The Extraordinary Mark Twain (According to Susy) by Barbara Kerley

Title: The Extraordinary Mark Twain (According to Susy)
Author/Illustrator: Barbara Kerley/ Edwin Fotheringham
Genre: NonFiction
Awards: CYBILS Nonfiction Picture Book Award (2010); Texas Bluebonnet Award nominee and many other awards and nominations
Age: 7-11

This book is about how Susy, Mark Twain's daughter, wrote a biography of her dad's life as she was growing up. Throughout this book there are little excerpts from Susy's journal that she kept on her father and how he carried himself and how he acted. In one of her journal excerpt she talked about his life when he was younger and how he would skip school, and that eventually went into the newspaper business and hopped around to many different things after that, and then ended up being a lecturer based on his friends recommendation. She mentioned his writing habits and that he would start just after breakfast and not be finished until just before supper, and he almost always skipped lunch. If he had a moment of inspiration he would continue and finish his writings no matter the time. During the summer they would live on a farm so her father could get away from all the people needing his attention, and on this farm they had a donkey and many cats. But, Susy found and her father found time to write. He had his wife look over and review questionable passages and she would help him clean them up. She described his detail and mannerisms to a 't' and captured him in his true from, she even had eyewitness accounts included in her biography of her father. 20 years after she wrote her biography of him, he wrote his own autobiography and included some of his favorite passages from her notebook.

I liked how this book included excerpts from her journal and we are able to see the notes she had taken. If I used this book it would be for how to teach students to be biographers like Susy. In the back of the book it gives a rundown of what Susy did and how she compiled all her notes to make one great biography. Students could complete something like this on one of their own family members and do a fun little project on it. This book best suits students in 3rd - 6th grade.
- Peace. Love. Giraffes.

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