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Book reviews by library staff and guest contributors
After the hellish experience of the past few years, Aki Ito finally feels like it might be possible to be happy again. She and her parents are about to leave Manzanar, the California desert internment camp into which her family and other Japanese-Americans were forced by the government following Pearl Harbor, for an unfamiliar Chicago neighborhood the government has deemed acceptable for ‘resettlement’.
I am shallow enough to say that I do sometimes pick a book by it's cover. So, confession made, I'll say if I knew nothing else about Harper St. George's new historical romance series, I would have picked up the books for the gorgeous covers alone. Luckily for me, the stories have fulfilled the promise of those eye-catching covers.
This sunny, inviting board book is dedicated to the former Canadian Indian Residential School students and their families as encouragement to find happiness, love, joy, and celebration in big and small ways. Contemporary children participate in cultural activities like baking bannock in an oven and universal moments like singing, dancing and walking barefoot in the grass. Author Monique Gray Smith is of Cree, Lakota and Scottish descent and writes award-winning children's and young adult books. She's also an international inspirational speaker and consultant working with Indigenous commu
As I've mentioned in the past, Booklist does many annual top 10 lists. Today I ran across their new one for biographies with a focus on trailblazers who changed the world.
Do you remember where you were on September 11, 2001? I was at home, watching the news, I stepped away to help my young daughter and when I came back, the South Tower was gone.
A few years ago, my son's fifth grade class read Towers Falling by Jewell Parker Rhodes. I read along with him, and it was one of the first times that I understood that to my children, and so many others, September 11, 2001 was not a powerful memory or a deep wound, but a historical event.
It shouldn’t be a huge surprise that Michelle Zauner, a musician who goes by Japanese Breakfast, has an interest in food. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It might however be a surprise that Zauner has written such a thoroughly lovely and reflective memoir, called Crying in H Mart, that celebrates Korean food among the sometimes strained bonds of family and cultural identity, in light of her mother’s unexpected cancer death.
The publisher's blurb for this book mentions the movie Get Out and that's a fair comparison. But I recently heard author Zakiya Dalila Harris talking about the influences on her writing and she mentioned Stephen King and I can see that too. Those aside, debut author Harris puts her own fresh, unique stamp on her novel and takes the story to places neither of those others could or did go. What starts out as a skewering of the whiteness of the publishing biz is turned sideways when a building, unknown menace begins to infuse the story.
Agent Fatma el-Sha’arawi, special investigator with the Egyptian Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities, knows she’ll need all those magical elements, and a few more, to get to the bottom of the latest investigation to cross her desk. The bodies of several prominent Cairenes, most European, are discovered burned to death at the mansion of a powerful Englishman, apparently gathered as part of a secret society. But these are not just any burns. The unfortunates had all their flesh burned away, but none of their clothing.
In this the 5th (I cannot believe this is book 5 already) of the Verity Kent mystery series, author Huber marks a slower cadence to her story. Verity and her husband Sydney are visiting Verity's family home in the Yorkshire Dales for the first time since before the death of Verity's beloved brother whose plane was shot down during the war. And if that emotional quagmire weren't enough, traveling with them is Verity's Great Aunt Ilse who has left war-ravaged Germany and returned to England seeking some peace.
It’s a fantasy for a lot of people; rent out the house, pay off some bills and give it all up for an adventure. For the Wilson family from Des Moines, Iowa this fantasy became a reality when they reorganized their life for a sabbatical in another country, Croatia. Jennifer Wilson had been traveling her whole life and as an accomplished writer the sabbatical seemed like a great idea for her to explore her immigrant roots. Her architect husband Jim’s role on the trip was to make sure their two young children had some sort of schooling during their unstructured months in a foreign country.
