Review of My Bicentennial Summer, by G. Neri, illustrated by Corban Wilkin

Biography, Children's Nonfiction Review, History, Starred Review 0

My Bicentennial Summer

True Adventures from the Most Epic Family Road Trip of All Time

by G. Neri
illustrated by Corban Wilkin

Candlewick Press, 2026. 88 pages.
Review written July 21, 2026, from a library book.
Starred Review

First, sorry about not getting this read before the Semiquincentennial.

As he did in My Antarctica, G. Neri makes his own travels the center of this nonfiction story, illustrated with plenty of photos, but also illustrations drawn over them. However, this time the travels happened when he was a kid. His family took six weeks and drove and camped all across America in honor of the Bicentennial in 1976.

Now, I was twelve years old in 1976. (It looks like the author is just a bit younger than me.) I remember all the hype about the Bicentennial. It makes me a little sad that not nearly as much happened for the 250th. But our family didn’t do an epic road trip like this, and it was super fun to read about and remember the hype.

I love the way the author points out the people and the cool things they saw as they drove through so many states. He talks about the history behind the Bicentennial, the ideals of democracy that we’re still striving toward, and brings it together with fun things about his own experiences in a pop-up camper with his family.

The end result is that as well as reading a fun story that’s surprising in many places – and true – you also come away proud to be part of this great big, quirky, and diverse country. We’ve come a long way in fifty years, but we’re still an incredibly diverse bunch of people with interesting local traditions in every part.

gregneri.com

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Review of Angry Girls Will Get Us Through, by Rebecca Traister

History, Teen Nonfiction 0

Angry Girls Will Get Us Through

by Rebecca Traister
read by Cynthia Farrell

Simon & Schuster Audio, 2026. 6 hours, 52 minutes.
Review written July 20, 2026, from a library eaudiobook.

This book takes Rebecca’s 2018 book for adults: Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, updates it for 2026, and directs it to teen girls, to encourage them to use their anger to fight injustice.

Angry Girls Will Get Us Through points out that the Declaration of Independence was fueled by anger – as evidenced by the list of grievances it includes. But that anger – from white men – has always been more acceptable than anger coming from women or any other group.

From there, this is a book of history, a history of how women channeled their anger, through all the years of American history, to make a difference.

An obviously large topic was the fight for women to get the vote, but women of the time also worked for abolition and for temperance. The author makes the point that the temperance movement was mainly to protect women from alcoholic husbands – and outlawing alcohol was a more feasible goal at the time than changing the laws around marriage that gave men complete control over their wives.

But then the book looks at more modern times, at the first women to run for president and be in Congress. How even in modern times, a woman shedding tears, even angry ones, could ruin her chances of winning elections, and how Hillary Clinton and women like her had to always be careful of how they expressed what in a man would be called “passion.”

And then it brings us to the present day, including the second election of Donald Trump. We get the encouraging news that Hillary Clinton’s defeat and the Women’s March prompted a new wave of women entering politics. We hear about the effects of Black Lives Matter and the Me Too Movement. I was disappointed that the Epstein files were not mentioned, but that is even still unresolved, so I can understand leaving it out.

By the end of the book, despite my upbringing that anger is an emotion good people avoid, I was convinced: Anger at injustice can lead to good things, good that can reach many more people.

I hope that young women who read or listen to this book will take that message to heart. For that matter, I hope I will take this message to heart and not be as quick to stuff down anger at injustices I hear about in the news.

rebeccatraister.com

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Review of Notre-Dame, by Lynn Curlee

Children's Nonfiction Review, History, Starred Review 0

Version 1.0.0
Notre-Dame

The World’s Cathedral

by Lynn Curlee

Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2026. 44 pages.
Review written July 7, 2026, from a library book.
Starred Review

Here is another book by artist Lynn Curlee about one of the important structures of the world. Although it is illustrated with big, beautiful paintings, those accompany a full text, so this book is more for upper elementary and middle school readers than your usual picture book crowd.

Is it safe to say that most people who have seen Notre Dame de Paris love this cathedral? I don’t think it’s just me. I’ve visited it several times, and each memory of that place is precious. So my heart was broken when the cathedral burned in 2019.

This book begins with the fire, explaining how it happened and the heroic efforts to save as much as possible. Then it goes back and gives the history of the cathedral. I didn’t realize it was the first truly Gothic cathedral, and we get detailed explanations of what that means.

