Review of Forgive Everyone Everything, by Gregory Boyle, art by Fabian Debora

Christian, Nonfiction Review, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

Forgive Everyone Everything

by Gregory Boyle
Art by Fabian Debora

Loyola Press, 2022. 112 pages.
Review written January 2, 2026, from my own copy.
Starred Review
2025 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #5 Christian Nonfiction

When I discovered Fr. Gregory Boyle had written a new book, Cherished Belonging, I rushed to Amazon to order my own copy and discovered another book of his I hadn’t read – Forgive Everyone Everything.

It turns out that this book doesn’t contain new writings. It takes short selections from his past three books, Tattoos on the Heart, Barking to the Choir, and The Whole Language, and pairs them with poignant paintings from Fabian Debora, Executive Director of Homeboy Art Academy.

The result is a book that’s perfect for meditative devotional reading in the morning, one spread per day.

I’ll be honest – Father Greg’s books can get a little rambly. Sometimes it’s hard for me to pick out punchy quotations to post on my Sonderquotes blog. So this book full of bite-sized powerful quotations was a delight. Reading one page inevitably gave me something to mull over during the day.

I did, of course, mark up more quotations for Sonderquotes. It’s going to be interesting to see, when I go to post them, how many are already there.

This would be a fantastic introduction to Father Greg’s writings. I do think it will leave you wanting the more in-depth stories. But it’s also a nice way to review his powerful and loving teachings, leaving you with one thought to carry with you through the day.

homeboyindustries.org

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Review of Reasons We Break, by Jesmeen Kaur Deo

Contemporary, Starred Review, Suspense, Teen Fiction Review 0

Reasons We Break

by Jesmeen Kaur Deo

Hyperion, 2025. 406 pages.
Review written November 24, 2025, from a book sent by the publisher.
Starred Review
2025 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #6 More Teen Fiction

Good girl Simran tutored Rajan in math all through high school. She was the first math tutor he could tolerate. After high school, Rajan shows up in her life again as a mentee in a program for helping troubled youth with community service. The rumors in their Sikh community say that he killed someone. Rajan’s visiting his probation officer as scheduled and trying to stay clean.

Then his old gang picks him up to pull him back into the gang – and grabs Simran, thinking she’s his girlfriend, as leverage. But that ends up turning out the opposite of expectations, as Simran volunteers to replace the gang’s bookkeeper (who recently got arrested) just long enough to pay off Rajan’s debt, so he doesn’t have work for them and break the conditions of probation.

Of course, once Rajan finds out about that, he’s not going to stand by and let Simran be in danger. But Simran is already intrigued by the puzzle of trying to figure out a rival gang’s code.

One thing keeps leading to another, and we gain insight that everyone can have life events that break them and lead them to choices they might not otherwise have picked.

It was interesting reading this book at the same time I was reading Gregory Boyle’s book, Cherished Belonging. Gregory Boyle works with gang members in Los Angeles, and is incredibly good at seeing their good hearts – and showing those good hearts to his readers. This story was fiction, but it also takes a compassionate look at teens caught up in gangs and all the difficulties of getting out.

The book also gives insight into the Sikh religion and that immigrant community in British Columbia – while delivering a suspenseful thriller about people we come to care about.

JDeoWrites.com
HyperionTeens.com

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Review of Island Storm, by Brian Floca, pictures by Sydney Smith

Contemporary, Picture Book Review, Starred Review 0

Island Storm

by Brian Floca
pictures by Sydney Smith

Neal Porter Books (Holiday House), 2025. 48 pages.
Review written December 29, 2025, from a library book.
Starred Review
2025 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #10 Picture Books

This picture book story is told in second person, which I usually don’t like, but it works beautifully here.

The wonderful pictures start even before the text. On the title page, there’s a boy and little sister standing at a window looking out. Then the dedication and copyright spread shows a woman collecting clothes blown from a line, plus a cloudy sky and gray sea.

Then we’re looking through a dark hallway to a bright doorway with the kids now wearing boots. And the text says:

Now take my hand
and we’ll go see
the sea before the storm.

The pictures and text show what they pass along the way and the waves smashing on the rocks.

But after this, and after several other interludes, there’s a refrain:

And then we ask, is this enough, or do we try for more?
You pull on me, and I pull on you, and we decide to go on.

And so they keep going on, passing homes with boarded up windows, their neighbor finishing one last walk with her dogs, the town empty of people after folks have finished stocking up.

When the thunder finally starts, they run home, planning on a shortcut through the woods – which ends up being harder in the storm than they’d thought it would be.

You can see the relief on the face of the grown-up with the flashlight who finds them and hugs them. Then they watch the storm through the windows – and the book ends the next day with the sun shining and the sea calm – “And you and I go on.”

