Pennsylvania Young Reader’s Choice Awards

My first book, The Tilting House, is a finalist in the Pennsylvania Young Reader’s Choice Awards, in the grade three-to-six category. It’s a pretty short list. I wish I knew some sneaky, underhanded way to get these brilliant Penn State kids to vote for my book…

Anyway, if you want to see the list, go here: http://tinyurl.com/3j6769k

See what a crazy classroom of kids did with my first book

I’ve been doing a lot of author talks surrounding my first book, The Tilting House, which is a middle reader novel (9-12 age range). I greatly prefer to do these talks to students after they have read the book. While nearly all the students I’ve spoken to have done some sort of associated projects, such as illustrating a chapter or writing a letter to me, none have taken it as far as the following group of over-achievers, as you’ll see from the email I received a few days ago:

Hi Tom,

The 3rd-5th grade community at University Child Development School
would like to tell you how much we enjoyed reading The Tilting House.
The content was so rich that we were able to extend it into our weekly
math problems.  Our students created their own geo-block tilting
houses, found the surface area and scaled them to full size.
Furthermore, we solved “writing on the wall” math problems dealing
with Platonic and Archemedian solids.  Finally, once we finished the
book, we had a Tilting House celebration with grow powder doughnuts,
dress up the Daga family, decorate your tilting house and The Tilting
House trivia.  Our students could barely handle the suspense at the
end and were sad when it was over.

Sincerely,
UCDS 3-5th grade team

Grow powder doughnuts? I’m interested.

Tom

Brilliant thoughts from the kids at Bryant Montessori

Yesterday I did an author talk with the kids at Bryant Montessori in Tacoma, Washington. They’d all read my first book, The Tilting House, and were ridiculously excited to have a “real author” (whatever that means) come and talk to them. That’s what I love about kids–if they like something, they show it. No need to be cool. No need to be reserved. If they want an author to sign their arms, they just roll up their sleeves.

These small humans also wrote some lovely letters to me beforehand. Here are a few highlights:

“Dear Mr. Llewellyn, Why did you make Victor Peat and his brother have a black Cadillac? Ws it because they had to look professional?” – Rosemary

“Mr. L, I like the book. I had fun reading the book. I like the way you used the name Josh. From Joshua.”

“Dear Mr. Llewellyn, Some of the book is scary. Did you have these thoughts when you were a kid?” – Eden

And here are a few sample stories created during a writing exercise with the same group of students:

“A famous chef made a cake then a dog came and ate it. Well, the people were inside. The people came out and realized that the cake was gone and they saw the dog standing there with a cake mustache and they chased the dog until they got the dog. The end.”

“Once upon  a time there was a famous chef. So it was his wife’s birthday. So he made a cake for his wife. All of a sudden, Sawman jumped out of the cake and Sawman was cutting everybody’s head off.”

“There once was a ninja who rescued the president, but he was not an ordinary ninja, he was the Great Ninja of the World!!!. The end.”

“Once upon a time there was a cat. The cat jumped on a windowsill. Because the cat liked to look out of the window.”

“The dog is a famous chef who couldn’t resist eating his wedding cakes. Then one day when he was feeling extra awesome he did not eat his wedding cake. He took it to the church where the old man with the canary was getting married. But then the dog felt hungry and ate the whole wedding cake. The he drove back but on the way he fell asleep, crashed into the ocean and drowned. The end.” – Jude

The future of literature is clearly in good hands.

Tom