Beware AI-produced Children’s Books!

Selection Adventures 20

For a year now, I’ve had my dream job – selecting children’s and young adult books for a large public library system with 22 branches.

I think I do a good job balancing critical reviews with popularity and patron requests and the need for a broad collection.

One day, someone requested that we get more books for kids about pets that weren’t only about dogs and cats. That’s something we can always use, but there’s not a lot published. So I looked in our vendor database.

Some titles we already had. Some were quite a few years old. Many were not in stock with our vendor. But I found some books that looked promising.

One book I ordered was called Rabbits: Children’s Animal Fact Book, by publisher Bold Kids. It didn’t have any reviews, and it was only available in paperback. But paperback meant it wasn’t too expensive, and a fact book about rabbits was what I needed, after all. How bad could it be? I put it on my order.

I completely forgot about it. Sometimes when I order short nonfiction books, I’m not sure if it belongs with the children’s nonfiction or with the picture books, and then I put a note on the book – Show to Sondy – to figure out where it belongs when I have the book in front of me. But this book was clearly nonfiction, so it could make it to the library shelves with no more input from me.

A few weeks later, I got a somewhat incoherent note from a cataloger about this book. While I was looking over the record and trying to form an answer, she came to my cubicle almost speechless and showed me this book, along with another: Northern Lights: A Book Filled with Facts for Children, also by Bold Kids.

Reader, when I looked at those books, I was filled with deep shame for having selected them. But wait! I discovered that one of our other selectors had ordered the Northern Lights book, so I felt a lot better that I wasn’t the only one who fell for them.

Let me explain.

The book starts out extremely repetitive and very poorly worded. There’s no logical progression between sentences, and some sentences repeat on later pages, except often with contradictory information or in a slightly different form. It’s got stock photo images and clip art text pages.

Here’s the page that first convinced me we couldn’t put these books on library shelves:

A rabbit has a male and female counterpart. A male rabbit is called a buck. The two types of rabbits have different characteristics. A doe is a baby rabbit, while a buck is a mother. All types of rabbits live underground, except for the cottontail, and their habitats are often called warrens.

Later, I read on. One spread has the same exact text on two facing pages. But the place where it got so bad it’s hilarious was the final spread:

If you’ve ever had the pleasure of feeding a rabbit, you’ve probably wondered how they reproduce. The answer is simple: they live in the wild! Despite being cute and cutesy, rabbits are also very smart.

They can even make their own clothes, and they can even walk around. And they’re not only adorable, but they’re also very useful to us as pets and can help you out with gardening.

[Don’t you wonder how animals reproduce when you feed them? And now you know how to improve your garden – just get a rabbit to help you! I’m thinking they put public domain Beatrix Potter books into the A.I.?]

Northern Lights was equally bad, though not quite as laugh-out-loud funny. Except maybe the spread that says twice that Northern Lights can be seen in Florida. Or the part that says you can hear the sounds they make. “The sound of the lights is like a rainbow.”

I wasn’t completely convinced that Artificial Intelligence would do such a bad job of “writing” a children’s book. But I tweeted about this book. The outstanding author of math books for children, Christopher Danielson, responded. We had a very amusing conversation about it, and he asked Chat GPT to write a couple of children’s books. The quality was very similar to these, so now I’m convinced.

But when I looked at our vendor’s website, Bold Kids has more than 500 children’s nonfiction titles. With one notable title being Sheeps: Children’s Book Filled With Facts (full credit to Christopher Danielson for spotting that one). What should have been a giveaway is that they are non-returnable, which is code for Print-on-Demand. So this “publisher” isn’t really investing money into making the books, just had AI produce the texts and didn’t check. They get printed when someone purchases one.

Let me note that while our vendor Ingram carries more than 500 of the Bold Kids titles, as does our ebook platform Overdrive, another vendor Baker & Taylor doesn’t carry any of them. (Good for them!) But Amazon carries them, as do many other websites selling books to the general public. So this is a general warning to beware.

Of course, this means that in the future I won’t purchase any more books from Bold Kids. But I also am going to be more wary than ever of books that don’t have professional reviews. I was already leery of self-published books, and this example has not helped at all. A friend who’s a writer told me that many publishers and agents are closing submissions because of a flood of AI-generated manuscripts.

