Booklouse Recommendations: Kyle Lukoff Meets Frog and Toad

It has been a mightily long time since I've been able to do some decent booklousing, and for this I am truly sorry.  Bits of life rose and fell, preventing me from spending hours digging into the murky histories of vintage books...but these bits now seem frivolous compared to the fact that our planet is in the middle of a pandemic.

As it turns out, it is quite the challenge to find vintage books when one is quarantined in the house.  Who would've known, eh?

So this morning I woke up feeling decidedly booklousy, I was ready to ignore it as I have had to do for many months now, when I realized something so obvious, so simple.

I'm not the only booklouse out there.
Surely I'm not.

There must be others.
They may not even know that they are booklouses.

thechildrensbookreview.com

So I sat down with my coffee in hand and opened Twitter and immediately saw author/librarian/sourdough queen/amazing person/friend & colleague Betsy Bird's tweet about her latest posting on her School Library Journal blog A Fuse-8 Production (blogs.slj.com/afuse8production/).

kylelukoff.com

She had invited a guest blogger to step in, and whoo-whee he surely did.  His name is Kyle Lukoff.  He's an amazing school librarian and author who, as he lays it out on his website     (kylelukoff.com), "[writes] about transgender kids, collective nouns, poetry, and queer lives."

scholastic.com

And in this particular guest blog post, Kyle wrote about his very accidental discovery of a  Bed and Breakfast in Provincetown with a most amazing connection to the beloved 1970's early reader "Frog and Toad" books by Arnold Lobel.

But this story is not mine to tell.  It's Kyle's story to tell.  So I'll exercise some self control in my musings about how incredibly fascinated and deeply moved I was by Kyle's story.  The "Frog and Toad" books were first published in 1970. I was 4 years old in 1970 and remember reading them as a young child.  They were among the first books my own two children (now 21 and 23) learned to read, using the same "Frog and Toad" books that once belonged to my husband when he was a child. 

At  their core the "Frog and Toad" stories are about love and friendship.  I understood this as a 4 year old child and I understand this even more deeply and widely now, thanks to Kyle.


Ready to dig in?  Click the link below.

http://blogs.slj.com/afuse8production/2020/07/14/frog-and-toad-were-more-than-friends-a-guest-post-by-kyle-lukoff/