Gothic cathedrals are among the most complex and ambitious structures ever conceived. It is simply mind-boggling to realize that they were constructed completely by manual labor, without the aid of machines of any kind. There were obviously no computers for design work, mathematical calculations, or virtual modeling, and no electric, hydraulic, or steam-powered devices to make things easier. All they had were hand tools like chisels, mallets, handsaws, levers, winches, and pulleys. Building materials were transported by boat or by oxcart. Probably the most complicated device they used was like a big hamster wheel, large enough for several men to operate by walking inside, for hoisting heavy loads high into the air.

Notre Dame has been around for nine centuries, and was ransacked at different times and then restored and added to. The French Revolution left it in disrepair, but then Victor Hugo’s popular novel, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, aroused interest in restoring it. That restoration was when the gallery of chimeras was added – the wonderful gargoyles on the bell towers.

The book concludes by telling of the amazing restoration work after the fire, with paintings of workers suspended from ropes.

The catastrophe of April 15, 2019, and the campaign of reconstruction riveted the attention of people from all over the world. By almost losing it forever, we gained a new appreciation of Notre-Dame’s importance as the ultimate example of a Gothic cathedral. As a monument of three different eras – the Middle Ages, the nineteenth century, and now the twenty-first century – the newly refurbished cathedral has reclaimed its official place as the Cathedral of Paris, a symbol of France, a great milestone in the cultural heritage of humanity, and one of the most popular tourist attractions on Earth. And unofficially, more than ever before, the Cathedral of Notre-Dame may be celebrated as the World’s Cathedral.

This tribute to the World’s Cathedral makes you feel like you’re there.

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Review of Airports: Behind the Scenes, illustrated by Maxim Usik

Children's Nonfiction Review, History 0

Airports

Behind the Scenes

by Anna Ridley
illustrated by Maxim Usik
consultant Laurence Hardisty

Thames and Hudson, 2026. 48 pages.
Review written June 1, 2026, from a library book.

Taking a trip with kids? Here’s a detailed and fascinating in-depth look at what goes on behind the scenes. I still recommend The Airport Book, by Lisa Brown, for very young children and preschoolers. But for kids who are reading on their own and love poring over detailed pictures, this oversized book will be ideal preparation. Okay, it’s really too big to conveniently carry with you – but kids will enjoy it so much in preparation for a trip, it’s worth it.

The book goes through the different parts of an airport – ticketing, security, baggage conveyor systems, through activity on the ground around the plane, air traffic control, and how things work inside the plane.

There are kid-centered questions throughout the book: “Do suitcases get mixed up?” “Why can’t I ride on the luggage carousel?” “Can I take snakes on a plane?” “Can a body scanner see me naked?” “Why is that airplane being towed?” “Who flies the plane when the pilot needs to go to the bathroom?” “How many planes are in the air at one time?” “Why can’t we fly with the windows open?” and “Why do I feel like farting?”

The whole book is filled with detailed pictures, answers to questions like those above and lots more, and plenty of information even I hadn’t known before I read this book. (So it wasn’t just that I ate the wrong thing before the flight!)

I like that this is a modern book, with modern scanners and security requirements, likely to match what a child will see at the airport today.

Interesting and informative, and a great way to get thinking about my upcoming trip to France!

maximusik.art

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Review of How the Word Is Passed, by Clint Smith, adapted by Sonja Cherry-Paul

History, Starred Review, Teen Nonfiction 0

How the Word Is Passed

Remembering Slavery and How it Shaped America

by Clint Smith
adapted for young readers by Sonja Cherry-Paul

Little, Brown and Company, 2025. 305 pages.
Review written May 27, 2026, from a library book.
Starred Review

I’m going to put this on my Teen Nonfiction page of the website, but it’s appropriate for upper elementary school on up. I didn’t feel talked down to when I was reading it, and it was interesting and engaging all the way.

This is a book about how we tell the story of slavery. And I’m afraid there were many eye-opening facts I didn’t know. The author visits seven historic sites and talks with the curators there about the history of slavery at that place – and how it’s smoothed over or how people are trying to confront it. He tells us about each visit and the people he met, and the book is a fascinating melding of the past and the present – helping the reader better understand just how much slavery underpins our lives today.

For the first stop at Monticello, the author went on a tour specifically about Thomas Jefferson’s relationship with slavery. This book doesn’t have a lot to say about Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemings – probably because it’s a children’s book. But it still has plenty to say about the contrast between Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence and the way he treated his slaves.

Though Jefferson understood the devastating impact that selling an enslaved person to another plantation could have on the rest of the enslaved population, he still sold more than one hundred people over the course of his life. He separated children as young as thirteen from their parents by sale, he bought children as young as eleven, and he separated children under ten from their families by transferring them between his own properties or giving them to his own family members as gifts.

