Fans of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series and especially fans of the audiobooks narrated by Jim Dale may be interested to learn about The Worst Witch audiobook by Jill Murphy.

Like the Harry Potter series, The Worst Witch takes place at a school for young witches (though no young wizards here), complete with broomstick lessons, potion tests and uniforms with house colors. At Miss Cackle's Academy, we meet Mildred Hubble, dubbed the worst witch at the school because of her talent for getting into trouble. What kind of trouble? How about turning a rude classmate into a pig! (She meant to turn her into a toad, you see.) It's a short but magical story -- and very funny too.

Oh, yes, and did I mention that it's narrated by Miriam Margoyles, whom you may remember as Professor Sprout in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets?

The audiobook series continues with The Worst Witch Strikes Again and The Worst Witch All at Sea.

Louise Erdrich's Chickadee has received the 2013 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction, announced on January 16. This award was established in 1982 by Scott O'Dell to encourage writers to focus on historical fiction, and it is awarded annually to an author for a "meritorious book published in the previous year for children or young adults," according to the award website. To be eligible for the award, the book must be published by a U.S. publisher and set in the Americas.

Chickadee is the fourth installment in Erdrich's Birchbark House Series and takes place in the nineteenth century, chronicling the kidnapping of Chickadee, an eight-year-old Anishinabe (known today as Ojibwe) boy, and the adventures that follow as Chickadee tries to return home and his family leaves home to look for him.

Some previous Scott O'Dell Award winners in the library's collection:

Dead End in Norvelt

In the historic town of Norvelt, Pennsylvania, twelve-year-old Jack Gantos spends the summer of 1962 grounded for various offenses until he is assigned to help an elderly neighbor with a most unusual chore involving the newly dead, molten wax, twisted promises, Girl Scout cookies, underage driving, lessons from history, typewriting, and countless bloody noses.

One Crazy Summer

In the summer of 1968, after traveling from Brooklyn to Oakland, California, to spend a month with the mother they barely know, eleven-year-old Delphine and her two younger sisters arrive to a cold welcome as they discover that their mother, a dedicated poet and printer, is resentful of the intrusion of their visit and wants them to attend a nearby Black Panther summer camp.

The Storm in the Barn (Graphic Novel)

In Kansas in the year 1937, eleven-year-old Jack Clark faces his share of ordinary challenges: local bullies, his father's failed expectations, a little sister with an eye for trouble. But he also has to deal with the effects of the Dust Bowl, including rising tensions in his small town and the spread of a shadowy illness. Certainly a case of "dust dementia" would explain who (or what) Jack has glimpsed in the Talbot's abandoned barn - a sinister figure with a face like rain. In a land where it never rains, it's hard to trust what you see with your own eyes, and harder still to take heart and be a hero when the time comes.

Click here for a complete list of previous O'Dell Award winners.

Join us on Sunday, January 20, 2013 at the Pittfield Branch at 2:00 p.m. for a cozy winter celebration. We'll have winter stories, songs by musician Sara Keller, a faux fireplace, hot chocolate and a fun craft.

We'll warm you up with this enjoyable family event. For children preschool through Grade 5 along with their grown-ups.

For some winter stories, click here.

Did you make a new year’s resolution to learn a new language? According to TIME, learning something new is the 3rd most broken resolution. With the help of AADL you never have to feel like it’s a lost cause! The Library has plenty of resources for you to learn languages, including Chinese, Spanish, French, German, and more (click on "language learning").

To look up some of those mysterious words in another language, the Library even has bilingual dictionaries to check out.

Want to get your kids involved? They can check out our online Muzzy Program (you need to log in to your library user account or use a library computer). They can use this free service to learn language lessons, watch videos, and play with vocabulary.

Movie goers, musical fans, and book lovers alike have fallen in love with the new film “Les Miserables,” which premiered on December 25 of this past year. Already “Les Mis,” as it is affectionately called by fans, has earned 8 Oscar nominations. To complement seeing the film, try checking out some related materials, including other movie adaptations, broadway performances, complete and abridged books, and sheet music. If you have the gift of understanding French, AADL even has the original novel and a French version of the movie.

For more information about the new movie, please visit their website for photos, production notes, trivia, videos, and more.

Extra Yarn by Mac Barnett is one beautiful picture book. It has the potential of winning a Caldecott Medal, thanks to Jon Klassen's beautiful illustrations. The story features young Annabelle who comes across a box containing some yarn. But a magical thing happens! She knits and knits and knits and the yarn never seems to run out. So she knits sweaters for dogs, and people, and trees, and cars, and soon the entire monochromatic town is awash in color thanks to her handiwork. The greedy archduke decides to steal her magic box, which leaves Annabelle in a bit of stitchuation. Will she knit her way out of it?

The nominees for the 2013 Edgars, honoring all things mystery -- novels, non-fiction, and television -- that first appeared in 2012, have been announced.

Named after Edgar Allan Poe, considered the grandfather of the genre, the Edgar is enjoying its 67th year.

