Like several of my ShelfTalker colleagues this week, my mind is on the transition to the summer season. As I write this on Thursday afternoon, schools across Austin are letting out, marking the last official day of school. And the store is filling up. This week has marked one of the busiest in recent memory, crowded with people looking for summer reads (although today they were mostly flocking to meet YouTube star Ryan Higa).
It’s an important moment for any children’s book program because there’s such a big shift that takes place between May and June. The school year offers infinite opportunities for dynamic collaborations with educators—between author events, book fairs, continuing education partnerships, and more. And May is an especially flurried time of wrapping everything up with schools before everyone goes on their well-deserved hiatus. Then June comes and our programming noticeably relaxes, even as storytimes swell in attendance and summer reading takes center stage. And that can be grounding in a way that helps us take a minute to get back to basics.
As my colleague Topher Bradfield’s Literary Camps ramp up at our local state park, giving hundreds  of lucky kids the chance to actually attend Camp Half-Blood (and brave all the dangers half-bloods so often face in Rick Riordan’s world), the rest of our programming calendar loosens up a bit. Summer in the bookstore means helping families find the books that they’ll take on vacation or read under trees or pack for camp—the kind of books that not only stop the summer slide, but build lifelong readers one kid at a time. It’s also a season when we tend to refocus and refresh our priorities, a terrific time for brainstorming new ideas and next steps, and not just internally. While individual schools are out, district staff is still in the offices, so it’s actually the best time of year to look ahead and collaborate on blue-sky ideas to push our city’s literacy outreach forward.
I also am able to read far more during this season than any other, digging further into upcoming releases and finding new favorites for the fall. I’ve also weirdly noticed that I tend to crave comfort reading at exactly this time every year as school gets out — returning to beloved authors and favorite series. It must have something to do with my own subconscious associations with summer, an impulse I can’t quite pinpoint but one that surely traces back to patterns I developed as a child. (Thanks to someone’s summer reading program, no doubt.)
This week last year I remember devouring The Raven King, Maggie Stiefvater’s conclusion to her exhilarating, brilliant fantasy series, and I’ve already set aside the book I’m dying to read this weekend. If you didn’t read Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch when it published in 2011, this is the perfect time to circle back. Set in Nigeria, the story centers on Sunny, an albino girl with hidden power who unites with other magical kids to fight a great evil. Although that may sound like your standard coming-of-age YA fantasy, Okorafor elevates the genre with rich imagery, distinctive world building, and a powerhouse protagonist coming into her own. It has remained one of my top picks for years. Penguin is at long last putting the first book into paperback with a stunning new look because the much-anticipated sequel is finally coming this fall. I got my hands on Akata Warrior yesterday but am waiting until I have a larger chunk of time this weekend to truly immerse myself. I can’t wait!
What are you looking forward to reading this summer?