I have to say that the amazing pictures, combined with the immediate text, make this book feel like you’re walking with the kids in the storm. This one is much better than I can capture with words alone – so let me encourage you to check it out!

brianfloca.com
sydneydraws.ca

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How Did You Count? by Christopher Danielson

Children's Nonfiction Review, Mathematical, Starred Review 0

How Did You Count?

by Christopher Danielson

A Stenhouse Book (Routledge), 2025. 36 pages.
Teacher’s Guide, 2025. 135 pages.
Review written January 2, 2026, from my own copies, sent to me by the publisher.
Starred Review
2025 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #3 Children’s Nonfiction

First, my apologies to the author for not reviewing this book sooner. The publisher sent me copies of the book and teacher’s guide when they were first published, because I so loved the author’s previous books, Which One Doesn’t Belong? and How Many?.

I did order copies for my library system and talked my coworker, who selects adult nonfiction, into ordering copies of the Teacher’s Guide. I had to decide whether to write separate reviews for each book and where to put them, but I eventually decided to review the books together and post the review on my Children’s Nonfiction page.

But then I got bogged down and put off reading the Teacher’s Guide, even though I was intrigued by it. I ended up setting aside an hour to finish it off on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, because I knew it was going to be one of my Sonderbooks Stand-outs. (And I only count books I *finish* in the previous year.) So, here, at last, is my review of this book I’m completely delighted with.

Like with his other books, as you might discern from the titles, Christopher Danielson is the master of asking kids questions that don’t have one right answer. And thus masterfully encourages children to explore and to engage in mathematical thinking.

The basic picture book here shows objects arranged in some way – rows, triangles, circles, clusters. Beside the photos, the reader is asked “How many…?” and “How did you count them?”

As usual, he starts with a simple example that helps kids understand what’s going on.

This is a book about counting, but not about right and wrong answers.
There are lots of interesting things to count. More important, there are lots of interesting ways to count them.
Once you know how many there are, count them in another way.
Turn the page to see what that means…

We see a photo of twelve tangerines arranged in a dish. The questions are asked. When you turn the page, across from the text are four smaller images of the same tangerines with lines drawn over them to show how they might have been counted.

Did you count the tangerines as four columns of three tangerines each?
Maybe you saw three zigzags of four tangerines.
Or two groups of six, or maybe you counted them one-by-one.
What other ways can you count the tangerines?

Various collections of objects follow. The most challenging to me was the tetrahedron made of basketballs. That page asked the usual questions, as well as, “Did you count any basketballs that you cannot see?”

At the back, the author says:

I made this book to spark conversation, thinking, and wonder.

It still makes my heart happy that a book about math can indeed spark those things.

Okay, all that’s in the picture book itself. I do recommend the Teacher’s Guide to elementary school teachers, to help you provoke those conversations and to start conversations with kids with genuine curiosity about their thought processes. I enjoyed the stories in the Teacher’s Guide about the conversations the author had with kids when he brought this book into classrooms.

I marked this paragraph in the Teacher’s Guide that shows the beauty of what’s going on here:

How Did You Count? is a book about structures. You can count everything in the book one-by-one. But you can also count by twos or fives, or by pairs, rows, columns, triangles, or squares. The fun is less in knowing how many there are, and much more in making and sharing new ways to know how many there are. How Did You Count? supports a virtuous cycle where the more ways you know how to count, the more new ways you can think of. All of this is in service of a rich understanding of number and operation relationships in arithmetic, which is not only a worthy goal on its own, but it also builds intuitions that support later math learning beyond arithmetic.

I love my job as Youth Materials Selector so much, it’s not often I miss working with the public. But reading the Teacher’s Guide, I got the idea for an awesome library program: Make it a Family Math program. Start by going over pictures from the book. But have a large collection of objects of various sizes and amounts. And ask the families to arrange objects to make their own “How Did You Count?” photos, and invite them to take pictures of the arrangements on their phones (or have the librarian do it for them) and submit them to the author’s website, talkingmathwithkids.com. (Since I can’t do it, maybe I can talk some of my colleagues into doing it.)

(And if that doesn’t sound like awesome, curious, exciting fun to you, I can’t help you.)

talkingmathwithkids.com
christopherdanielson.wordpress.com
routledge.com

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Review of Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

Current Issues, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review 0

Abundance

by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
read by the authors

Simon & Schuster Audio, 2025. 7 hours, 15 minutes.
Review written December 27, 2025, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review
2025 Sonderbooks Stand-out: #4 More Nonfiction

I read this book from the recommendation on President Obama’s list, and I love remembering that once we had a president who read such thoughtful works. Maybe some day we will again! (Confession: I’ve read two of the novels from the list, and they were too literary for me. So in a way, I was glad to appreciate this one – haven’t completely lost my ability to grasp difficult reading.)

