MLA Andrew Weaver will dole out the stickers and chat with young readers as the special guest at the Oak Bay branch of the Greater Victoria Public Library’s Summer Reading Club Aug. 4.
“The students take out books in the summer and they commit to reading so many books and get stickers and prizes,” said Weaver, MLA for Oak Bay-Gordon Head. “I will be in the Monterey centre library and be there as the kids come in to get their stickers and chatting to them about the books they read and things like that.”
The children’s book he highly recommends is The King, the Mice and the Cheese, a tale from 1965 by Nancy and Eric Gurney .
“It’s a wonderful book,” he said. “The king likes cheese so much that his castle gets infested with mice.”
The king’s “wise advisors” suggest cats to rid the castle of mice leading to a cat problem. Predictably, the advisors next suggest dogs and so on. By the end, the advisors suggest mice, to rid them of an elephant problem. Instead, the king opts to share the cheese.
“I read this book to kids all the time,” Weaver said.
Their typical solution to the king’s quandary? “Kids always say ‘stop eating the cheese.’
“Kids get it, it’s a wonderful metaphor for climate change, with the cheese being oil.”
Weaver is at the Summer Reading Club Aug. 4 from 2 to 2:45 p.m. For more information about Summer Reading Club see gvpl.ca/src. No registration is required.
