Monday, May 4, 2015

Animorphs for Reluctant Readers

I like helping kids connect with books. When family members are struggling to find books for their kids I tend be one of the people that tries to help make that connection. For one particular family, lately most of those series have been out of print series that I have to hunt through library book sales or online used book stores to find the books.

Recently, I've been struggling to help one family member make that connection. However, at a local book sale we found a box of Animorphs books. For the price of about two new paperbacks we walked away with a large portion of the series. I was able to determine just how much using Scholastic's free Book List for the series found here. I waited to see if the child went home with the books and read them, but as predicted the books are a hit. The books are not high works of literature, but they do attract reluctant readers into the pages. Now I am tasked with finding the series.

The last time I had searched for a family member the series was not available outside the second hand market. However, much to my surprise and bad luck the beginning of the series is available in print currently it looks up to book 7. After checking my list I realized our first used book hunt had produced all but Animorphs #2: The Visitor of those available through the new market. So, I'm off hunting again. Thankfully, this is the season for library book sales. I'll pick up the new one as a birthday gift and hunt down the rest as I can.

I also discovered while looking that the Goosebumps books are back out again. Again, I hadn't looked in a bit, I'd primarily purchased what ever was available second hand. However,when I started my hunt for Animorphs an additional request was made for Goosebumps and while we were able to pick up later ones in the series, the early ones have been more elusive. So, I was quite happy to find the early ones available for sale. Just as a heads up the ones currently available are not in the same order as those originally published. The first one published in the 1990's is now currently number 13 I believe. So if you are working as I am with old and new, you will have to compare not only numbers, but titles, as they have changed. To make it even more confusing they had multiple series and numbers to begin with when they were first published. It can make it challenging to keep track.