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Book reviews by library staff and guest contributors
I call them winners!
No joke, this book is sensational and worthy of all the accolades. Recipient of the 2024 Newbery Award given to the author of the most distinguished children's book of the previous year, The Eyes and the Impossible is funny, smart and unusual. I loved it.
In the newest picture book in Andrea Beaty's Questioneers series, we finally get the story of Lila Greer, who we know as the Grade Two teacher from previous books.
We first see Lila as a baby with a curl on her head, one that "fills her with dread", and as she grows older the What Ifs still get her:
"They made her heart race. Put knots in her stomach. A frown on her face."
I dropped into The Nigerwife without expectations. It was a book picked by the Lakeview Mystery Book Group members, from a list of suggested titles (created by me), last fall. But the picking of this year's books happened months ago and I didn't have much memory of why I'd put it on a list of suggestions back then. So when I picked it up now to read for the group, I just dove in.
I'm going to tell you that I have a very low threshold for scary things. So if I say that a book freaked me out you can take it with a grain of salt. That said, The Last Astronaut, which was a bit of Alien, a bit of The Martian and some Major Tom vibes thrown in, made me read with one eye closed for the latter half of the book as the creeping dread of the unknown grew.
A mother and child are at the zoo. As they look at the animals, she says things like, "If you crawled like a gecko up the wall, I would still love you best of all." Each animal is a new opportunity for the caregiver to express her love. Repetition and rhyme would make this a lovely bed time story. One that is reminiscent of The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown.
Davi is living her own version of Groundhog Day. But instead of going to sleep and waking to the same day over and over, Davi is trapped in a fantasy realm attempting to save the Kingdom. And each time she fails and dies (often tortuously), she is woken by a wizard and has to start all over again. She doesn't know why she's trapped in this world, she just knows how many lives she's lived in the past 1000 years and that nothing she's tried up until now has worked to free her. So Davi decides on a new tack.
The students at Urban Promise Prep School must follow the "Principal Moore Method" for conduct and behavior at all times. Principal Moore is strict, but his method saves lives, or so the boys are told time and time again. Infractions include not walking on a line painted on the school floor, talking in the hallway or having unauthorized food in a locker or backpack. The infractions result in demerits that never get recouped. After a certain number of demerits, the students find themselves in detention, or even worse, expelled.
Follow the hush and magic In the Night Garden by Carin Berger. Blue, green, and black illustrations invite us in with the glow of fireflies and a sprinkling of stars. A quiet cat walks through each page and “tiptoes across the roof”. We experience the sights and sounds of the garden through the seasons. A swirling of wind blowing, bullfrog melodies, murmurings of a stream, and calls from an “occasional hoot owl.” The book feels both dreamy and earthy – filled with all sorts of natural plant and animal life.
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 library-world), it's a special collection of popular books that are truly too good to miss. Some are new and popular titles, others are older titles that might not have had as much media attention as a bestseller or celebrity book club selection but are still great reads that deserve another look.
Even the smallest specks on this planet have to figure out where they belong. This story traces the journey of tiny baby barnacles as they stream through the ocean, floating away from their parents and into the vastness to discover where they will make their home. Some travel together and others travel alone, but every single baby barnacle manages to swim its way to "a place to stay, and grow, and thrive. Something every speck needs." Vivid watercolor illustrations show a vibrant, active underwater landscape, punctuated with the small, glowing dots of the baby barnacles on their journey.