Jefferson believed that he might free himself from any guilt over the brutality of slavery by avoiding its most extreme forms of physical violence. But as an enslaver, there was no such thing as avoiding the violence of slavery – to own an enslaved person was itself to make yourself a participant in the inherent violence of the institution. Additionally, when he felt it necessary to maintain the order that made his life possible, Jefferson did engage in some of the very brutal practices he claimed to so deeply loathe.

When an enslaved man who worked in Monticello’s nail factory was caught a year after he escaped, Jefferson wrote, “I had him severely flogged in the presence of his old companions.” Although he attempted to create distance between himself and the abuse by assigning the whipping to an overseer, Jefferson knew, just as slave holders throughout the South knew, that the spectacle of public assault was a means of both asserting authority over, and maintaining order among, enslaved workers.

The other places the author visits include Whitney Plantation, where they attempt to show what plantation life was like for the enslaved people; Angola Prison, where mostly Black men are incarcerated, and where they try to smooth over the history of enslavement in that place; Blandford Cemetery, where Confederate soldiers are honored with beautiful stained-glass windows but don’t talk about what the Confederacy stood for; Galveston Island, where they reenact the story of Juneteenth, when enslaved people in Texas first learned they’d been freed; New York City, where enslaved people were auctioned off, and where a Black settlement was leveled to create Central Park; and finally Gorée Island in Senegal, where human beings were shipped across the ocean, passing through the Door of No Return.

I like the way the book is filled with facts, but it’s told as an absorbing story. He interacts with people who live in each place and talks with them about what that history means to them.

This ends up being a powerful book. I’m glad this information has been put in a form accessible and interesting to children, because this is an important part of our national history, and shouldn’t be glossed over. So far, I’m going to recommend this book to kids from about fifth or sixth grade up – but also to adults. Is this more concisely told than the adult version? I’m going to put that one on hold to see, but so far this one is packed with a satisfying amount of information, told in an absorbing way.

clintsmithiii.com
sonyacherrypaul.com
lbyr.com

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Review of Black History Is Your History, by Taylor Cassidy

History, Teen Nonfiction 0

Black History Is Your History

by Taylor Cassidy
illustrated by Adriana Bellet

Atheneum, 2025. 192 pages.
Review written May 17, 2026, from a library book.

Taylor Cassidy is a popular TikTok creator of the series “Fast Black History.” She’s in her early twenties and already very popular. This book is a compilation of bios of Black people who did notable things, told in a conversational style. Let me note right up front that I’m an older white lady, and I am not in the intended audience! She takes a very casual tone, as I’m sure works beautifully on her TikTok channel, talking firsthand with teens.

In every chapter, she includes a sort of sidebar with a different color background and the heading “Tay Story.” She tells about something in her own life that relates to what the person featured in that chapter went through – and how she learned from them and you can, too.

I’m not very near to the trials of high school, so I wasn’t as interested in those parts as in the bios they were interrupting, but I think teens will relate to most of the things she describes. And that got me thinking about something in my life, so it seems only fair to insert this:

Sondy Story

Last summer, I went to a Christian writers’ conference, and one of the editors who was speaking said that everybody’s first Christian book is a memoir.

And I had to plead guilty. I have a book about Psalms (and I recently signed with a literary agent!) – and I illustrate each type of Psalm by telling my own story and how different types of Psalms were helpful at different times.

But the editor continued. It’s okay to include your own story if it illustrates something bigger. Strangers don’t necessarily care about your life – but if you can use it to illustrate something bigger, that can work and add a personal touch. I think I’ve managed that in my Psalms book.

***

And I also think Taylor has managed it in her book. Her stories show teens how the qualities found in these Black heroes can inspire you to get through difficulties in your own life. I wouldn’t want to read a straight memoir from Taylor – She’s so young! But a series of profiles of Black heroes peppered with personal experiences that relate? It ends up being an interesting and readable book.

As a librarian, I’d like some notes in the back as to her sources, but she did try to include in the text where she got a lot of the information. This is Black History that is the opposite of a textbook, and I think kids from middle school up will enjoy her fresh take – and probably learn even more on her TikTok channel.

simonandschuster.com/teen

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Review of Stealing Little Moon, by Dan SaSuWeh Jones

Audiobooks, History, Teen Nonfiction 0

Stealing Little Moon

The Legacy of the American Indian Boarding Schools

by Dan SaSuWeh Jones
read by Shaun Taylor-Corbett

Scholastic Audio Books, 2024. 6 hours, 10 minutes.
Review written April 8, 2026, from a library eaudiobook.