And another problem is that partly these are bad because they were trained on what’s out there on the internet. (I assume.) Published authors are wise to be wary of publishers wanting to train AI on their writing.

In the meantime, I offer my experience as a cautionary tale for your amusement. Artificial Intelligence is not yet capable of writing good children’s books, anyway.

Oh, and one final note. I was trying to decide what category to file this post under, and I decided it’s time for a new one, which I’ll call Selection Adventures. I thought it could cover things from my Selector job — but also my experiences on various award selection committees. When I was on the Newbery Selection Committee, I posted about the experience. But I’m currently on the Morris Award Committee to find the best Young Adult Debut book of 2023, and the Mathical Book Prize selection committee, and a CYBILS Award category chair, and a member of Capitol Choices — and I should write up some posts about them. (Award selection is so much fun!) So that’s the new category, and I’m hoping to add to it in the future.

Review of Razing Hell, by Sharon L. Baker

Christian, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review 0

Razing Hell

Rethinking Everything You’ve Been Taught about God’s Wrath and Judgment

by Sharon L. Baker

Westminster John Knox Press, 2010. 222 pages.
Review written July 3, 2023, from my own copy, ordered via amazon.com
Starred Review

For decades now, I’ve been collecting books on universalism. Razing Hell is a lovely example. The book is focused primarily on rethinking our views of hell, by looking at what the Bible says about it in the original languages, and checking how it matches the strong Bible message of a God of love.

I like Dr. Baker’s approach, because although she’s coming at it from deep scholarship (as evidenced by the list of sources in the Appendix), she makes the book accessible and uses the questions of actual students she’s known to elucidate these views. I also liked that she goes beyond presenting a new view of hell to talk about the aspects of theology that would affect, such as retributive vs. restorative justice and the purpose of the atonement. It’s all presented in a readable and accessible way, with the Appendix loaded full of references, both Scriptural and academic.

She presents a view of hell I found familiar from George MacDonald’s writings: She builds off the idea that God is a consuming fire. And then suggests that this fire is love — that will burn away what is evil — so will be painful for those who hold onto evil. She even imagined part of the pain of judgment may be an offender being confronted by the pain of all those they had hurt. She isn’t saying this image is necessarily exactly how things will go, but she does present a solid case that the purpose of hell is restorative justice, not retributive justice.

One small point that I don’t remember seeing in other books on universalism is that in the Bible, justice and violence are often presented as opposites:

First, in the biblical texts, justice is often opposed to violence. In Isaiah 5:7, God “expected justice [from Israel], but saw bloodshed” instead (NRSV). Isaiah 59:3-4 begins with the violent, wicked actions of the people, stating that “your hands are defiled with blood, and your fingers with iniquity; your lips have spoken lies, your tongue utters wickedness. No one brings suit justly, no one goes to law honestly” (NRSV). Because of these unjust, violent actions “justice is far from [them]” (59:9). If we compare that passage to Isaiah 16:4-5, it indicates that once oppression and violence are gone, justice is established. From these verses we see that justice and violence have nothing in common. In other words, where there’s violence, justice is absent. We may even be able to say that justice and violence stand as opposites so that one cancels out the other. The absence of justice in acts of violence begs this question: If justice is not present in violence, how then can we conceive of a God who executes justice through violence, especially the eternal violence of hell as we have traditionally thought it?

She talks about how forgiveness fits into this picture of justice:

Reconciling justice is also transformational justice. It pierces the darkness of retributive violence with the grace of God and the message of peace through love, forgiveness, and reconciliation. to do justice is to love; to do justice is to forgive; to do justice is to reconcile; this is a chain reaction in which love forgives, forgiveness reconciles, and reconciliation restores — all characteristics of divine justice, God’s reconciling justice.

And here’s a crucial question that years ago got me started along the path of universalism:

But does the defeat of sin within the person take place only in the temporal realm, within time itself, while we live in this body? Why should it? If we are beings who live on after death, like the Bible seems to say, what makes us think that God limits the bestowing of eternal grace to one time period? Why can’t God extend the offer of grace, forgiveness, and reconciliation through Jesus even at judgment — when all will be laid bare, when all persons will see the extent of their sin and the extravagance of God’s love?

