{"id":21745,"date":"2017-06-02T08:30:21","date_gmt":"2017-06-02T12:30:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=21745"},"modified":"2017-06-02T08:30:21","modified_gmt":"2017-06-02T12:30:21","slug":"summertime-in-the-bookstore","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/?p=21745","title":{"rendered":"Summertime in the Bookstore"},"content":{"rendered":"

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).
\nIt\u2019s an important moment for any children\u2019s book program because there\u2019s such a big shift that takes place between May and June. The school year offers infinite opportunities for dynamic collaborations with educators\u2014between 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.
\nAs my colleague Topher Bradfield\u2019s Literary Camps ramp up at our local state park, giving hundreds\u00a0 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\u2019ll take on vacation or read under trees or pack for camp\u2014the kind of books that not only stop the summer slide, but build lifelong readers one kid at a time. It\u2019s 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\u2019s actually the best time of year to look ahead and collaborate on blue-sky ideas to push our city\u2019s literacy outreach forward.
\nI 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\u2019ve also weirdly noticed that I tend to crave comfort reading at exactly this time every year as school gets out \u2014 returning to beloved authors and favorite series. It must have something to do with my own subconscious associations with summer, an impulse I can\u2019t quite pinpoint but one that surely traces back to patterns I developed as a child. (Thanks to someone’s summer reading program, no doubt.)
\nThis week last year I remember devouring The Raven King<\/em>, Maggie Stiefvater\u2019s conclusion to her exhilarating, brilliant fantasy series, and I\u2019ve already set aside the book I\u2019m dying to read this weekend. If you didn\u2019t read Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch <\/em>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\u00a0Akata Warrior<\/em> yesterday but am waiting until I have a larger chunk of time this weekend to truly immerse myself. I can\u2019t wait!
\nWhat are you looking forward to reading this summer?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Embracing the joys of the season and choosing my first summer read.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21745\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.publishersweekly.com\/blogs\/shelftalker\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}