(DLA Las Piñas GS LRC) February Book of the Month - Big Nate

If there's a common thread among bestselling books for elementary school boys, it's the merry mischief maker traipsing through a comics-laden landscape. It is now a common literary trajectory that boys begin their independent reading lives following Dav Pilkey's "Captain Underpants" before moving on to Jeff Kinney's "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" and the more recent phenomenon, "Big Nate" from author and illustrator Lincoln Peirce.

He's been penning Big Nate as a daily comic strip for more than 20 years. The strip, about a spirited sixth-grader who lands himself in trouble for situations he never saw coming, is now syndicated in 300 newspapers. It was never intended for children.

That changed three years ago when Lincoln reached out to Jeff who had been in contact with him since almost two decades earlier when their roles were reversed. Jeff, at the time, was a college student and comic strip aspirant who had been reading Big Nate in the Washington Post.

He wrote to a handful of cartoonists seeking advice, Lincoln wrote back, and the two maintained a correspondence for a couple of years before falling out of touch. It was only after Jeff had created a sensation that Lincoln reached out to him who was speaking at the local public library. The two met in person and he asked the Big Nate cartoonist if he would create content for his new kids' website called Poptropica.

"My hope was that his strip would find a larger audience and that it would be published in book form," Jeff said. Two months after its Poptropica debut, Lincoln landed a 16-book deal with a publisher. The series was based on the comic strip, chronicling the small and large dramas of life in the sixth grade with stylish humor whether Nate Wright is being sent to detention for shoving too many green beans in his mouth or trying to avoid taking tests.

(DLA Las Piñas HS LRC) March Book of the Month - Towering

Still in line with International Women's Day that took place yesterday, we're featuring Towering, a retelling of Rapunzel set in frozen Upstate New York, that was released in 2012. It's the gothic and darkly romantic young adullt latest from New York Times bestselling author Alex Flinn. If the original fairytale wasn't girl power enough for you, this retelling will surely be it.

Flinn has written and published ten books to date but we all know her as that girl who changed how we saw the beloved fairytale Beauty and the Beast when she set everything in modern-day New York City and told the story from the viewpoint of the Beast named Kyle Kingsbury in the 2007 novel Beastly.

After that success, she decided to just keep the fairy-tale mash-ups coming! Beastly turned out to be the first book from the Kendra Chronicles and then, three more other reimagined fairytale books were put out. Towering is the fourth book from the Kendra Chronicles but is officially Book 3 (Book 1 is Beastly, Lindy's Diary is 1.5, the 2nd is Bewitching).

It's in two viewpoints: Wyatt, a teenager who moves from Long Island after the devastating loss of his best friend and his best friend's sister to a remote town where his mother grew up, only to have vivid nightmares and to hear a haunting singing voice, calling him into the wilderness, and Rachel, a beautiful girl who was taken as hostage and locked in a crumbling tower by a woman she calls Mama.

She was quite excited at first, felt like a princess living in a castle. Many years later, Rachel realizes it's really a prison in the forest and begins to plan her escape. When the two meet, they begin to solve the mystery of why each is there. The novel moves back and forth between Wyatt and Rachel, raising questions that keep the pages turning. It's absolutely a good read for mystery and fairytale fans alike.

(DLA Las Piñas HS LRC) March Author of the Month - Rainbow Rowell

Tomorrow is International Women's Day so we're featuring someone who can totally represent girl power! Rainbow Rowell is an American author of young adult and adult contemporary novels. Her books have ed a great deal of critical acclaim in 2013. She currently lives in Nebraska with her husband and two sons. Rainbow is fond of reading comic books and planning Disney World trips when she's not writing.

Rowell was a columnist and a copywriter at the Omaha World-Herald from 1995 to 2012. Her first published novel was Attachments in 2011. In 2013, she published two young adult novels that were named by The New York Times as among the best young adult fiction of the year.

Eleanor & Park was also chosen by Amazon as one of the 10 best books of 2013 and as Goodreads' best young adult fiction of the year. Rainbow completed the first draft of Fangirl for National Novel Writing Month in 2011, it was chosen as the inaugural selection for Tumblr's reblog book club.

Her work gained some attention in 2013 when a parents' group at a Minnesota high school challenged Eleanor & Park resulting to Rowell being disinvited to a library event however, a panel ultimately determined that the book could stay on library shelves. She noted in an interview that the material that these parents were calling "profane" was what many kids in difficult situations realistically had to deal with, and that "when these people call Eleanor & Park an obscene story, I feel like they’re saying that rising above your situation isn’t possible."

Rowell's fourth book, Landline, a contemporary adult novel about a marriage in trouble was released on July 8, 2014. In the same year, talks of DreamWorks planning a movie based on Eleanor & Park was released, for which Rainbow has been asked to write the screenplay. She announced in December 2014 that her fifth book, Carry On, based on the book series central to the plot of Fangirl, will be published in October 2015.