can you believe it?  April is over!  And I completed the A to Z Challenge with this post!  And believe it or not, I found two books I read that started with the letter Z that I hadn't reviewed yet.  The other Z book I had already reviewed.  One of these is more middle grade, then the other is definitely a teen read.

First is Zach's Lie by Roland Smith.  It's the first in a two book series, that concludes with Jack's Run, about a boy whose family has to go into the witness protection program.  The main character is Jack, who becomes Zach in the program.  And of course as boys that age might be likely to do, he does something that gets his family in danger again.  I'm a huge fan of Roland Smith, he is probably one of the first authors I really got to meet when I started on my current quest of meeting all my favorite authors/rock stars.  Here's the blurb from Goodreads:
Jack Osborne's life changes forever the night men in masks break into his house, threaten Jack and his family, and ransack their home. Jack then discovers the reason these men have come into their lives-his father has been arrested for drug trafficking.

Jack, his mother, and his sister are then forced to enter Witness Security Program. Jack becomes "Zach" and moves to Elko, Nevada, a town in the middle of nowhere. There he meets Sam, the strangest school custodian he has ever encountered, and Catalin, a girl who might make Zach's uprooting worth the trouble. But just as Zach finally begins to piece together a new life, he finds himself in danger again-and this time his actions could determine the fates of everyone he cares about.

The second book I'm talking about today is called Zombie Blondes by Brian James.  I think this was one of the first YA zombie books I remember reading and really liking.  I think I also posted a review somewhere and even got a thank you from the author!  I just can't remember where.  Here is the blurb from Goodreads:
From the moment Hannah Sanders arrived in town, she felt there was something wrong.
     A lot of houses were for sale, and the town seemed infected by an unearthly quiet. And then, on Hannah’s first day of classes, she ran into a group of cheerleaders—the most popular girls in school.
     The odd thing was that they were nearly identical in appearance: blonde, beautiful, and deathly pale.
     But Hannah wants desperately to fit in—regardless of what her friend Lukas is telling her: if she doesn’t watch her back, she’s going to be blonde and popular and dead—just like all the other zombies in this town. . . .


Have you read any books by Roland Smith?  Are you a fan of zombie stories?  Will you try to read this one?  And while you're here, it's the very last day to enter my giveaway below!


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A to Z April: C Reviews - Cheating at Solitaire by Ally Carter/Cryptid Hunters by Roland Smith

So, this post didn't get done as far ahead of time as I'd hoped, and I'm thinking that in order to make sure I get everything done like I should for this challenge, I may end up with just posting the synopsis from Goodreads and then telling what I liked about it.  Today's choices are two really different types of books.  The first one goes along with the Chick Lit I've been sharing so far in this A to Z challenge.  The second book today is a kids book.

The first book is called Cheating at Solitaire.  Many of my followers may know the author more for her YA books, the Gallagher Girls  and Heist Society series.  I haven't read any of those, but loved this book.  In fact when I got to meet the author back in 2013 at the Romantic Times Convention in Kansas City, she was shocked to see that was the book I had.  I loved the theme of how it was okay to be single, but then of course there was a fun fall into being in love with a cute guy.  Here's the blurb from Goodreads.com:
Self-help guru Julia James is so good at being single that she's become famous for it-advising women that they don't need a man to be happy. Then the unthinkable happens. Just when her newest book, 101 Ways to Cheat at Solitaire, is about to hit stores, a trumped-up piece of gossip linking her to a gorgeous actor hits the papers. Their pictures are splashed all over the tabloids, and now Julia's credibility is about to hit rock bottom. But she isn't going down without a fight. Unless, that is, the actor is going down with her.

