Review of Will’s Race for Home, by Jewell Parker Rhodes

Children's Fiction Review, Historical, Starred Review 0

Will’s Race for Home

by Jewell Parker Rhodes

Little, Brown and Company, 2025. 196 pages.
Review written February 4, 2026, from a library book.
Starred Review
2026 Coretta Scott King Author Award Winner
2026 Capitol Choices selection

Here’s a Western with a Black kid as the protagonist. The book starts out in late 1888. Will lives with his parents and his grandfather on land they sharecrop in Texas, giving most of the profit to the owner. Father and Pa say it’s not much better than slavery.

So when Father hears about a coming land rush for land in Oklahoma, opening up on Monday, April 22, 1889, at noon, Father and Will join the crowd heading out to stake their claim. They’ve got their mule Belle hitched up to a wagon, and they hope to make it on time, because there are more people seeking 160 acres of land than there is land to give them.

And the journey is difficult. They find a friend who helps them, and then they need to help the friend. And they have to get their mule and wagon across the Red River on the border between Texas and Oklahoma. They face gunslingers and sheriffs who don’t want Black folks to claim land. Will gets to know his father better and then gets to know himself better, because by the end he has an important part to play.

It feels like children’s books are getting shorter lately, which is a welcome change. In under 200 pages, Jewell Parker Rhodes gives us a story full of danger and drama, as well as compassion and hope, and shedding light on a part of American history I hadn’t known a lot about. (My own great-grandparents had a homestead in Oklahoma – now I’m curious if they were part of that same land rush.)

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Review of The Nine Moons of Han Yu and Luli, by Karina Yan Glaser

Audiobooks, Award Winners, Children's Fiction Review, Historical, Starred Review 0

The Nine Moons of Han Yu and Luli

by Karina Yan Glaser
read by Sira Siu and Brian Nishii

HarperCollins, 2025. 10 hours, 1 minute.
Review written January 31, 2026, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review
2026 Newbery Honor Book

The Nine Moons of Han Yu and Luli tells two stories, 1200 years apart. Han Yu is a boy living in China in the year 731, during the Tang dynasty. He sells steamed buns in the market with his father. But when his entire family gets put into isolation because of his sister’s case of the illness sweeping the countryside, Han Yu decides to accept the commission intended for his father and travel along the trade routes later known as the Silk Roads to deliver the goods and make more money than his family can make in a year.

Alongside that story, with alternating chapters, we learn about Luli, who lives in 1931 Chinatown in New York City. Luli’s family owns a restaurant that used to be bustling and busy, but now hard times have fallen and business is slow, and they are in danger of losing the building that houses their restaurant and their home.

The parallels in the story are skillfully executed, though the children’s lives are so far apart in time and space. Both children start selling steamed buns to help their families. Both face difficulties and hardships with a parallel flow through the alternating chapters. Despite the cliffhanger chapter endings, I never found myself annoyed to switch characters, because I was equally interested in each character’s adventures.

Han Yu has a way with animals that they come to him and turn to him. And rumors say that a tiger protects him. Along the way, he meets a young poet who becomes his best friend. Luli, too, has a dog who protects her, and friends who help. Her whole class visits the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and they also visit the Chinese art treasures that Luli’s neighbor keeps in their building at the gift shop.

What ties the two stories together? There’s a piece of silk that has been handed down in Luli’s neighbor’s family for generations. It has a poem written on it in Chinese characters. So we’re ready to hear the story of how it came to be.

I have to say that both characters have some awfully good luck that keeps disaster averted – but in a children’s story, I think we all have more tolerance for that. (I certainly needed those kids to get a happy ending!) And the kids themselves both have plenty of opportunities to display courage and resourcefulness.

It’s not every author who can tie together two stories of children from 1200 years apart who never meet and have it work beautifully. This story, steeped in actual history, gives the reader a deep appreciation for Chinese culture along with the joy of a story well-told.