Stealing Little Moon is a story about American Indian Boarding Schools, but also a family story. Dan SaSuWeh Jones’s grandmother was taken from her family at gunpoint when she was four years old. Her name was Little Moon There Are No Stars Tonight. She arrived when Chilocco Indian Agricultural School had just opened – and the author was a maintenance worker after the school closed. In between, four generations of his family attended the school.

I expected a story of horrific abuse in the Indian Boarding Schools. I had no idea that children as young as four years old were taken, which adds to the horror, but I wasn’t exactly surprised by stories of abuse, poor nutrition, hard work, lack of medical care, and a refusal to let the children speak their own languages – yes, horrified, but not surprised. (The Witness Blanket, by Carey Newman and Kirstie Hudson, gave me a powerful overview of what happened in the schools.)

However, this book contained much more than that. The author would often digress, telling about notable people who attended the Indian schools, telling about legislation that tried to erase them, and also telling about steps taken to fight back and reclaim the schools as a positive force in Indian lives. It was after Native Americans themselves were in charge of the schools that they were forced to close. But their legacy lives on, in both good and bad ways.

Listening to this book as an audiobook, it felt pretty unorganized because of all the digressions. I think if I’d had the book in front of me and the chapter headings in mind, it would have felt less so. But still, the digressions were all very interesting. They often had a personal touch with the author’s family. I did like how he pointed out that by bringing children from many different Indian nations together, they gained new solidarity with one another and this shared experience – traumatic in many ways, but also with some positives.

Above all, he demonstrates how the United States government tried to wipe out the indigenous people and make them assimilate – but they failed in that goal.

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Review of A World Without Summer, by Nicholas Day with art by Yas Imamura

Award Winners, Children's Nonfiction Review, History, Starred Review 0

A World Without Summer

A Volcano Erupts, a Creature Awakens, and the Sun Goes Out

by Nicholas Day
with art by Yas Imamura

Random House Studio, 2025. 294 pages.
Review written February 17, 2026, from a library book.
Starred Review
2026 Sibert Honor Book
2026 YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Award Finalist

A World Without Summer won Honor in the nonfiction award from both the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) and the Association for Library Services to Children (ALSC) – which highlights that here is a nonfiction book perfect for middle school students. It also gives me a dilemma where to post the review – on the Teen Nonfiction page or the Children’s Nonfiction page? Recently, I’ve started leaning toward putting any nonfiction longer than a picture book on the Teen Nonfiction page, but since I put Nicholas Day’s debut book and Sibert winner, The Mona Lisa Vanishes, on the Children’s Nonfiction page, and they are very much alike, I’m going to post this one there, too – but be aware that the sweet spot for this book is middle school and upper elementary.

Because I read an adult fantasy novel called Without a Summer, by Mary Robinette Kowal, I already knew that it snowed in Washington, D. C., in July 1816 because of a volcano that erupted in another part of the world. This book told me much, much more.

The author keeps the conversational tone he used in The Mona Lisa Vanishes and starts off by telling the reader about Tambora, a volcano in Indonesia that erupted in 1815 – and just how utterly enormous that eruption was. He talks about the people who died in that eruption – and the thousands who died in the aftermath. But the later thousands who died as a direct result of that eruption didn’t even know it was because of the eruption.

After talking about the original eruption, Nicholas Day takes us to Europe, where the oddities began with yellow and brown snow, which nobody knew was from the ash of the volcano. As it turned out, summer never came in places across the globe – and neither did harvest.

But besides talking about gruesome deaths that were a result of Tambora, the author also tells us the story of Mary Godwin, who became Mary Shelley – and wrote Frankenstein the same year the climate was all out of whack. We get the whole story of her elopement and trip to Switzerland – and just how much they complained about the weather.

Nicholas Day is exceptionally good at bringing the reader into the story, getting them thinking with questions, and helping them see the connections between that past world, disrupted by climate shock, and our present world, which has some new technologies (like forecasting weather) thanks to the disruptions of Tambora, but is still vulnerable to global events.

I’m going to go ahead and quote from a closing section, because it shows where he goes with this story, and I don’t think it’s a spoiler in nonfiction.

While Mary Shelley was writing the great novel of catastrophe, people across the world were working in wholly new ways to prevent catastrophe. These were governments, and they were ordinary people, too. They were working on behalf of a simple idea, a new idea: that those who were suffering could survive – that they should survive – that they deserved to survive.

That there were things that could be done and should be done.

When we remember Tambora, what stands out is the bleak and the strange: the skeletal figures, the sawdust bread, the boils on the face of the sun. The disease. The distress.

