Nature's engineer
Warm-weather nature explorations may feel a long way off. But that doesn’t mean that junior naturalists are entirely without opportunities to learn more about the environments around us.
MADreads for Kids
Book reviews for children by library staff and guest contributors
Now always available in Overdrive
Wisconsin's Digital Library just got bigger. There are now 300 magazine titles that have been added for you to check out from home. They range from popular and venerable (Us Weekly, The New Yorker, National Geographic, Cooks Illustrated) to the obscure (Cricket Skills and Secrets). The magazines include current issues and back issues.
Read Native 2021
Read through the seasons - and emotions - in Birdsong by Julie Flett. A young Cree girl, Katherena, moves to a new home with her mother. She misses her “friends and cousins and aunties and uncles”. The new home is over the mountains and near a field “covered in snowdrops”. She feels lonely and does not feel like getting out her pencils and paper for drawing. “My hands are cold.” But soon, she meets their nearest neighbor, an older woman named Agnes – who loves gardening and making things out of clay.
No need for a microscope
Author Candace Fleming and illustrator Eric Rohmann have wowed the children’s book world with a very engaging and detailed book about bees. Did you know bees are quite hairy?! The oil paintings of bees in this book are so close-up you’ll feel like you’re just as tiny, getting exclusive access of a nest from a bee's point-of-view.
ALA Youth Media Awards Announced
The American Library Association (ALA) announced the top books, audio books, and media for children and young adults, including the Caldecott, Coretta Scott King, Newbery and Printz awards at its virtual Midwinter Conference today.
A list of 2021 award winners follows:
All the beautiful books
It’s that time of year again, when the American Library Association’s Caldecott Committee bestows a Medal and Honor prizes on the years’ most distinguished picture books.
Here are some strong contenders that are worth checking out before the announcements on January 25th.
A focus on food
Madison Public Library has added more than 50 new cookbook titles to the collection thanks to a recent $1,000 grant from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for East Asian Studies’ (CEAS) East Asia in Wisconsin Library Program.
Not every friend is meant to stay
Suraya has always found it hard to make friends and being a new student doesn't help. She does have one good friend, although it comes in the form of a grasshopper. It’s a pelesit, a spirit familiar that serves Survaya, inherited from her estranged grandmother. The book begins with the reader being empathetic of lonely Suraya and welcoming of her pelesit. You’ll be rooting for them thinking, “I’m glad he’s there to protect her from those bullies!” But soon things take a wicked turn, reminiscent of a popular horror movie when awful things start happening to Suraya herself.
Book news delivered to your mail box (digitally speaking)
Did you know that you can get MADreads review emailed to you weekly? Or that you can find out what new Book Club Kits have been added to the collection? Or learn what's new with the Wisconsin Book Festival? All of these, plus a whole lot of other book news, are options when you subscribe to the Library's Insider Newsletters.
Big reader of mysteries? You're covered. Someone who'd rather listen than read a print book? We've got your back.
Best books for a not so best year
If you ask anyone they'd probably tell you that 2020 wasn't their best year. I won't get into all the ways in which it was not good and really it was probably not good for each of you in different ways. But what was good was the books that were published. It's really been a stellar year for reading as demonstrated by all the awesome "best" lists that are coming out. If you don't believe me - and I'll admit to being a bit biased as I was on a panel that helped select some of the titles on one of these lists - take a look at a few of the lists that have come out so far.**
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