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Review of The Lost Bookshop, by Evie Woods

Audiobooks, Contemporary, Fiction Review, Historical, Paranormal, Romance 0

The Lost Bookshop

by Evie Woods
read by Avena Mansergh-Wallace, Olivia Mace, and Nick Biadon

One More Chapter (HarperCollins), 2023. 12 hours, 1 minute.
Review written December 26, 2025, from a library eaudiobook.

I put a hold on The Lost Bookshop because of how much I enjoyed the author’s The Mysterious Bakery on Rue de Paris. This one was very similar, and I also enjoyed it. In both, we’ve got one historical thread combined with a romance in the present, and the perspectives of both the man and woman involved in the romance, plus the perspective of the character in history whose actions affect the present.

Our characters in this book start with Opaline, in the early twentieth century, whose brother was forcing her to marry a man she hadn’t even met after their father died. Opaline flees to Paris, and there starts working with Sylvia Beach in the famous Shakespeare & Co. bookshop. She later moves to Dublin and starts her own bookshop – until her brother gets her committed to an insane asylum.

In the present, we’ve got Martha, who’s fleeing her abusive husband and looking for a job in Dublin. She lands a job as a housekeeper for an eccentric old woman in a historic home. Then one day she sees Henry scrutinizing her windows and thinks he’s a peeping Tom. But he is looking for a bookshop with an address right next to her house – that doesn’t seem to exist. But Henry is a rare book dealer and has a letter that says that bookshop has Emily Bronte’s lost second manuscript.

One thing leads to another, and you can tell where it’s going – but it’s fun. Opaline’s story – in Paris and especially in the insane asylum – is riveting.

I have to say that this book had more paranormal elements than The Mysterious Bakery on Rue de Paris – and for me this one crossed the line into unbelievability. It wasn’t only the bookshop that only appears to those who need it (or true believers? or something), but also mysterious otherworldly messages, and several more things.

However, despite a few too many paranormal bits for my taste – I still enjoyed these characters. Henry always seems to say the wrong thing, but he’s earnest and kind. Martha fleeing a truly horrible abusive situation had all my sympathy as well. (I saw my ex-husband for the first time in a decade when I was in the middle of listening to this book and was reminded of how we program ourselves to love someone, and that’s hard to turn off, even when their behavior means they don’t deserve or want your love any more. Not that mine was as bad as Martha’s husband. But still, she had my sympathy.) And Opaline’s situation was also fascinating in an awful way, tying in with what I’d read in Ten Days a Madwoman, by Deborah Noyes. It wasn’t all that long ago that men could lock women up in insane asylums.

Fortunately, this story ends happily for all our main characters. This is a feel-good romance, a little too enthusiastic with the paranormal elements, but you can be sure that all the stars align for them in the end.

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Review of The Forbidden Book, by Sacha Lamb

Historical, Paranormal, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

The Forbidden Book

by Sacha Lamb

Levine Querido, 2024. 251 pages.
Review written February 18, 2025, from a library book.
Starred Review
2025 Sidney Taylor Young Adult Silver Medal

The Forbidden Book is another brilliant paranormal story playing off Jewish folklore, as with When the Angels Left the Old Country that I enjoyed so much. This one is set in medieval Eastern Europe.

As the book opens, a lumber merchant’s daughter named Sorel is about to be married to the rebbe’s son from the nearby city. She knows she feels like the girl dressed up in the wedding clothes is a stranger, and she wants to leave. But it’s when she hears a voice in her head saying that they’ll go with her that she leaps out the window and flees.

She steals the stable-boy’s clothes where he stashed them in the stable, along with a knife. She cuts her hair short and sets out, feeling oddly free.

I thought it was a story about a young transgender man, but it turns out there’s more to the voice she heard than her own wishful thinking. When asked her name, Sorel comes up with Isser Jacobs, and before long, she gets attacked in an alley by thugs looking for Isser Jacobs and something he stole. But a giant black dog interrupts the attack and Sorel escapes.

But she’s worried about the girl, a friend of the real Isser, that the thugs mentioned. One thing leads to another, and Sorel and a small group of others are trying to find out what happened to Isser and looking for a magic book that he stole, which was written by the Angel of Death.

