Review of The Trouble with Heroes, by Kate Messner

Children's Fiction Review, Contemporary, Starred Review 0

The Trouble with Heroes

by Kate Messner
read by Mack Gordon

Bloomsbury Children’s Books, 2025. 4 hours, 16 minutes.
Review written February 2, 2026, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

I’m embarrassed. I have a print copy of this book, signed by the author, which I received at ALA Annual Conference last June and was eager to read. But somehow, with award reading, one thing and another – I didn’t get it read until my audiobook hold came in. However, all is not lost – the book was good enough that I will certainly want to read it again, and I do own a copy.

This audiobook packs a lot of punch into four hours. Finn Connelly was caught kicking over a headstone because his dad’s headstone wasn’t the kind you can kick over – and he’s in deep trouble. Turns out, he defaced the headstone of a beloved woman who had climbed all of the 46 High Peaks of the Adirondacks, and who had written letters to others who wanted to become 46ers, encouraging them in their paths. So the lady’s daughter says she’ll drop charges – if Finn will hike all 46 High Peaks that summer, and take her mother’s dog with him.

At the same time, Finn has a Language Arts poetry project he needs to complete in order to pass seventh grade. It’s supposed to be on the theme of heroes. The teacher suggests he write about his dad.

Finn’s dad was a firefighter who saved people on 9/11 and was captured in an iconic photo. And he went on to work overtime during the Covid-19 pandemic to save people. But Finn doesn’t buy the hero worship. Because he knows all too well how human his dad was.

The book is a novel in verse about Finn’s summer, climbing the 46 peaks with three different trail mentors. And the dog, whom he nicknames Drool-face. It’s told in Finn’s voice as he tries to complete poems for his poetry project. And it’s a whole lot of fun to watch his attitude slowly change – from thinking it’s all stupid and he’s a terrible person and heroes are all fake – to something much more optimistic. And at the same time, we watch him wrestle with who his dad really was.

And it’s all done in four hours! Honestly, I would have liked a little more. The story wasn’t incomplete, and plenty of details were filled in about these actual hikes – but I enjoyed my time with him and would have liked a little more of it. (This isn’t a real complaint – I think it’s fantastic to have good books for kids that aren’t ponderous tomes. But, yeah, I was a little sad it was so short.)

Oh, and the book will also make you hungry for cookies – as Finn devises a cookie to go with each of the 46 High Peaks. (Hmmm. I may have to look in the print book to try a recipe or two.)

A book that’s both powerful and heart-warming. At first, it made me want to go out and do some hiking, but the talk of rock scrambles and mud squelched that impulse to settle for enjoying reading about it.

katemessner.com

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Review of How to Hatch, written by Sara Holly Ackerman, illustrated by Galia Bernstein

Children's Nonfiction Review, Science, Starred Review 0

How to Hatch

A Gosling’s Guide to Breaking Free

written by Sara Holly Ackerman
illustrated by Galia Bernstein

Alfred A. Knopf, 2026. 32 pages.
Review written February 6, 2026, from a library book.
Starred Review

I was a Hatch before I became an Eklund, so books with my former name in the title always catch my eye. When I sat down to read this book, I was completely delighted.

This straightforward nonfiction picture book shows the steps of a gosling hatching simply and clearly, with large and engaging illustrations.

Endpapers at the front (frontpapers?) show two geese building a nest, and the title page shows the mother goose smiling and revealing eggs beneath her. Then as the main book starts, we’re focused in on what’s going on inside a single gosling’s egg.

I like children’s books where I learn something. The very first step is something I hadn’t known. The main text, addressed to the gosling, goes like this:

Step One: BREATHE!

First you need to prick the air cell.
Aim your egg tooth. Jab. Inhale.

Ahhhhh. If that feels good, you won’t believe how much air is on the other side of the shell.

But that’s for another day.

The sidebar gives more detail (still simple and clear), explaining about the pipping muscle at the back of the gosling’s neck that starts twitching, about the egg tooth and the air cell, about how the embryo’s lungs start working – and that the embryo will need to rest after this, sometimes a whole day.

