finding books that address a theme

I know this is an easy one for all of you library people, but I'm just a former math teacher who didn't really listen in elementary school when the library teacher taught us how to find books ...

My question is how do I go about finding books that address a certain theme for a certain age group? For example, if I want fiction addressing the theme of "resilience" that is interesting and appropriate for preteens, how do I find titles?

Thanks!

Jeff

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Permalink Reply by Steve Watkins on August 22, 2007 at 12:57pm

One Web 2.0 way to do this is to search Library Thing http://www.librarything.com/search/ for user-input tags on resilience. Another is to try OCLC's Fiction Finder at http://fictionfinder.oclc.org which will unearth some additional titles. Once you find some likely titles in LibraryThing, you can follow some of the related tags to find similar items that might not be tagged with the exact word "resilience". Oh, and a simple search of Open Worldcat http://worldcat.org will yield a large number of results that can be narrowed using the facets displayed on the left of the screen.

--Steve

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Permalink Reply by Jeff Branzburg on August 22, 2007 at 4:19pm

Steve:

Thanks. These resources are quite helpful!

Jeff

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Permalink Reply by Tony Greco on August 22, 2007 at 3:59pm

Hi Jeff. I recently learned about a couple interesting resources for finding books. They deal mostly with genres, keywords, ratings, etc. and not age groups, but they might help:

Whichbook

Overbooked

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Permalink Reply by Jeff Branzburg on August 22, 2007 at 4:20pm

Tony:

Thanks a lot.. In addition to Steve Watkins' reply, with yours I now have a nice array of possibilities.

Jeff

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Permalink Reply by Brian Herzog on August 23, 2007 at 2:24pm

Another tool you could use is NoveList. However, unlike the others listed here, NoveList isn't a free website, so you'll probably have to go through your local library to access it. But it'll let you search by theme or topic, and limit to reading levels. It'll also let you find one book you like, and then show you others like it. I use it all the time, just for this sort of thing.

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Permalink Reply by RefLibrarian on August 26, 2007 at 9:35am

I recommend the children's version of Novelist, called Novelist K-8 (also a subscription database, which your public library may provide. I tried a search using "resilience" and came up with 2 pages of titles. You could also look at other related keywords, like "coping". If you do not have access to Novelist K-8, please send me your email address and I will forward the list of resilience books to you.