The book is full of that touch of magic and reads like a mystical folktale. Sorel has some encounters with spirits before she’s through and needs to think about what she actually wants for her life.

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The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan

Audiobooks, Fiction Review, Historical, Old Favorites, Starred Review 0

The Joy Luck Club

by Amy Tan
read by Gwendoline Yeo

Phoenix Books, 2008. 9 hours, 5 minutes. Original book published in 1989.
Review written December 1, 2025, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

I’m going to go ahead and call this an Old Favorite, though I only read it once before – sometime before I started writing Sonderbooks in 2001. I remember that we watched the movie based on the book when my second was a baby – and felt like it should have a warning label because a baby dies in the movie. I revisited the book because my friend Suzanne mentioned it when she signed up for Book Talking with Sondy. I then discovered that my library has an eaudiobook version available and put a hold on it.

The book is wonderful. It features four Chinese women who immigrated to America and their four American daughters. The women met monthly for a Joy Luck Club where they played Mahjongg, but now one of them has recently passed away, and her daughter has been invited to join the game. And the women in the club have a surprise for the daughter – they have found her long lost twin sisters, and have gotten her tickets to China to meet them, fulfilling her mother’s dearest wish.

The rest of the book gives us stories – stories of the mothers, and stories of the daughters. We eventually learn how the twin babies were lost so long ago during war time. We see how the mothers and daughters lived very different lives and don’t fully understand each other. We see that the daughters have more in common with each other than they ever realize.

The reader did a fine job of consistently giving the characters in this book their own unique voices – but I had trouble in the audio version keeping track of whose story I was hearing and which daughter went with which mother. Unfortunately, the part of the chapter heading that showed in Libby did not include the character’s name, and I listened to this while driving to a new place, and missed some crucial details. I did remember how it worked from having read it before, so I feel like I still appreciated the book.

And this remains a classic novel about mothers and daughters and the experience of being an immigrant. With each character having different experiences in their journeys, literal and figurative, it shows how every immigrant’s experience is unique – yet gives us a window on what the challenges they face, which even their own children may not fully understand.

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Review of Coach, by Jason Reynolds

Children's Fiction Review, Historical, Starred Review 0

Coach

Track, Book Five

by Jason Reynolds
read by Guy Lockard

Simon & Schuster Audio, 2025. 5 hours, 14 minutes.
Review written December 18, 2025, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

Coach is the fifth book in Jason Reynolds’ Track series for middle grade readers, each one featuring a different member of the Defenders track team – talking about all the good things about competing on a team while also giving us a window into life situations that weren’t always easy. It looks like I only reviewed the first two books, Ghost and Patina. Though this is book five, it’s effectively a prequel – since this book covers when Coach was a kid, discovering track himself in the 1980s.

This book is narrated with great enthusiasm by Guy Lockard. The reading was basically the same character as in Jason Reynolds’ Stuntboy books, a boy with ADHD. And that didn’t feel wrong for this book, though Coach – then known as Otie Brody – wasn’t formally diagnosed with ADHD and was a bit older than Stuntboy. But he was enthusiastic about things and did sometimes get distracted.

Otie’s enthusiasms make for great reading. His dream is to run in the Olympics and win a gold medal like his hero, Carl Lewis. And also to build a time machine like Marty McFly from Back to the Future. But after he gets mocked for letting his hair get out of shape – his dad being out of town – Otie tries to fix it himself – and accidentally shaves his eyebrow off. His mother helps him concoct a plausible story that it reduces drag and makes him faster – and shaves his whole head to sell the story.

That’s the beginning of Otie’s antics and obstacles as we see him trying to do his best, dreaming of winning glory, and dealing with some family issues – that all go into making him the empathetic coach he’ll need to be later.

Another solid feel-good choice for middle school and upper elementary readers, you don’t have to read the first books to enjoy this one. So glad that there’s one more!