The rest of the pages follow this pattern – encouraging words telling the gosling what to do, with more detailed explanations on the side.

And we get the full story of what it takes to break out of an eggshell from the inside.

First you need a hole for air, then you need to turn and peck to open a way out. And lots and lots of resting in between.

And it’s all told about – so interesting – with a focus on what’s going on inside the egg. And ends up with adorable gosling pictures.

Many elementary school classrooms have egg hatching projects. This book will be a perfect accompaniment. It sticks to the topic, approaches it simply but full of facts, and shows the kid reader an amazing look inside an egg.

sarahollyackerman.com
dancingkangaroo.com

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Review of The Enchanted Greenhouse, by Sarah Beth Durst, by Caitlin Davies

Fantasy, Fiction Review, Starred Review 0

The Enchanted Greenhouse

by Sarah Beth Durst
read by Caitlin Davies

Macmillan Audio, 2025. 13 hours, 33 minutes.
Review written February 7, 2026, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

The Enchanted Greenhouse is another cozy fantasy romance from Sarah Beth Durst, set in the same world as The Spellshop. Though this book was written after The Spellshop, I think you’d be able to read the books in any order. And if you enjoy one, you’ll enjoy the other. I was delighted to learn the origin of the sentient spider plant who was the friend of the main character in the first book.

However, enchanting that spider plant into life got our main character, Terlu, into deep trouble. She was a librarian in the Great Library of Alyssium, the Empire’s capital city, and she got lonely in the stacks with no one to talk to. So she enchanted a spider plant to keep her company. But the law declared that only sorcerers were allowed to do magic. Terlu was discovered and found guilty – and condemned to be a statue in the Great Library as a warning to others.

But then Terlu wakes up in a snowy forest. She’s not a statue any more. She goes searching for others and finds a giant enchanted greenhouse, with many smaller greenhouses inside of it, full of wonders. There is one gardener on the island in charge of it all. He’d expected that the statue he’d been sent and awoken was a sorcerer to help him solve the problem of the greenhouses failing after the death of the sorcerer who’d created them. Instead he got a librarian who’s afraid to do magic because she doesn’t want to be turned into a statue again.

But it turns out the gardener, Yarrow, is a kind man (and handsome!) and he gives her food and shelter for as long as she wants to stay. And then Terlu waters and awakens a small sentient rose plant who had been dormant. And this rose convinces her to seek a spell to awaken her fellow sentient plants who are all in an enchanted sleep. Between that and the failing greenhouses, Terlu realizes that she needs to figure out the old sorcerer’s spells to help these other beings. Fortunately, she’s skilled in multiple languages, though she might need a little help with code-breaking.

That’s the world of this book, and it adds up to another sweet and satisfying cozy magical story.

sarahbethdurst.com

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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.)

jewellparkerrhodes.com
lbyr.com

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Review of 107 Days, by Kamala Harris

Biography, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review, True Stories 0

107 Days

by Kamala Harris
read by the Author

Simon & Schuster Audio, 2025. 9 hours, 58 minutes.
Review written January 27, 2026, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

This audiobook made me wistful, nostalgic, and deeply sad for what might have been, but by the end filled me with hope and determination.

The content of the book is simple to describe: Kamala Harris tells about her 107 days running for president, from the day Joe Biden called to tell her he was dropping out to the night she got the news she had lost the election.

It renewed all my wishes that she had won. She cares about people and about trying to make government work for people. In her description of her days and her thoughts and emotions, she feels like a real person – a real person who is trying to do her best with what she has.

I think I relate to Kamala because she’s only a few months younger than me. (And Tim Walz only a few months older.) She’s also a likable person – down-to-earth and genuinely trying to use government power to defend those who need help and to bring fairness to our system.

I’ve seen criticism of this book that she didn’t take responsibility for the loss. But I think she did her best with the time she had. She does admit to some mistakes, and she points out mistakes by others (perhaps more than she should have, but it feels fair). This book shows how she gave it her best shot.