But we should remember this part, too.

Without this idealistic work – without the invention of this idealistic idea – far more would have suffered. Far more would have perished. Tambora was a warning.

But hidden inside it is this deeply hopeful truth: We can act.

Read this book to learn, to hear a good story, and to think about the ways we earthlings are connected.

bynicholasday.com

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Review of Rebels, Robbers, and Radicals, by Teri Kanefield

Children's Nonfiction Review, Current Issues, History, Starred Review 0

Rebels, Robbers, and Radicals

The Story of the Bill of Rights

by Teri Kanefield

Abrams Books for Young Readers, 2025. 216 pages.
Review written March 4, 2026, from a library book.
Starred Review

First, a note that this is not picture book nonfiction. I’ll put it on the Children’s Nonfiction page, but this is targeted to middle school and upper elementary students who can read longer material.

I love Teri Kanefield’s legal writing. Her calm voice on her blog is long where I’ve gone to understand present-day legal issues. So of course I checked out this book for children on the Bill of Rights.

And I’d had no idea how interesting that topic could be. She explains her approach at the back of the book:

I hit on the idea of presenting the material the way the law is presented to law students – through actual court cases. The case method avoids abstract principles and tedious explanations. Instead, the law is presented through the stories and struggles of actual people. The principles and laws are woven into the fabric of the case the way morals are woven into fables.

Stories of real people involved in real struggles are always livelier than dry explanations, particularly when those stories include bank robbers like Bonnie and Clyde, high school students challenging violations of their rights, rebels who refuse to obey laws they believe to be unjust, and people considered radical because they want to entirely remake the government. The statement “you have the right to a jury trial” will have little relevance to most people. But when we read about the Zenger trial and see that juries were devised to guard against the kind of tyranny that early Americans experienced under British rule, the right to a jury takes on a real-world meaning.

Teri Kanefield achieves these goals in a book that’s interesting every step of the way. She goes through each one of the first ten amendments and gives examples showing how the interpretation of each amendment affected people’s lives – and still affect them today. She talks about how things have changed over time, about the conflict between states’ rights and federal rights, and about things like how the “right to privacy” isn’t mentioned in the Constitution, and how it’s a question of the ninth amendment whether the federal government can rule on that.

Although this book is completely suitable for upper elementary age readers, I can testify that it’s great reading for adults, too. As always with Teri’s writing, I learned things about the law of our land that I hadn’t known I didn’t know.

terikanefield.com

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Review of Trans History, by Alex L. Combs & Andrew Eakett

Audiobooks, Graphic Novel, History, Starred Review, Teen Nonfiction 0

Trans History

From Ancient Times to the Present Day

by Alex L. Combs and Andrew Eakett
read by a full cast

Listening Library, 2025. 3 hours, 36 minutes.
Review written February 10, 2026, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review
2026 Odyssey Award Young Adult Winner

The Odyssey Award is given each year for the best audiobook production, and I always make sure to listen to the winners and honor books, because they are without fail wonderful. As it happened, I already had the print graphic novel version of this book checked out, and I always wonder how audiobook producers can pull off converting a graphic novel to an audiobook.

Let me tell you, these folks went all in. They used music and sound effects to help enhance your understanding of what was going on. And when they say “Full Cast” – I don’t see an indication of how many different voices they used, but I have no doubt the number is high. (I think they read off names at the end of the audiobook, so they weren’t without credit.) Especially meaningful was that the last chapter features twelve modern-day trans folks, and these people spoke their own words on the audiobook.

I did take a look at the graphic novel – and I think that both formats offer something unique. But the audiobook production was so deserving of the award, don’t miss that version!

If you ever thought that transgender people are a recent phenomenon, this book will put that idea to rest. They cover trans history, yes, beginning in ancient times – with the caveat that the historical people they talk about would have used different words and wouldn’t necessarily have called themselves trans if they had lived today. But they make a clear point that diversity of gender expression has been around as long as humans have.

The chapters cover the ancient world, Europeans and colonialism, the rise of Sexology, the history of trans people in the United States, and then present day voices from the trans community.

In the preface, the authors say they have three goals for the book:

1. Help dispel the myth that trans people are a “new thing.”

2. Demonstrate that what it means to be trans varies greatly among trans people.

3. Empower trans people by helping them learn about trans history.

They met these goals well, and they also presented a fascinating history I hadn’t known much about, in an entertaining way. The production of this audiobook is stunning and the stories were riveting. May this super informative and helpful look at trans history break down myths and stereotypes and fight marginalization.

alexlcombs.com
candlewick.com

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