The second book is called Cryptid Hunters and it is by Roland Smith.  I got to meet Roland Smith one of my first few years teaching, but it was before I'd discovered just how much I loved meeting authors, so no picture. :-(  I've always been a fan of strange creatures, like the Loch Ness monster, Bigfoot, and other similar things. Especially while the show The X-Files was on and I learned of even more, like the Chupacabra to name one.  So this book about two twins who get swept into the world of searching for these strange creatures was right up my alley.  Here is the blurb from Goodreads.com:
After their parents are lost in an accident, thirteen-year old twins Grace and Marty are whisked away to live with their Uncle Wolfe-an uncle that they didn't even know they had! The intimidating Uncle Wolfe is an anthropologist who has dedicated his life to finding cryptids, mysterious creatures believed to be long extinct.



Have you read either of these authors or any of their books?  Do you like cryptozoology, the study of these strange creatures?

While you're here, make sure you enter my giveaway below!


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Elephant Run by Roland Smith

I am a HUGE Roland Smith fan. I was first introduced to his writing when he came to speak at my school, and I have yet to be disappointed by a book from him. I will admit this started out a bit slow, I was reading it just during lunch at school, and I think that was the problem. When you pick this book up and just read, you soon get sucked into it. This is another book that really gets you interested in history. Elephant Run takes place in Burma during World War 2. There isn't really a Burma anymore. It is Myanmar now. But this talks about the elephants in that area and tells how the Japanese came in and used the elephants and the people who trained them, the mahouts, to build up their defense. I love the nature that Roland Smith also uses in his books.

I also like that there are literature circle questions included with this addition of the book. Tempts me to use it as a book I read during my Greater Gator class next year. We'll see. I do kind of like to do books that they can read off the Truman list to help the librarian as well.

2010 Warrensburg Children's Literature Festival

This is a break from my usual book review blogs, yet in a way, I will review an author and her book. First I want to put the link to the webpage that tells about this event:

http://guides.library.ucmo.edu/clf

I have heard about this for the past few years, but not at my school. This is actually more for kids at the elementary grade level, up to about 6th grade. I actually learned about this from the bookstore I work at. It actually seems as if the Park Hill School district goes to this more often than I would guess the NKC school district does, although I could just be unaware since I don't contact our elementary schools much. It takes place during University of Central Missouri's (UCM)spring break, which coincided with NKC's spring break this year. So when an email came on the Missouri Association of School Librarians (MASL) Listserv asking for volunteers, I thought about how I'd like to experience this. As soon as the schedule for this week was up at the bookstore, I emailed to volunteer for the last day of the festival. My confirmation email told me that I would be hosting author Marie Smith for the day.

At first I wasn't sure who my author was. Then one night at the bookstore last week, I was putting away a Roland Smith book, and I realized that Marie was his wife. I met Roland Smith at my school about 8 or 9 years ago when he came to speak at several schools in my district. From that time on I was hooked on his books: Jaguar, Thunder Cave, Zach's Lie, Jack's Run, Cryptid Hunters, etc. Roland and his wife Marie have written several ABC books together: B is for Beaver an Oregon alphabet, Z is for Zookeeper a zoo alphabet, W is for Waves an ocean alphabet, S is for Smithsonian America's Museum Alphabet, E is for Evergreen a Washington State Alphabet, and N is for our Nations's Capital a Washington D.C. Alphabet, the book I purchased and had autographed.

Meeting Marie I was instantly impressed. She was very collected, and knew exactly what she wanted to do. And when I listened to her speak and saw her slides at the first session today, I was even more interested in her. Marie Smith's grandmother was an eskimo. And she comes from a big family, and even has family from Missouri! She loves to bake pies, and fell into writing when her husband asked her to help him write the first alphabet book, B is for Beaver. She was very nice, and interacted with the kids wonderfully.

The last thing I want to say is that I am now inspired to write my own alphabet book. I won't give away what my topic is, but I got tips on how to write it, and already have a lot of my letters figured out. She talked about her publisher, Sleeping Bear Press, and I will try to send them my finished manuscript. I'm hoping I can work and get it done this summer. So I'll be researching and working as I can starting now. She did say the hardest letter was X, and that publishers will completely reject a book if they don't like what you have for that, so I'll be working on finding the perfect word for that.