~Pass It Around~

I love this book.

It's a tale that starts out sounding like it's a simple childrens' story.

And then it starts hitting you right in the heart. "This is the danger of loving: No matter how powerful you are, no matter how many kingdoms you rule, you cannot stop those you love from dying."

Powerful stuff that most authors aren't brave enough to put in a childrens' novel.

Because I adore this book, I always read it aloud for my kids, and they always love it, too. We've used the book this year for lessons on quotation marks, paragraphs, plot structure, text-to-text connections, character development, and poetry writing.

Somewhere along the way it becomes clear that I've infected my kids. They start checking the book our of the school library. There's a bit of a waiting list for the copy I have in my room. They talk their parents into buying it from book orders.

This morning I had to ducktape the hardcover back on our classroom copy. The dust jacket has long since vanished. The pages are dog-eared and filled with old sticky notes marking someone's favorite passage.

Love of literature and stories is infectious.

Who have you passed the bug along to?