Flora and Ulysses

Flora and Ulysses | Fantasy | Kate DiCamillo | Newbery Medal | ages 8-11 | 

"...you are the ever expanding universe to me"

Crazy events happen in Flora Bell's life involving a newborn superhero squirrel, Ulysses! One day the neighbor Mrs. Tickman is vacuuming with her new vacuum that her husband gave her for her birthday, weirdly enough outside and she happens to accidentally vacuum a squirrel. While all of this is happening, /flora is looking from her window and rushes in to help the creature. Right after performing CPR on him, the squirrel stand sand does something incredible. He lifts the whole vacuum above his head with one finger. It is then that Flora realizes the squirrel has attained superhero powers because of the incident and finds him special and becomes best friends just like the characters from her favorite graphic novel. The adventures for Flora and Ulysses have begin and with every superhero comes arch nemesis and they soon realize this. Together they fight against Flora's mother trying to get rid of Ulysses, loneliness and in Flora's case, a complicated relationship with her mother and father as they are going through a divorce.

This a very witty and quirky book, that stands out from most books. There's so much nonsense that'll challenge you to imagine unrealistic things. A woman vacuuming outside, and the vacuum is strong enough to suck in almost anything including a squirrel which gives it powers? This book is truly different in which it allows students to take a break from informational reading and have a mindless fun read. I like the book because it works as a transitional book for students who are getting ready to read higher level books. There's illustrations on some pages to allow the reader to have a picture in mind what's being read, new vocabulary introduced and often repeated allowing the words to stick and also nonsense words and phrases that are just fun to say. I would use this book in my classroom, and recommend it for third to seventh graders. And this book, another ability of Ulysses is writing poems. In the classroom, we can also practice writing poems. The book also mentions comics and as a writing assignment, we can have students create their own comic story and have it be as silly as they want, and make sure to promote creativity just the award winning author did.