And later on, she asks similar questions, after referring to the parable of the workers in the field (where those who labored one hour got the same wages as those who worked all day, who were angry about it):

If God desires to continue the work of reconciliation up to the last second, how can we protest? A sermon I heard as a new Christian put forth one of my favorite images of God as a God of second chances, a God who never gives up on us, who pursues us like a hound of heaven, always offering opportunities for repentance and reconciliation. Why wouldn’t God offer that same invitation on that final day? Why would God’s work of salvation end just because someone’s body dies? The work of Jesus must still be effective after the end of time or even after time runs out.

And here are some broader questions, at the end of the chapter “The Fire, the Wicked, and the Redeemed”:

Which vision of hell most coheres with the God revealed in Jesus — the view of hell in which persons suffer for all eternity with no hope for reconciliation with God, or the view of hell in which persons understand the depth of their sins, take full responsibility for them, and reconcile not only with God, but also with their victims? Which view offers a more compassionate eschatology? Which view takes more seriously the extensive significance of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus? Which view most adequately and permanently exterminates evil? Can hell coexist with God’s kingdom of love?

And there’s more. She looks at specific Bible passages and the meaning of Greek words translated “hell” or “eternal,” among others.

Then I appreciated where she looks deeply at the Old Testament sacrificial system. It wasn’t about payment, but about cleansing and dedicating your life.

For the Hebrew people, blood was a symbol for life or the giving of life represented in the Old Testament sacrificial system. So when the priests sprinkled the blood on the altar, it symbolized the people giving their own lives up to God as living and holy sacrifices. The blood served as an outward symbol of an inward reality: the life of the worshiper given to God, set apart (the meaning of “holy”) for God’s purposes.

And then she lists many Old Testament scriptures, especially from the prophets, where they learn God is far more interested in their hearts than in their sacrifices.

We needed to see the message of the prophets, proclaiming that God rejected blood sacrifices, the formalism of worship without the heart to go with it, and the shedding of blood without the investment of a life given to God to back it up. I’ll reiterate for the sake of emphasis: God never intended for Israel to kill animals and pour their blood out on the altar as an exercise in itself. God hoped the people would catch on to the true meaning of the blood poured out and perform their external sacrifices as a symbol for the true internal sacrifice of their very lives set apart to God and for God.

And there’s lots more about atonement, about forgiveness, about the kingdom of God, about Jesus reconciling people to God — and what that all means in our lives now.

Jesus makes this clear to us in John 13:35. He says that all people will know we are his disciples . . . how? By preaching hellfire and brimstone? By throwing around threats of eternal punishment for those who reject Jesus? No! All people will know we are the disciples of Jesus by the love we have for one another. Through our love for others! The very nature of our reconciliation with God through Jesus makes us God’s agents, God’s ministers of reconciliation — not so that we can work to keep people out of hell, but so we can transform the world through reconciliation. The only way to get rid of enemies is not to throw them into an eternal hell, but to preach divine forgiveness and guide them to a life reconciled with God and others.

As with all other books on universalism that I’ve reviewed, please don’t imagine that my summary is a complete argument or contains all the important points. I hope this review piques some people’s curiosity and inspires them to read this book.

There’s a spectrum for books about universalism that ranges from super academic and full of footnotes, designed for biblical scholars, all the way to books written entirely for laypeople and that don’t use a lot of Scripture references to back up their points. This book is pretty squarely in the middle of that spectrum. Maybe a little on the academic side, because it does get into the weeds of other ramifications of universalism — but she puts the notes into an appendix to keep the analysis flowing.

Highly recommended, and I do hope this will motivate some of my blog readers to read this book.

wjkbooks.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of The One and Only Ruby, by Katherine Applegate

Animal Characters, Children's Fiction Review, Contemporary, Starred Review 0

The One and Only Ruby

by Katherine Applegate
illustrated by Patricia Castelao

Harper, 2023. 217 pages.
Starred Review

Katherine Applegate has done it again! She’s written a third book about The One and Only Ivan and his friends. This one features Ruby, the little elephant whom Ivan resolved to protect, and the reason everything changed for them.

In this book, Ruby’s tusks are growing out, and the other elephants in her herd at the Park are teasing her and getting her ready to celebrate her Tuskday.

But Ruby has complicated emotions about growing tusks. In this book, we get her story, back in Africa, of when her mother was killed for her tusks, and what happened to Ruby afterward.