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Review of The Teacher of Nomad Land, by Daniel Nayeri

Audiobooks, Award Winners, Children's Fiction Review, Historical, Starred Review 0

The Teacher of Nomad Land

A World War II Story

by Daniel Nayeri
read by Daniel Nayeri

Listening Library, 2025. 3 hours, 23 minutes.
Review written December 12, 2025, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review
2025 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature Winner

Ahhhh. The Teacher of Nomad Land is my favorite Daniel Nayeri book so far. And he’s already won the Printz Award and Newbery Honor. Traditionally, it usually turns out that the winner of the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature does not win the Newbery Medal. Will this year break the pattern?

But about the book. As the subtitle indicates, this is a World War II story, and it’s set in Iran. Iran wasn’t the main stage in World War II and was officially neutral – but that made it a place where people from all over the world could meet one another – with lots of room for misunderstandings.

Our story begins in Isfahan when Babak’s father has recently been killed by the Russian army. His father had been visiting the nomads in their summer home, teaching their children, and the army fired at them, thinking they were insurgents. Babak promises his little sister Sanna that even though they are orphans, he won’t let them be split up, but their relatives don’t give them any choice.

So Babak works as an errand boy for a year, trying to save money to take Sanna away with him so they can be together. They will ask the nomads to take them in before they leave for their winter home.

After a year of saving, the money doesn’t work out, but Babak and Sanna set out anyway. Babak brings along his father’s blackboard, rigged with leather straps to carry on his back. He offers to teach the nomads’ children and tries to be as good a teacher as his father was, but his first attempt isn’t enough for the chief of the nomads.

But then the adventure really begins. As Babak and Sanna try to find their way back to Isfahan, staying together no matter what, they encounter a ruthless Nazi spy who takes all their food. Later, they meet the Jewish refugee boy from Poland that the German is looking for. Together, they try to make their way to somewhere safe, but there’s lots of misunderstanding along the way, not to mention the need for food and water.

The most brilliant scene of all is when Babak figures out how to facilitate communication between the nomads, British soldiers, and Russian soldiers – using I think it was five different languages.

Along the way, Babak learns to emulate his father and think like a teacher, gleaning plenty of wisdom as he does so.

I also love that the book isn’t overindulgent in its length, despite the heavy topic of war time – under four hours in an audiobook! – just right for a children’s book. Yes, it’s about war time, so there are dangerous and scary situations, but the kids at the center of it come through brilliantly.

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Review of Happy Land, by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Audiobooks, Contemporary, Fiction Review, Historical 0

Happy Land

by Dolen Perkins-Valdez
read by Bahni Turpin and Ashley J. Hobbs

Books on Tape, 2025. 10 hours, 19 minutes.
Review written November 21, 2025, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

First, a big thank you to Suzanne, who recommended this book when she signed up for my email newsletter, Book Talking with Sondy. My hold finally came in, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

This is a book that combines characters you care about with little-known history and present-day injustices. There are two perspectives and two narrators in this audiobook. First, in the present day, Nikki has been summoned unexpectedly from her home in DC to her grandmother in North Carolina. Nikki hasn’t seen her grandmother since her mother and grandmother had an extreme falling-out. Now Nikki’s own daughter is at loose ends after graduating from high school without a plan going forward, and Nikki hasn’t been doing well in her career as a real estate agent. But she doesn’t know why her grandmother has summoned her to the mountain where their family has lived for generations.

The second perspective is Luella, Nikki’s grandmother’s great-grandmother. Luella was born in slavery, but after gaining freedom, her community was in danger from the Klan in South Carolina. So the entire community, led by her father, a preacher, traveled to a mountain on the border with North Carolina. At the urging of William Montgomery, a charismatic young man who asked her to marry him – they founded not just a community, but a kingdom. And William was elected the king and Luella the queen.

At first, the folks of the kingdom rented the land from a widow who needed their help running her hotel, but they worked toward owning the land. There were many obstacles along the way and much personal turmoil. And this is all based on an actual “kingdom” that existed in America not long after the Civil War.

