MADreads Reviews

The publishing calendar starts to heat up in May, as shelves start to fill with titles the industry hope to see readers packing into their summer vacation luggage. This May is esp

This picture book is a black, white, and neon pink look at a classroom skeleton named John who retires and moves to the country to live with Grams and Gramps in a cottage in the woods.  Grams and Gramps have lived in this cottage for a long time, and it is described as a little bit crooked and a little bit under the weather.  This perfectly describes what my fixer-upper home is like, with an inspired twist on words.  John the Skeleton is a book in translation, and as such, it opens the reader to concepts, words, and illustrations that have a distinct Northern European flair.  Gramp

This gorgeously illustrated nonfiction picture book shows the unique ecosystem of a whale fall. A massive blue whale dies, and her decomposing body nourishes various marine life, from scavengers to microorganisms, on the ocean floor over more than a century. Jason Chin’s watercolors beautifully depict the process in all its phases.

Abbott's new novel is both a thriller and an exploration of the sibling dynamics of the Bishop sisters.

Joy comes in many forms in The Yellow Bus by Loren Long. We see the new yellow school bus carrying children from home to school. “And they filled her with joy.” Then, the bus has a new life driving older riders to the library and to country parks. They, too, “filled her with joy.” The illustrations show the sunshine yellow of the bus and everything in and around the bus drenched in color. Beyond these bright colors, the rest of the page is muted and in greyscale. This makes the yellow bus always pop off the page.

Aphrodite Du Bell hates her name. The eponymous heroine of J. J.

Monday is the best day of the week (according to Mabel). 

Every month there are new titles purchased for the Too Good to Miss collections at our libraries. If you're not familiar with TGTM (as we call it here in 

Where peace is lost, may we find it.
Where peace is broken, may we mend it.
Where we go, may peace follow.
Where we fall, may peace rise.

Atlas is defined by Merriam-Webster as:

1. capitalized: a Titan who for his part in the Titan's revolt against the gods is forced by Zeus to support the heavens on his shoulders
2. capitalized: one who bears a heavy burden, and
3(a): a bound collection of maps often including illustrations, informative tables, or textual matter. 

Max in the House of Spies by Adam Gidwitz (author of

Reading Elizabeth O’Connor’s Whale Fall, you will become completely immersed in the beautiful, weathered coastal landscape of a Welsh island in 1938.

An important book on colonization and stolen cultural artifacts, And Yet You Shine by Supriya Kelkar follows the story of India's Kohinoor diamond. Its journey from India to the United Kingdom is rife with horrors due to the many hands that want to grab ahold of it. But despite the bloodshed, deception, and even disfiguring that the diamond goes through, it continues to shine. The mixed media illustrations are vividly beautiful, but far more importantly, the message throughout the book is clear: the perpetual unfairness of colonization must be acted upon and reversed.

I think most kids who have siblings wonder, "am I my parents' favorite?". If you could know, would you want to? And what happens when you discover you're not the favorite?

Jason Reynolds's take on a teen romance is unlike anything I was expecting and more than I ever imagined.  For starters, it's told from the perspective of a 17-year-old boy named Neon.  It tackles the difficult subject of intimacy as Neon freaks out in a bathroom, cycling through the timeline of his entire romantic relationship.  

Once upon a time, a tattoo artist had three children, two girls and a boy.

Long before the days of cellphones and food delivery apps, demae (cycling deliverymen) used bicycles and amazing acrobatic balancing skills to deliver trays of steaming soba (buckwheat) noodles to hungry residents of Tokyo. The neighborhood kids all wonder, how do they manage those tottering towers of tasty food and stacks of breakable dishes while steering through the crowded streets with one hand on the handlebars? What would happen if the kids tried that too?

Nonfiction author Melissa Stewart delivers another great book, highlighting some of the mini-est mammals on earth. 

I knew nothing about Ruocchio's debut, first in the Sun Eater series, other than it's pretty long, it's going to take a long time to read. If I say I finished it in a couple days, you'll get an idea as to how exhilarating it was and how much I loved it.