I wasn’t as enchanted by the voice of this book as I was with Ivan’s story, which I could easily believe was a gorilla talking, and a gorilla who’d heard lots of television. I’m not quite sure how Ruby’s vocabulary got so big, but her story was moving. And we did come to understand how mixed her emotions would be about growing up.

Once again, this will motivate young animal lovers to want to help, while entertaining them in the company of long-time friends.

katherineapplegate.com

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Mesmerizing Fun – and Next Book Ideas!

Library Links 0

Last week, our library system hit 20 million all-time digital checkouts!

Our division director alerted us on Teams when there were 180 to go, so we spent the next 15 minutes watching the dashboard, speculating which book would be the 20 millionth checkout. The lucky book was Crying in H Mart, a super popular title I should read one of these days.

And that reminded me to tell people about some mesmerizing fun to be had on your library’s Overdrive dashboard page, if they check out ebooks with Overdrive. You can find a link to ours at the bottom of the ebooks page with the words Check out what’s being checked out right now.

What this page does is rotate through the covers of books being digitally checked out or placed on hold. And you can watch the numbers change. We’re way past 20 million now, but will we hit 3 million checkouts in 2023? It seems likely.

But the other thing you can get from this is ideas for what to read next. Spy on what other people are reading in real time! For example, I had no idea that we have digital access to a magazine called The Knitter until I saw it come across this dashboard. And it’s fun to watch. Though funny thing — titles don’t go by as quickly when it’s late at night. But they do still move.

Happy reading!

Review of Seasparrow, by Kristin Cashore

Fantasy, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Seasparrow

by Kristin Cashore

Dutton Books, 2022. 602 pages.
Review written February 6, 2023, from a library book
Starred Review

Seasparrow is the fifth book in the fantasy series that began with Graceling. And yes, you’ll want to read the other books in the series before you tackle this one, because many themes and plot points and characters from the previous books show up in this one. There’s even a cast of characters at the back of the book to keep them straight.

The name Seasparrow itself refers to the main character of the book, Hava, who acquires the nickname Hapbva, which means “Seasparrow” in the native language of the captain of the Monsea. The book starts out on the ship. The Monsean delegation is heading home from Winterkeep after their adventures in the book Winterkeep. Hava has healed, and now she is secretly translating formulas for a bomb that she smuggled out of Winterkeep.

The book includes the voyage, shipwreck, difficult survival, and homecoming, all from Hava’s perspective. Hava is Queen Bitterblue’s spy, and she has a grace where she can change what people see when they look at her. On the ship her main task is to translate the journals with the formulas. Or so she thinks until she discovers someone hiding something on the ship.

The plot of this book is very slow-moving, but I still found myself compelled to read on. Kristin Cashore’s writing is immersive and pulls me into her worlds.

Yes, there’s romance in this book, but in this case, it’s refreshingly slow-moving. I won’t say slow burn, because there’s not even a lot of spark. But there is slow-growing love, and it fits Hava’s personality and what she’s been through.

Fans of Kristin Cashore’s books will be delighted to have another chance to plunge into her intricately crafted world. There are more mind-reading blue foxes in this book, more gracelings, more monsters, more political intrigue, and more realistic depictions of people coping and healing after trauma. Oh, and there’s a nice plot twist toward the end that I didn’t see coming at all, but that fit perfectly.

kristincashore.com
penguinteen.com

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/seasparrow.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of How to Write a Poem, by Kwame Alexander & Deanna Nikaido, art by Melissa Sweet

Children's Nonfiction Review, Poetry, Starred Review 0

How to Write a Poem

by Kwame Alexander & Deanna Nikaido
art by Melissa Sweet

Quill Tree Books, 2023. 32 pages.
Review written June 27, 2023, from a library book.
Starred Review

This picture book is a wonderfully illustrated poem about poetry. It is appropriately fanciful, imaginative, and full of figurative language.

The collage illustrations show kids following the instructions on one level, and imaginative flights of fancy on the other level.

Each line or pair of lines gets a spread. Some of the lines I like best include:

Close your eyes, open the window of your mind, and climb out,
like a seedling reaching for tomorrow.

Next, listen to the grass,
the flowers,
the trees — anything
that’s friends with the sun.