I still find myself wishing she’d had a little more investigation happen to irregularities in swing states’ voting machines, but she was determined to reinstate a peaceful transfer of power and not deepen the nation’s mistrust in voting results. And that was a powerful and hard thing she did. She said that only three other vice presidents have had to certify their own defeat – and Hubert Humphrey refused and had the president of the Senate do it in his place.

And she does hold out hope at the end. This was written before ICE moved so many troops into Minneapolis, so she focuses on the midterms and reminds us that the people still have power. May that be so. And may we as the people of these United States remember that we are the foundation of this government and make our voices known.

kamalaharris.com

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Review of (S)Kin, by Ibi Zoboi

Audiobooks, Paranormal, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

(S)Kin

by Ibi Zoboi
read by Bahni Turpin and Robin Miles

Versify (HarperCollins), 2025. 6 hours, 16 minutes.
Review written January 31, 2026, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review
2025 National Book Award Finalist

This paranormal novel in verse features two viewpoint characters. Marisol and her mother have moved from the Caribbean islands to New York City, and it’s the new moon – time for Marisol to shape shift. She sheds her skin and shifts into a fireball witch who flies through the night and wreaks vengeance on the person her mother directs her to. Her mother and the mothers before them have shapeshifted for generations, and they thought that in New York City, where no one believes the old stories, they might find it easier to be human, not treated as monsters.

Also in New York City, Genevieve, with darker skin from an unknown mother, lives with her white father and white stepmother. She’s got a terrible skin condition – some kind of allergy or eczema, always burning. Her father studies folklore, and she wonders if her mother was some kind of mermaid.

But when a woman shows up to tend her baby siblings who can soothe her skin, Gen wonders what kind of magic is happening.

Ibi Zoboi takes actual Caribbean legends and shows us what it might be like to be one of those mythical creatures – and dream of better things in America. How might that work out for teens who only want to be normal humans, blending in with their peers?

A powerful story of kinship and identity.

ibizoboi.net

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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.

karinaglaser.com

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Review of How to Read a Book, by Monica Wood

Audiobooks, Contemporary, Fiction Review, Starred Review 0

How to Read a Book

by Monica Wood
read by Eileen Stevens

HarperCollins, 2024. 10 hours, 18 minutes.
Review written January 28, 2026, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

First, a great big thank you to my friend Eileen, who recommended this book. I loved it so much!

I mean, what’s not to like? It starts out in a book club in a women’s prison. Violet, who’s 22 years old and was in prison for manslaughter, is remembering how the meetings used to go. The women would find fault with most of the books, but got a lot of satisfaction out of even that.

Then Violet gets out of prison. Her sister picks her up, but shows her an apartment in the city, rent paid for with inheritance money after their mother’s death – which the whole family blames Violet for. Her family doesn’t want her to even come back to their small town.

But in Portland, Maine, Violet runs into Harriet, the lady who ran the book club, in a book store – and also encounters Frank, the man whose wife died when Violet was driving drunk.

One thing leads to another – also involving a job taking care of highly intelligent parrots – and I was super interested all the way, enjoying the company of these kind and wise people. (Well, Violet doesn’t always act wisely, but Harriet and Frank are there to help.)

And of course it’s a book about the power of books to connect people and transform lives. And a book about second chances. And standing up for yourself even after you make bad mistakes.

It’s also the sort of book that expands your heart.

monicawood.com

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Review of We Deserve Monuments, by Jas Hammonds

Award Winners, Contemporary, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

We Deserve Monuments

By Jas Hammonds

Roaring Brook Press, 2022. 375 pages.
Review written January 26, 2023, from a library book
2022 Capitol Choices Selection
2023 Coretta Scott King John Steptoe Award for New Talent
Starred Review

We Deserve Monuments is about a Black lesbian teen named Avery who suddenly got uprooted from her home in DC at the start of her senior year of high school. Avery’s grandmother is dying of cancer in rural Georgia, and her mother decided that the family needed to be with her – never mind that the last time they visited was when Avery was five.

