Name: Kids Book Box Curated By Rivka Galchen
SKU: 2288-1498
Price: 39 USD
Availability: InStock

This kids book box is curated by Rivka Galchen

Rivka Galchen, is a Canadian-American novelist of both adult and children’s books and a staff writer at the New Yorker. She is also a trained doctor who earned an MD from Mt. Sinai school of medicine.

For the Kids’ Book Box, she chose three books that she hopes readers from three years of age to 103 will treasure. We invite you to read these aloud, like Galchen did with her daughter, or read them along with children. May the experience be magical to all parties!

The books included in this box are:

Summer of the Monkeys by Wilson Rawls

A School Library Journal Top 100 Children’s Novel, An NPR Must-Read for Kids Ages 9 to 14 and Winner of 4 State Awards

The last thing fourteen-year-old Jay Berry Lee expects to find while trekking through the Ozark Mountains of Oklahoma is a tree full of monkeys. But then Jay learns from his grandpa that the monkeys have escaped from a traveling circus, and there’s a big reward for the person who finds and returns them.
His family could really use the money, so Jay sets off, determined to catch them. But by the end of the summer, Jay will have learned a lot more than he bargained for—and not just about monkeys.

Telephone Tales by Gianni Rodari

Winner of the 2021 Mildred A. Batchelder Award, Winner of the 2020 Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ English Translation Prize

Gianni Rodari is widely considered to be Italy’s most important children’s author of the 20th century.

Every night, at nine o’clock, wherever he is, Mr. Bianchi, an accountant who often travels for work, calls his daughter and tells her a bedtime story. Set in the 20th century era of pay phones, each story has to be told in the time that a single coin will buy. One night, it’s the story of a carousel so beloved by children that an old man finally sneaks on to understand why, and as he sails above the world, he does. The next night, it’s a land filled with butter men, roads paved with chocolate, or a young shrimp who has the courage to defy expectations and do things differently.

Reminiscent of Scheherazade and One Thousand and One Nights, Gianni Rodari’s Telephone Tales is composed of many stories within a story. Each is set in a different place and time, with unconventional characters and a wonderful mix of reality and fantasy. Gorgeously illustrated by Italian artist Valerio Vidali, these stories entertain with wit, surprise, and imagination.

The Casket of Time by Andri Snaer Magnason

Winner of The Icelandic Literary Prize for Children and Young People’s Books, Winner of The Icelandic Booksellers Prize for Best Teenage Book of the Year

Nominated for the Nordic Council Children and Young People’s Literature Prize, Nominated for the The West Nordic Literature Prize

Nominated for the Reykjavik Children’s Literature Prize

“I loved this book so much — it is a cerebral tale, well told and unabashedly philosophical. So grim that I fear it will not be for everyone…But despite the beheadings, the grave-robbing, the people casually thrown to the lions, the central message of the book is clear, and it’s welcome. Greed hurts us; power ruins us; and time has never been our enemy. Indeed, Magnason reminds us, as long as our tendency toward self-destruction doesn’t get in the way, time is the earth’s, and humanity’s, greatest healer.”

—Kelly Barnhill, New York Times Book Review

An entrancing adventure for today’s troubled planet, The Casket of Time is a fantastical tale of time travel and environmental calamity from celebrated Icelandic author Andri Snær Magnason.

Teenage Sigrun is sick of all the apocalyptic news about the “situation” and, worse, her parents’ obsession with it. Sigrun’s family—along with everyone else—decides to hibernate in their TimeBoxes®, hoping for someone else to fix the world’s problems. But when Sigrun’s TimeBox® opens too early, she discovers an abandoned city overrun by wilderness and joins a band of kids who are helping a researcher named Grace solve the “situation.”

The world, according to Grace, is under an ancient curse. There once was a princess named Obsidiana, who was trapped in time by the greedy king of Pangea. To protect Obsidiana from dark and gloomy days, the king put her in a crystal casket made of spider silk woven so tightly that time itself couldn’t penetrate. The king’s greed for power doomed his kingdom and the trapped princess. Sigrun sees eerie parallels between the tale of Obsidiana and the present-day crisis, and realizes it’s up to her and her friends to break the ancient curse and fix the world.