JuniorBookWorm.com

Cornelia and the Audacious Somerset Sisters

The last time I fell in love with a couple characters was when Alice and I spent six months or so, reading The Book Thief. Cornelia is wonderful. She is a serious and lonely daughter of a single mother who is a famous pianist. Cornelia befriends an older next door neighbour, Victoria, who is a brilliant story teller. She tells the stories of herself and her three sisters as teenagers. They roamed the world, got into trouble and had a ball. Cornelia gobbles up the stories and learns a lot about life from her. Alice (9) and I loved this book except for one thing. As Alice pithily put it one day, "Is it all going to be these stories?". What she meant by that is that Cornelia is a fascinating character and she is neglected at times. Perhaps Blume (and that is not Judy) will write a sequel that concentrates on Cornelia more, now that Victoria is no longer in the picture. Ages:7-10 

Encyclopedia Britannica?

I am sure that in every generation there are changes that everyone feels are major transitions. But somehow our generation, and perhaps all generations feel this, have gone through amazingly earth shattering changes. Our parents generation received the gift of television, their parents got the car (I guess I am thinking on my feet here and defeating my own thesis but let me go on), our generation were given the web at a time in our lives (if you are a fortysomething) when
one didn't think that the world was going to be reinvented before our eyes. Many of us shacked up, had kids and moved country or bought large possessions, what else could change so radically? And then the World Wide Web happened.
Many things about it took our fancy right away and other things more gradually. I never open a yellow pages anymore, nor do I book things by phone. But getting my head around "research on the net", as my children's homework seems to always include, has taken me awhile. Just last week I pulled out our three Dorling Kindersley encyclopedia and asked my daughter to look up the Aurora Borealis in one of them. Afterall, the facts on the subject have not changed much recently. 
I had to challenged my perceptions about online research recently when a friend told me that she had to get off the phone because Encyclopedia Britannica would be calling her a any moment. Why? Because they had ordered the fifty volume set and were shocked at how disappointing it was. The graphics were largely outdated. So, if you wanted to see what Quebec looked like in 1989, then this book would be appropriate but if you didn't, you were stuck with it and a few feet more of it as well.
So now they were going to be back to square one, if they could return it.
Wikipedia keeps getting better. Online information includes factual errors but many sources are constantly checked and reevaluated. Are we victims of the Dewey Decimal system or can we embrace research that excludes indexes and card files? Are books no longer necessary for research? We'd like our readers to respond and help our ex-Britannica customers know what to do.