Mama Letty doesn’t even seem glad to see them. She calls Avery “Fish” because her lip ring makes her look like a fish on a hook. She’s prickly and isn’t exactly grateful for the family swooping down because she’s dying.

But other things go surprisingly well for Avery. The girl next door and her white friend take her under their wing, and she’s quickly got better friends than she had in DC, including the girlfriend she recently broke up with.

But there are complications. Avery learns for the first time about her grandfather who was killed by Klan members before her mother was born. And then it turns out those Klan members are related to her new white friend. And she is attracted to the girl next door, but has no reason to think those feelings are returned.

All this is going on while she’s trying to get to know Mama Letty, but learns about family trauma and hurt. And why can’t her mother and grandmother ever have a conversation without fighting?

I like the way the author shows us a family with lots of flaws but also lots of love.

Jashammonds.com
Fiercereads.com

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Review of Liturgies for Resisting Empire, by Kat Armas

Christian, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review 0

Liturgies for Resisting Empire

Seeking Community, Belonging, and Peace in a Dehumanizing World

by Kat Armas

Brazos Press, 2025. 205 pages.
Review written January 24, 2026, from my own copy, purchased via Amazon.com
Starred Review

I’ve been reading this book slowly, a section at a time, as part of my devotionals over the last several weeks. I’m not sure I grasped everything, but I like the way it opened up my thinking and showed me how much of the way I look at the world is shaped by empire-building.

At the front and back of the book, there’s a liturgy, with an Invocation and Benediction – and prayers, reflections, and readings in between. Each chapter begins with an Invocation and Reflection – a folk tale from an indigenous people group – and ends with a Prayer of Resistance and a Benediction. Each chapter is about something in Empire to reject, and something in Christianity to embrace. For example: “Rejecting Lies, Embracing Reality,” “Rejecting Hierarchy, Embracing Kinship,” “Rejecting Dualism, Embracing Paradox,” “Rejecting Sameness, Embracing Wholeness,” “Rejecting Dominance, Embracing Connection,” and “Rejecting Violence, Embracing Peace.”

This is another book I’ve marked up with quotes for Sonderquotes. It’s full of food for thought, challenging assumptions I’d carried and didn’t even realize I was holding. Let me type out a few examples to give you the flavor, rather than trying to summarize:

But the Bible itself reveals a truth often overlooked: Divine wisdom is not confined to one culture or people. Many of the sayings in the Bible’s wisdom literature echo the insights of neighboring ancient societies. Take Proverbs 22:17-24:22, which parallels the Instruction of Antenemope, an Egyptian wisdom text dating back to at least the twelfth century BCE that offers guidance on how to live with humility, integrity, and care for the vulnerable. The Hebrew authors did not reject these principles but instead wove them into their sacred texts.

In doing so, they remind us that wisdom transcends boundaries, that truth can be found in unexpected places, even beyond our own traditions. This is a quiet decentering of exclusivity, a recognition that knowledge belongs to no single people. Instead, it is a gift to be shared and honored across cultures. Perhaps this is the heart of wisdom itself: an openness to learning from the “other,” without fear, in a sacred exchange that resists the grasping hand of empire.

The last chapter especially shows us how Jesus brought the opposite of empire.

When empire used the cross to subdue, Jesus used it to restore. This is restorative justice: healing through relationship and repair. In Christ, justice is not the hammer of empire but the mending of what is broken – the gathering of the lost, the lifting of the fallen, the restoration of dignity where it has been stripped away. The cross does not demand allegiance through fear but invites transformation through love.

And in this sacred reversal, reconciliation finds its true meaning. Enemies are no longer enemies; the estranged are drawn into belonging, woven into a community where love breathes life into existence. Christ’s self-giving redefines our very identity, calling us into a peace that heals and binds and makes whole. Here, in the shadow of the cross, we step into divine reality – a place where love transforms empires and grace redraws the boundaries of what it means to belong. Here, we find shalom.

I’m going to hold onto this book to read again – hoping more will sink in each time I read it. This book acknowledges that the Way of Christ is not the Way of Empire and helps us see the difference.

katarmas.com

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