Want to go on an amazing scavenger hunt that zig-zags through interesting parks, museums, and landmarks throughout San Francisco? If you do, then you would love reading Book Scavenger by Jennifer Chambliss Bertman. And as a bonus for literature buffs, the story includes several references to the works of authors such as Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Babbage, Jack Kerouac, Dashiell Hammett, and Robert Lewis Stevenson.
This multi-layered story is about Emily, who moves to San Francisco and makes friends with James. Around this time, Emily’s favorite author, Garrison Griswold, is ambushed and left for dead. Emily learns he is in critical condition and in a coma. When Emily finds herself in the station where Griswold was attacked, she discovers a mysterious book, The Gold-Bug. Certain that The Gold-Bug is a clue in a game that Griswold created before his incident, Emily and James set out to find the other clues to the game. Unfortunately, they will need to find the clues before another, more nefarious, group does.
About the Author
Book Scavenger is the first book in the Book Scavenger series which also includes The Unbreakable Code and The Alcatraz Escape. For writing Book Scavenger, Jennifer Chambliss Bertman has won several awards including Indie Next Top Ten Pick, Amazon Book of the Year, Bank Street College Book of the Year, and NCTE Notable Book.
Jennifer Chambliss Bertman was born and raised in Mountain View, Ca where she lived with her parents and brother. As a young person, her favorite authors and books included Lois Lowry, Judy Blume, Beverly Cleary, Ruth Chew, Edgar Eager, Madeleine L’Engle, Zilpha Keatley Snyder, Ellen Raskin, E. L. Kongisburg, James Howe, The Babysitter’s Club, and Nancy Drew. Her background includes studying creative writing and dance at UC Irvine and going on to earn her MFA in creative writing from Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, CA. She worked in publishing for over a decade before becoming a children’s book author. Bertman now lives in Colorado with her family.
Classroom Connection:
If you are a classroom teaching, this might be the perfect book to hook your young adult readers. The following are some projects and activities to enhance and go along with the reading of Book Scavenger:
1. Introduce your students to the concept of ciphers. Give students worksheets with different examples of ciphers, including substitution texts, Baconian ciphers, Morse Code, number letters, etc. Question students about what they think the odd example sentences on the paper are. See if the students can crack the codes. Work through some of the examples with students, but allow time for students to decipher once they catch on to the game. Discuss with students why people would want to make codes that others cannot understand.
2. This Book Scavenger Teacher’s guide that can be found at https://images.macmillan.com/folia-assets/teachers-guides/9781250079800TG.pdf has really useful and relevant activities to accompany the book. It includes vocabulary activities, character studies, graphic organizers, research projects, discussion prompts, and more, including the following anticipation guide that I think is great to get students thinking critically about topics in the book.
3. Students can hide their own books (with their parents’ permission) around the school or a designated area. Using a GoogleDoc, the classmates can write riddles to one another and post when they have found and re-hidden books. This is a mini-version of the Book Scavenger game that can use a private document that only the people playing can see and the teacher can monitor the whole game.
I hope you read Book Scavenger and enjoy it as I have! Happy Reading!
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