Thursday, August 1, 2013

August Author in the Spotlight

August Author in the Spotlight

Happy August everyone!!  I have 16 days left of summer before I head back to work/school.  I love summer and plan to make the most of my last days off before the school year begins.  I am taking my kids on a 12 mile bike ride tomorrow and two kids from the neighborhood have asked to tag along.  My kids are going to Wisconsin Dells next week and I will get time home alone during the day (yay) and time with my husband at night.  Then it is a mad rush to squeeze in last minute appointments as well as all these good books I plan to devour this month including two by August Author in the Spotlight, Mary Losure.

Mary has written two books, The Fairy Ring and Wild Boy.  Each of these books are non-fiction and appropriate for children.

Here is the synopsis from Good Reads:

The Fairy Ring or Elsie and Frances Fool the World:

The enchanting true story of a girl who saw fairies, and another with a gift for art, who concocted a
story to stay out of trouble and ended up fooling the world.

Frances was nine when she first saw the fairies. They were tiny men, dressed all in green. Nobody but Frances saw them, so her cousin Elsie painted paper fairies and took photographs of them "dancing" around Frances to make the grown-ups stop teasing. The girls promised each other they would never, ever tell that the photos weren’t real. But how were Frances and Elsie supposed to know that their photographs would fall into the hands of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? And who would have dreamed that
the man who created the famous detective Sherlock Holmes believed ardently in fairies
— and wanted very much to see one? Mary Losure presents this enthralling true story as a fanciful narrative featuring the original Cottingley fairy photos and previously unpublished drawings and images from the family’s archives. A delight for everyone with a fondness for fairies, and for anyone who has ever started something that spun out of control.

Wild Boy.  The Real Life of the Savage of Aveyron:
What happens when society finds a wild boy alone in the woods and tries to civilize him? A true story from the author of The Fairy Ring.

One day in 1798, woodsmen in southern France returned from the forest having captured a naked boy. He had been running wild, digging for food, and was covered with scars. In the village square, people gathered around, gaping and jabbering in words the boy didn’t understand. And so began the curious public life of the boy known as the Savage of Aveyron, whose journey took him all the way to Paris. Though the wild boy’s world was forever changed, some things stayed the same: sometimes, when the mountain winds blew, "he looked up at the sky, made sounds deep in his throat, and gave great bursts of laughter." In a moving work of narrative nonfiction that reads like a novel, Mary Losure invests another compelling story from history with vivid and arresting new life.

This month you can expect a two book reviews, a contest, a guest post from Mary and an author interview.  You can visit Mary Losure at her website:  http://www.marylosure.com/  Please visit Booksnob often and enjoy the last month of summer!!