Meanwhile, in the present, Nikki learns about the kingdom – but that her grandmother is in danger of losing the land, where she’s lived since she was born on the premises. And along the way, she sees how connected her grandmother is to the land and to the community – but needs to find out more about why her grandmother and mother stopped speaking to each other. Can she mend the generational rift? Can she save the land that her family has owned for 150 years?

I didn’t completely understand the law that allows people who inherit one portion of property to sell off other portions of property at auction without folks who live there knowing about it. Since I was listening, I didn’t even catch the name of this type of law, but the author names it as a major way that land has been stolen from African Americans, destroying generational wealth. So one of the big conflicts in the book has to do with an actual current issue.

And it’s all told in a compelling story. Luella’s life wasn’t easy, even though she was a queen. And Nikki, after her, has some choices to make as she learns about her connection to royalty and the Kingdom of the Happy Land.

The author’s blog points to a fascinating webpage about the actual Kingdom of the Happy Land. Amazing stuff!

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Review of The Davenports, by Krystal Marquis, read by Joniece Abbot-Pratt

Audiobooks, Historical, Romance, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

The Davenports

by Krystal Marquis
read by Joniece Abbott-Pratt

Listening Library, 2023. 12 hours, 2 minutes.
Review written April 29, 2023, from a library eaudiobook
Starred Review

The Davenports reminds me of a Jane Austen book – a wealthy family trying to get their kids married off – only this one is set in 1910, and the family are successful Black Americans in Chicago. The father of the Davenport clan was born enslaved, but after escaping, ended up making a fortune with a carriage company. And he’s happily giving his family a much better life – maybe sheltering them a little too much.

Now the two daughters and one son are at an age to be married – but nobody falls in love with the person their parents want and expect them to marry. And it’s quite fun watching it happen.

There are four viewpoint characters: Olivia Davenport is getting ready for her second season and really needs to find a husband this time around. When Jacob Lawrence shows up from England, everyone thinks she’s found one. But then she stumbles into meetings of activists when she’s doing charity work and learns the plight of her people in the South.

Olivia’s friend Ruby has been in love with Olivia’s brother, John Davenport, since they were kids. Her father is running for mayor of Chicago, and her parents want Ruby to go ahead and get him to propose. Maybe if she makes him jealous….

Younger sister Helen Davenport is never happier than working in the garage on the modern horseless carriages. Maybe she can help John convince their father to expand the business to automobiles. But instead, her parents hire an etiquette tutor to bring Helen into line.

The final viewpoint character is Amy-Rose, long time friend and maid to the Davenport girls. She’s been saving her money, and now she’s almost ready to start her own business and open a salon.

I thought I knew where this book was going, but all the romances run into snags toward the end of the book, and the author’s note hints at a sequel. So I’m looking forward to more time with the Davenport family in the future. The author’s note also tells us that the family was based on an actual family led by a formerly enslaved Black man who got rich in the carriage business. She wondered what life might have been like for his daughters. And her wondering gave us this delightful book.

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Review of The Bluest Sky, by Christina Diaz Gonzalez

Children's Fiction Review, Historical 0

The Bluest Sky

by Christina Diaz Gonzalez

Alfred A. Knopf, 2022. 314 pages.
Review written September 11, 2025, from a library book.

The Bluest Sky is the story of Hector, a Cuban boy in 1980 who dreams of getting on the National Math Olympiad Team. But he wonders if the politics of his father, who spent time in prison and now lives in America, will outweigh that of his grandmother, who is a high official in the Communist party.

There are rumors that the government is allowing more people to leave Cuba. But they are rousing communities against the non-patriotic scum who would do so. Hector loves his country and his friends and doesn’t understand why anyone would leave.

And then his mother tells him that she has applied for exit visas to join his father, whom Hector hardly knows.

The story that follows is full of ups and downs and conflict. It builds toward the Mariel boat lift, when Cuban prisoners were added to the boats of refugees.

This book is a window into a difficult time and tough decisions. I had heard of the Mariel boat lift, but hadn’t realized it was so recent – and that Hector would have been younger than me, so folks from that episode of history are still alive in America today. I appreciate that fictional eyes can help kids understand what it must have been like to live that historical moment.

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