Some of the nominees are:

Best novel category:
Gone Girl, Gillain Flynn. In this twisted, double-triple-quadruple backstabbing epic, the reader falls into an ever-changing quagmire between one of literature's most twisted couples. Haven't heard yet of a reader who read the whole thing and DIDN'T fling it across the room.

Live by Night, by Dennis Lehane is set in the Prohibition Era and stars Joe Coughlin, son of a Boston cop who eschews his father's line of work and strives to be a gentleman gangster. Since this is a Lehane novel, you know that's not going to happen.

Best first novel category:
The Expats, by Chris Pavone -- CIA spy Kate Moore falls in love, marries has two sons, and willingly gives up her career to move to Luxembourg with Dexter, her nerdy banker husband. They are befriended by a couple who raise warning flags for Kate. Soon she becomes in clandestine efforts to unravel the threads that make less and less sense, not the least upsetting is the growing suspicion that even Dexter is not who he seems.

Best paperback original:
Louis Berney produces a sequel to Gunshot Straight (2010) with Whiplash River. In another fast-paced thriller, Shake Bouchon buys a restaurant on Ambergris Gray, an island off Belize. But things don't work out so well -- not only does he dodge three hitmen's bullets, but someone burns down his restaurant.

Another sequel is in contention in this category. Malla Nunn brings back her popular character, Det. Emmanuel Cooper, first seen in A Beautiful Place to Die (2009), in Bleassed are the Dead who is investigating the death of a beautiful Zulu housemaid.

For a complete list of nominees, check out this link.

The winners will be announced on May 2nd in New York.

The word is out about German author Nele Neuhaus' American debut Snow White Must Die * (translated by Steven T. Murray). This opener of a new contemporary police procedural series is already a huge international bestseller. (Available in the original German editions in our World Language Collections)

After serving a 10-year sentence for murdering two young girls (convicted solely on circumstantial evidence) , 30-year-old Tobias Sartorius returns home to Altenhain, a village near Frankfurt to find his parents divorced, and their lives in shambles. On a rainy November day police detectives Pia Kirchhoff and Oliver von Bodenstein are summoned to a mysterious traffic accident: A woman has fallen from a pedestrian bridge onto on-coming traffic, and witnesses are definite that she was pushed. It soon becomes clear to the detectives that the two cases might be connected.

When another young girl disappears, the investigation turns into a race against time as the villagers are determined to take matters into their own hands. "Again and again, Neuhaus inserts the old Grimm's fairy tale refrain : "White as snow, red as blood, black as ebony" that describes Snow White, the role of one of the original missing girls in a high school play 10 years earlier, to underscore the grimmest of human emotions: white for icily plotted revenge, red for raging jealousy, black for homicidal madness.

"An atmospheric, character-driven and suspenseful mystery set in a small town that could be anywhere, dealing with issues of gossip, power, and keeping up appearances".

This emotional page turner, fueled by unexpected plot twists will please fans of Tana French, Laura Lippman, Kate Atkinson, and Chevy Stevens.

* = starred review

While there is a basketball theme to the book, Boy21 is not a sports book, and it’s not just for teens. It is a heartfelt and fast paced story of loss, family, friendship, and competition. It's also a book that is on many "best of 2012" lists regarding young adult fiction. From the writer of Sorta Like A Rock Star and The Silver Lining’s Playbook, we meet Boy21, who is one unique teen.

Set in a fictional blue collar suburb of Philadelphia, Boy21 centers around Finley, AKA White Rabbit, who selectively doesn’t say much and calls himself a “minimal speaker.” He goes about his life playing basketball, living with his hardworking father, and hanging out with his fellow ball-playing girlfriend, who is pretty much his only friend. Together they long to get out of the rough and tumble life in Belmont, which is mainly divided between Irish Americans and African Americans.

Life proceeds as normal until one day his coach lets him in on a little secret. There is a new kid heading to town, and Coach wants Finley to keep a big secret about the new kid and stick to him like glue as he helps guide him as he transitions to the new school. It sounds easy enough, but ends up being more challenging than Finley thought. Russell, who calls himself Boy21, has lost his parents in a tragedy and heads to Belmont to live with his grandparents. His coping mechanisms (acting as though he’s from another planet) are hard for Finley to grasp at first, but as the story progresses the boys learn a lot from each other as they find out that they have more in common than just basketball. These boys are coping with more than any teen should, and how they conquer their demons and rise above leaves for a magical ending.

Overdrive users will be pleased with the new "Next Generation" platform from Overdrive. Go to our download page to take a look at the new digs and watch this video to learn more about the new experience. On the same page, read the step-by-step instructions that highlight what's new. The new format, Overdrive READ, allows you to read your book with your internet browser, no download required. After you begin reading, be sure to click on the bookmark in the upper-left corner of a book page to save as an internet bookmark or favorite. Also new are the enhanced filtering options including always available books, a list of free public domain titles that never expire and don’t count against your library checkout limit.