{"id":14121,"date":"2016-09-27T12:01:16","date_gmt":"2016-09-27T16:01:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/?p=14121"},"modified":"2025-05-27T15:18:51","modified_gmt":"2025-05-27T19:18:51","slug":"warning-will-toughest-customer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/2016\/09\/warning-will-toughest-customer\/","title":{"rendered":"Warning: This Will Be Your Toughest Customer."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

After working for 20 plus years as a children’s librarian, I feel very comfortable with young people. I\u2019m good at getting them to open up and tell me what they are looking for. Children come in with parents in tow, after visiting the library with their class. \u201cRemember me?\u201d they ask, and I always let them know that they are unforgettable. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Story time is where I shine, and I enjoy building a relationship with parents and children at these weekly events. It\u2019s also fun to be considered a rock star of sorts when you walk into the room and sit down for story time. \u201cThere she is Mommy!\u201d  <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I do have one customer who\u2019s got me stumped though.  She\u2019s not too impressed with my reader\u2019s advisory skills, and her eyes narrow when I show her a few things in her age category.  She\u2019s almost 11 years old,  a little guarded,  and already a bit jaded about books.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oh, I can hear you already.  You\u2019re mentally conducting an awesome reference interview. You\u2019re wondering if I thought of titles that you consider foolproof. Is she a girly girl? Into sports? Does she want something that’s just a little bit scary? What about biographies or crafts?<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

See, here\u2019s the thing.  She\u2019s my daughter. So this is like the hairdresser with crazy hair, or the mechanic who drives a clunker.  I\u2019m the librarian who\u2019s got a kid that isn\u2019t thrilled about anything I’d think is interesting. I am the librarian who, as a kid, sat in the quad at lunch time, absorbed in a book. My kid is the one who is super cool, at ease conversing with adults, and is described by her teachers as \u201cmature\u201d and \u201cresponsible\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

 <\/p>\n\n\n

\n
\"ssireading\"<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

I don’t shrink from challenges,  so I set out to get into her brain. Her preferences are muddled by puberty and tween-ness, but that didn\u2019t dissuade me. She reads at a seventh grade, so I had  to be wary of content.  EBSCO\u2019s  Novelist K-8 Plus proved a great resource and I was able to customize a list of titles at her Accelerated Reader level that also interested her. Well, let\u2019s just say that she didn\u2019t curl up her lips. Score! She kept coming out of her room and reading me parts of <\/span>How They Choked:  Failures, Flops and Flaws of the Awfully Famous<\/strong> by Georgia Bragg and Kevin O\u2019Malley.  Another one that we enjoyed reading aloud:  <\/span>Swear to Howdy<\/strong> by Wendelin Van Draanen. She still talks about it and feels that  we’ll never find a book that holds  our hearts captive like this one. <\/span>I\u2019m looking forward to proving her wrong.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After working for 20 plus years as a children’s librarian, I feel very comfortable with young people. I\u2019m good at getting them to open up and tell me what they are looking for. Children come in with parents in tow, after visiting the library with their class. \u201cRemember me?\u201d they ask, and I always let them know that they are unforgettable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":263,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":"","_members_access_role":[],"_members_access_error":""},"categories":[1048,22],"tags":[588,534,145],"class_list":["post-14121","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogger-ericka-chilcoat","category-childrens-literature","tag-nonfiction","tag-readers-advisory","tag-tweens"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14121","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/263"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14121"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14121\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14121"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14121"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alsc.ala.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14121"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}