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Book reviews by library staff and guest contributors
It’s spring(ish) time, and time to turn thoughts to new beginnings. Publishers relish this time of year, as April marks the start of the big push to for new titles. This year is no different, and along with a lot of familiar names, there are plenty of new authors who have been waiting, after the ups and downs of the pandemic years, to see readers back in bookstores and libraries to discover their new works.
Are you looking for a book that is slightly quirky, and will leave you thinking about it even after you have finished reading? Then Magic Candies by Heena Baek may be just what you have been looking for.
Newberry Medalist, Avi, writes a gripping story of the American Revolutionary War through the eyes of Sophia Calderwood. Sophia, a well-educated young lady, lives with her parents in British occupied New York. Her beloved older brother is a captured soldier in the Continental Army and her parents are secretly committed to the cause of the American Patriots. Sophia, herself an ardent Patriot, wants nothing more than to help the cause and free her brother from a horrific British prison. She is enlisted as a spy; however, the plot she uncovers is almost too outrageous to believe!
Temple Alley Summer is full of mystery, history, and ghosts. Kazu's summer project is to learn more about his neighborhood, Temple Alley, named for the former Kimyo Temple located where Kazu's house currently stands. An old legend claims that the temple has the power to bring the dead back to life. A girl named Akari suddenly appears in the alley and Kazu starts to wonder if the legend is more than a story.
I LOVE Bodies Are Cool! This glorious picture book celebrates all of the different human bodies that exist in the world. It is a truly joyous and inclusive book, and the delightful text and beautiful, exuberant illustrations combine to encourage body acceptance and confidence in the youngest readers – and the grown-ups who read to those little ones, too! “My body, your body, every different kind of body! All of them are good bodies! Bodies are cool!” Pick up a copy of Tyler Feder’s Bodies Are Cool and share some body love and positivity with the ones you love.
Mention historical romance, and the images that usually leap to mind are of European ladies in dresses with hoops or corsets, swooning under the gaze of some strapping hero.
Sergeant Sanda Greeve wakes alone in the medical bay of a strange ship. Worse, it's an enemy ship and the only other inhabitant is the sentient artificial intelligence who runs the ship, The Light of Berossus, aka Bero. And that's not the worst news she's about to hear. Bero shows her that Ada Prime (Sanda's home planet) and Icarion (their enemy) have both vanished from the galaxy, blown up 230 years ago during the war that left Sanda wounded. Sanda had been in stassis in a life pod until Bero, who has been alone for years, found her.
Seriously. In this young adult novel, high school is the worst. Todd Mayer has died and no one at his school will answer any questions or admit to knowing him when the police investigate. Things are not right, that's for sure. Georgia's brother goes to school with Todd and is in the same grade, even, and won't acknowledge that he knows Todd. So what's up?
Our new Spanish language Art of the Picture Book collection highlights excellence in Spanish language picture book art in a wide range of visual styles, with an emphasis on original works by Spanish-speaking book creators from across the Americas and Europe.
Though slavery ended in 1865, the importation of Africans as slaves was outlawed nearly fifty years earlier in 1808 with an act of Congress banning the practice. The truth, like most everything in history regarding race, is far from black and white. Environmental journalist and Alabama waterman Ben Raines sheds light on just how the ghosts of the slave trade, long thought well-buried, exist surprisingly close to the surface both literally and figuratively in The Last Slave Ship: The True Story of How Clotilda Was Found, Her Descendants, and an Extraordinary Reckoning.
