“The Beatles might have thought that all you need is love, but lucky for teachers, Penny Kittle knows better. She knows that when you want to create lifetime readers, you not only need to fill the room with books, not only need to show your own passion about books, but need to help kids develop lifetime reading habits. In this book, Penny shows all of us how to help kids develop those habits as she shares her masterful teaching strategies that turn aliterate students into kids who not only can read, but want to read.”
—Kylene Beers, author of When Kids Can’t Read/What Teachers Can Do
“Book Love is nothing short of miraculous. Penny Kittle knows the developmental stage of adolescence like she invented it. This book alone could make me a good teacher. It's detailed, so incredibly readable and I swear, filled with simple miracles.”
—Chris Crutcher, author of Period 8
“Book Love focuses on a critical question all but forgotten in this age of standards and testing: What can we, as teachers, do to help our students develop a love for reading? Book Love is a breath of fresh air. It challenges many damaging practices that have become norms in our nation’s classrooms, offering insightful, practical ways for teachers to begin instilling a love of reading in our students and showing teachers and administrators how to build reading lives that last. Kittle is right—we cannot wait for someone else to teach our students to love reading. It starts with us, and I am hopeful that for many teachers it will start with this book.”
—Kelly Gallagher, author of Readicide
“Worried the teenagers you teach will never pick up a book on their own? Let Penny Kittle show you how to kindle a passion for reading with authentic texts and techniques aimed at students' most vulnerable spot—their hearts.”
—Carol Jago, author of With Rigor for All
“Penny Kittle invites us into her high school classroom where many of her students fall in love with reading for the first time. Through reading research, her practical classroom rituals, and the powerful words of her students as they describe years spent not reading, Penny builds an undeniable case for pleasure reading in the high school English classroom as a path to reading competence, stamina, and engagement.”
—Donalyn Miller, author of The Book Whisperer
"Penny Kittle’s descriptions of the readers in her classrooms, the ones who expertly pretend to read and then develop evasive strategies to fool the teacher into thinking they have been reading, were so spot-on in Book Love that I felt she may have been eavesdropping in my own sixth grade classroom. Surely, I thought, she knows my collection of students who don’t seem to find joy in reading and therefore don’t read. That’s when I realized that Kittle is exploring a theme unfortunately common across so many of our classrooms. With that sense of shared purpose, I eagerly dove into her book to try to ferret out some solutions. Penny Kittle delivers, on many levels. Book Love is a both an ode to the power of reading to expand our interests and intellect, and a guide to encouraging even the most reluctant readers in our classrooms to read and enjoy more books."
—Kevin Hodgson, MiddleWeb
