Between These Pages (Blog)

Between These Pages--Book Reviews for Children's Books

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This blog is dedicated to reviewing different children's books from Easy Readers, to Picture Books, to independent reader choices.

The blog is written by an elementary school teacher that wants to provide thoughtful and solid information on different books that are out there for kids. In her own words, she realized that there is no guidance for what is contained within different children's books and therefore wanted to provide a clear rating that evaluated the same criteria in each book reviewed to give a clear picture about what it is about.  She makes a disclaimer as to the fact that these are her opinions about the selected texts and viewers may have different feelings. 

The blog ran from July 2010 to December 2010 and listed a large number of reviews for different children's books including variations of The Nutcracker, Dinosaur books, Teen interests and many more.  The very clear aspect that is a big bonus to her reviews is that she writes each one in the same format.  She gives a summary of the work, her opinions and then has a basic list of information that she believes it is important to include that answers questions about stronger themes within the text such as sex, nudity, dating, profanity, violence and others.  This gives a clear picture about what the book is about and allows the reader to evaluate if it is good or bad for their child/teen.

The blog also does posts on story variations.  There were a series of posts about the Nutcracker story and different tellings so blog readers can see the differences and similarites between each story.  There is also a later post that breaks down interesting books on dinosaurs for different level readers.

A downside to the author's reviews is that she avoids writing about series books.  Popular series are books of a style that are read over and over and it could be important to include those so when kids read the same series, it is clear what they are getting into each time they open the book.

This blog has no timeline of when books are reviewed.  It could be old books or new books or whatever the author feels like reviewing at that point.  Because there is no guidance, this can be a bit confusing, but it still provides quality, well written reviews about different books and covers a wide range of topics.

There have been no new posts for over a year and of the posts written, there are not many comments so it is not an active blog.

If an educator is looking, this blog can provide some solid information on resources for your classroom and books that different students may enjoy.  Because the author of the blog adds tags to the work, it is easy to find recommendations based on different subjects.  This blog could definitely be an asset to any classroom adding books.

For readers, this blog is an easy way to find that next great read as well as learn about different variations of works and age ranges so they can find the perfect fit.