I like the approach this book takes, starting in the introduction by giving us a vision of what abundance might look like thirty years from now. What would we hope the lives of our children and grandchildren would look like if they have abundance?

Then the bulk of the book talks about how we might get there – some things we’ve done well in the past, and some course corrections we should make.

And very much of the book is about government and public policy. Because it’s about building and innovation – and government already has its hands in those things. They show that in some areas, government regulations have proliferated in a way that makes us unable to respond to immediate needs. But they also give examples where governments helped things come together to achieve greatness – two examples are the Moonshot and Operation Warp Speed – the Covid vaccine.

This book isn’t about one party or the other – it shows blind spots on both sides – but has many suggestions for how our country can foster innovation and do great things – and work toward a future of abundance for our entire population.

This is one that I could probably give a better review if I hadn’t listened to the audiobook and had the book in front of me – I could quote the excellent points made. (However, if I’d tried to get the print book read, it wouldn’t have happened any time soon, so it’s just as well.) So let me tell you that the book gives an in-depth look on the attitudes and values (rather than necessarily the policies) that we need to foster to build an abundant future.

I very much hope there are still politicians who read books – from local to state to federal – and that many of those will consider the ideas found in this book, and whether the laws and regulations they are responsible for help or hinder that abundant future.

derekthompson.org

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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.

sachalamb.wordpress.com

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Review of Toes, Teeth, and Tentacles, by Steve Jenkins & Robin Page

Children's Nonfiction Review, Science, Starred Review 0

Toes, Teeth, and Tentacles

A Curious Counting Book

by Steve Jenkins & Robin Page

Little, Brown and Company, 2025. 36 pages.
Review written November 18, 2025, from my own copy, sent to me by the publisher.
Starred Review

I’ve long been a big fan of the work of Steve Jenkins and his wife Robin Page, so I was saddened by his death in 2021. I’m glad that Robin Page is keeping his memory alive by creating new books with his art (and it’s not clear how much she’s contributed to the art side).

Steve Jenkins is the one who makes incredibly realistic images of animals using cut paper techniques. Then his books are the ever-popular books full of facts about animals. Yes, I’d already noticed that some of the images have already appeared in other books. In this case, I don’t know how many of the images are new and how many are reused, but whatever the source, the result is delightful.

I tend to think that most animals have similar features to humans – two eyes, two ears, a nose, and a mouth. Two arms, two legs, five fingers and toes on each limb. Sure, I know about octopuses and spiders and insects, but there’s a basic pattern, right?

Well, this book disrupts those ideas of mine. It’s a counting book – of animal features.

We start with the one glowing spine on the angler fish, one sac in the nose of the hooded seal, one ear of the praying mantis. Then we look at the moray eel with two sets of jaws and the slow loris with two tongues. Then the squid with three hearts, the tuatara with three eyes, and the Jackson’s chameleon with three horns.

And so it goes. For each number up to ten (which includes the rattlesnake’s rattles and the sea pig’s legs), we’re given four or five examples. Then we’re told about several animals with bigger numbers of things, like the twenty-two tentacles that ring the nose of the star-nosed mole and the 18,000 teeth of the giant African land snail. A chart at the back gives more details and facts about each animal featured.

Books of strange animal facts are always a hit with many kids, and this is a fun and surprising way to organize those facts.

stevejenkinsbooks.com
robinpagebooks.com
lbyr.com

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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.

amytan.net

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Review of True True, by Don P. Hooper

Contemporary, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

True True

by Don P. Hooper

Nancy Paulsen Books (Penguin Random House), 2023. 368 pages.
Review written October 20, 2023, from my own copy, sent by the publisher.
Starred Review

True True is the story of Gil, a Black teenager from Brooklyn with Jamaican roots, who transfers for his senior year to a prep school in Manhattan to be on the robotics team. But once there, he gets confronted by racism – a football player and two teammates start a fight with him, and Gil is the only one who gets suspended and put on probation.

On probation, he’s not supposed to work with the robotics team for a month. But he knows he can help – is it worth doing if he can’t take any credit?

The racism is quite blatant, but still unacknowledged. Gil fumes and figures out how to get those opportunities his grandma and mother sacrificed for, while still showing his friends in Brooklyn that he cares about them. The sensei at his dojo has a copy of The Art of War, and Gil tries to use the principles found there to battle the racism so strong at school.

It’s all portrayed in such a way that it feels real, and we are with Gil as he tries to juggle friends, family, classes, martial arts, robotics, all while trying to battle racism in the most savvy way. He makes many mistakes along the way, which gets us all the more firmly on his side.

This book has so much heart, it doesn’t feel like an issue book. It’s a book about a teen trying to deal with what life throws at him.

DonHooper.com
PenguinTeen.com

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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!

jasonwritesbooks.com

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