Davis Senior High School

Selecting a Title

The title you select must meet three criteria:

1. It must be a title from the Davis Senior High School library collection.
2. It must have at least three professional reviews and one reader review (see below for how to find professional reviews).
3. It must be
   • a book you have not read before.
   • a book that is not part of the school textbook collection.

Need help selecting a title? Try some of the links below.

What Should I Read Next? Put in the name of an author you like, and this site will suggest other authors and titles that are similar.

Whichbook This site allows you to select characteristics you like in a good read.

YourNextRead  "Tell YourNextRead what book you just finished—and enjoyed!—and it will generate a web of eight related books."

Once you choose a title and have it approved, please create a citation of it in your NoodleTools account. Create a new project called "Recommended Read" and share it to the Recommended Read drop box.

Links to Professional and Reader Reviews

The assignment requires you to locate three professional, and one reader review, for a total of four reviews. Below

Yolo County Library Catalog

Search the catalog for your title. Often you will find a link under the cover image of the that says "Reviews & More." Clicking here will take you to a page where you can read reviews from standard professional sources, like Publisher's Weekly, Library Journal, School Library Journal, Kirkus, Horn Books, Booklist and others. However, to get the full citation, you may need to look in a magazine database like EBSCOhost.

EBSCOhost

Searching within Literary Reference Center will provide you access to reviews. Look under the "literary criticism," "reviews" and "magazine" tabs of the result lists to find reviews.

ProQuest Central Student

Search the ProQuest Central Student database. Remember to to limit your search to "full text" results.

The Horn Book

The Horn Book Magazine is "is one of the most distinguished resources in the field of children’s and young adult literature".

Kirkus Reviews

Kirkus Reviews is not indexed in any of the periodical databases, but its archives of reviews is available from its own web site.

Publishers Weekly

Publishers Weekly has been a source of book reviews for over 100 years.

Goodreads

Goodreads has lots of reader reviews. The reviews are not individually titled, so use "Community Reviews" and the reviewer's username in your citation for title and author.

Offline (Print) Sources

In the reference section we have the Book Review Digest, which contains short excerpts of reviews. This would be a good source to check if the book was published between 1960 and the mid-1990s.

Review Citations and Notecards

You must find at least four reviews, three of which should be professional reviews from sources like Booklist, Horn Book, Kirkus, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly and School Library Journal.

Create a citation in NoodleTools for each review. Then create a new notecard. In the "Direct Quotation" field, place a quote from the review that expresses the reviewer's opinion of the book. Paraphrase the quote in the "Paraphrase" field. Finally, in the "My Ideas" field, respond to the review by affirming or refuting the reviewer's position and by providing a reference to the book to support your position.