(DLA Las Piñas HS LRC) March Author of the Month - Kiera Cass

Please give a warm welcome to one of the new all-American young and awesome femme fatale fiction authors we have in our lineup hitting the shelves sooner rather than later -- Kiera Cass! We do have a lot of writers already but what makes her any different? Let us have the pleasure of telling you why!

She was born and raised in South Carolina, a proud child of the 80's. Her first book contrary to popular belief was not the bestselling The Selection but was titled The Siren and it was self-published in 2009 while she was five months pregnant.

The Siren was a result of Kiera's world getting shaken in 2007 by a local tragedy which she took pretty hard. Over the course of the following year, she tried a lot of things to get herself together and she ended up sitting down to write a story where the character had to deal with her problems so that she wouldn't have to.

However, that wasn't The Siren yet! She was not able to end that story though but after waking up from a nap at that time, Kiera finally came up with the idea that would become The Siren. Ideas for the dystopial novel, The Selection, and other stories came not so long afterwards once she got into the habit of writing even if The Siren did not have quite the successful following.

In early 2010, she found a cool gal at HarperTeen and an even cooler agent who helped publish The Selection in 2012 (while she was pregnant again!). Kiera is currently 33, living in Vancouver with her hubby and two kids, Guyden and Zuzu. She loves spending her free time on social media (making videos on YouTube and entertaining people on Twitter), eating cake, and being married.

(DLA Las Piñas GS LRC) March Book of the Month - Yankee Girl

The International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination is observed annually every 21st of March since the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed it in 1966 and called on the international community to redouble its efforts to eliminate all forms of racial discrimination after police opened fire and killed 69 people at a peaceful demonstration in South Africa against the apartheid pass laws last 1960 on the very same day.

This month, we're featuring Yankee Girl, an unflinching resonant story about racism and culture clash in the 1960s. It's about a young American girl, Alice Ann Moxley, who has just moved to Mississippi from her home in Chicago after her FBI-agent father has been reassigned to protect black people who are registering to vote.

The year is 1964 when there were still divisions between the South and North of the United States of America and there are racially motivated attacks, especially in Mississippi. Alice is finding life in Mississippi difficult, with the threat of an attack on her home from the Ku Klux Klan, her new school being one of the first in the area to accept coloured children and being picked on because she is not the same as the rest of her class.

She is nicknamed "Yankee Girl" and taunted by the popular girls at school she calls the Cheerleaders, although she soon discovers that the other new girl, Valerie - the school's first black student - suffers much worse. Soon Alice realizes the only way to befriend the girls is to seem like a co-conspirator in their plans to make Valerie miserable. It takes a horrible tragedy for her to realize the complete ramifications of following the crowd instead of her heart.

The story travels with Alice through this time, as she has to make some difficult life and social choices, which could affect her life and her parents. This is the first book of Mary Ann Rodman, a former school media specialist and university librarian, and is based on her own childhood experience. The main characters are drawn true to form while the plot is one which will make any intelligent and caring person angry but will also make those same people sad because any of this had even happened.

(DLA Las Piñas HS LRC) March Book of the Month - What Happened to Goodbye

You may not be able to borrow books right now from the library until we kickoff the brand new School Year 2014-2015 but that sure won't be stopping us from recommending you more books to check out once you get back (which means more books to add to your already long reading lists).

For the first day of March, we're highly suggesting you get your hands and your eyes on realistic fiction author Sarah Dessen's 2011 novel, What Happened to Goodbye.

The book chronicles the life of seventeen-year-old Mclean Sweet through her journey of change, family dynamics, high school, identity issues, friendship, and self-discovery amongst many things as she reinvents herself everytime she moves houses when her dad finishes a 'project'.

It's actually your very average kind of teenage rant and who can't relate with that, right? Except for the fact that this is Sarah Dessen we're talking about and literary awards or nada, she's definitely today's one of the best writers in the genre today so of course she adds her own twists on the typical! Here's a lovely quote from Dessen's site.

Good books, like our true selves, aren’t instantly created or perfectly crafted. They are messy and frustrating and flawed, which are exactly the same things that make them real.

Quite true, isn't it? Lots of people will be graduating at this time of the month or on the first week of April and even if you're not graduating, you're still going away for the summer vacation. You'll be leaving school where we admittedly meet most of the people that we learn to cherish and who mold us in the long run. Better see the book for yourself and tell us what you think. ;D

(DLA Las Piñas GS LRC) March Author of the Month - Enid Blyton

This month we're honoring the first Enid Blyton Day held at Rickmansworth, a small town in south-west England situated approximately 20 miles northwest of central London and inside the perimeter of the M25 motorway, on March 6, 1993.

Enid Mary Blyton, an English children's writer whose books have been among the world's bestsellers since the 1930s, was born on 11 August 1897 in London, the eldest of three children, to Thomas Carey, a cutlery salesman, and his wife Theresa Mary Harrison.

A few months after her birth Enid almost died from whooping cough, but was nursed back to health by her father, whom she adored. He ignited her interest in nature; in her autobiography she wrote that he "loved flowers and birds and wild animals, and knew more about them than anyone I had ever met".

Thomas also passed on his interest in gardening, art, music, literature and the theatre, and the pair often went on nature walks, much to the disapproval of Enid's mother, who showed little interest in her daughter's pursuits. And so Enid was devastated when he left the family shortly after her thirteenth birthday to live with another woman. She wrote on a wide range of topics including education, natural history, fantasy, mystery stories and biblical narratives.

During the months following her husband's death, Blyton became increasingly ill and moved into a nursing home three months before her death. She died in London on November 28, 1968 at the age of 71. As of today, her books have sold more than 600 million copies. They are still enormously popular and have been translated into almost 90 languages.

The British-American CGI-animated series for children named Make Way for Noddy which aired in GMA Network was based on Enid's Noddy character. You may check out some of her books that are currently on display at the Grade School Learning Resource Center at the Divine Light Academy Las Piñas.

DLA Las Piñas GS LRC: Top Library Users & Borrowers (February 2014)

Top Library Users

Norena P. De Boer

Science Area

Kevin Yuri M. Angeles

5 - Humility

Top Library Borrowers

Ava J. Orlino

Science Area

Elijah J. Liang

1 - Gentleness

Theophilus Aragorn R. Carpina

1 - Mildness

Gabriel Emmanuel G. Dirvata

2 - Patience