Another wonderful image:

And dive deep into the silent sea of your imagination

to discover a cotton candy cavalcade of sounds —
words raining everywhere.

They tell us to let the words “dance with your joy, speak to your sorrow.”

As the book goes on, the kids who started out sitting in a circle of chairs end up playing in imaginative landscapes.

I have no doubt this book can inspire a new generation of poets. I hope we get it into their hands.

kwamealexander.com
deannanikaido.com
melissasweet.net
harpercollinschildrens.com

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Childrens_Nonfiction/how_to_write_a_poem.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Hooray for New Subscribers!

General 0

Great blue heron flying across a lake

Welcome New Subscribers! This post is for you!

It’s an apology for not getting many reviews posted this week, along with an explanation.

Here’s the story: I recently finished writing a book about Psalms called Praying with the Psalmists: Open Your Heart Using Patterns from Psalms in Your Prayers. It’s a complete study of all 150 Psalms, looking at ten types of Psalms, telling how my own story has been woven with Psalms, and above all encouraging readers to write their own psalms of prayer.

I thought I’d look for an agent before I look for a publisher — but have quickly learned that both agents and publishers want you to have a platform. I thought, I’ve got a website! But let’s just say, they want numbers bigger than what I have.

So — last Saturday I made a new Info page, highlighting all the different content I’ve developed since I started writing Sonderbooks in 2001. Check it out if you haven’t seen it yet! I spent a good bit of time on it and am happy with how it turned out.

Then I posted about the new page on Facebook and Twitter, hoping to get new subscribers. I’m asking people to subscribe on my Sondermusings Substack or on the blogs, Sonderbooks blog, Sonderjourneys, or Sonderquotes.

So imagine my dismay when I read a comment from my friend on July 4th that the Subscribe button gives an error message!

It turns out that it didn’t work on any of my blogs. No wonder I haven’t been getting subscribers! It works for me because I subscribed the day I put in the Subscribe2 plug-in. But it won’t even send the confirmation email for new subscribers, and no one could sign up.

Well, I stayed up late Tuesday and Wednesday, trying to figure it out, with no luck at all. Wednesday night, after failing to fix the old plug-in, I tried to find a new one that would do what I wanted. I’m not after a fancy mailing list — just subscribing to my blog. I finally found that MailPoet does what I want. I installed it last night, and a few people tested it — THANK YOU! — and now I’m writing my first post to hopefully get sent.

Today I tinkered with it more. I now have two subscription options from the Subscribe page. One is get posts in your inbox as soon as they’re published. The new one I added tonight is a Weekly digest. It will send you an email once per week with the latest posts. So if you want to switch subscriptions, you should be able to do it on that page.

All this tinkering and I haven’t been able to do book posts, which is frustrating me. So I’m hoping to get a book review posted tomorrow, and on the weekend fix the subscriptions on the Sonderjourneys and Sonderquotes blogs.

And I have an awesome story about my encounter on Tuesday with the great blue heron pictured above that I’m dying to post on Sonderjourneys. So I hope that will happen this weekend, too.

Meanwhile, thank you ever so much for your interest in Sonderbooks!

Great blue heron posing in shallow water of a lake with grass behind it

Review of Demon Copperhead, by Barbara Kingsolver

Audiobooks, Award Winners, Fiction Review, Historical, Starred Review 2

Demon Copperhead

by Barbara Kingsolver
read by Charlie Thurston

HarperAudio, 2022. 21 hours, 3 minutes.
Review written June 30, 2023, from a library eaudiobook
Starred Review
2023 Pulitzer Prize Winner
2023 Women’s Prize for Fiction Winner

I’ll be honest: When I was in the middle of this long audiobook, I wasn’t enjoying it much. It tells the story of Demon Copperhead — a kid named Damon, who, like the father who died before he was born, had red hair. He was born in the very rural Lee County, Virginia, to an addict Mom, and bad things just kept happening to him, so the book was somewhat depressing. I kept listening, because it was written by Barbara Kingsolver, who is a truly amazing author.

There was abuse from a stepdad, overdose death of his mother, terrible foster home situations, and eventually getting addicted himself. The narrator had such an authentic rural Virginia accent, I was surprised when he spoke at the end of the book in the “thank you for reading this book” section without the accent.

Something the author does to make all this terrible stuff tolerable is telling the story from the perspective of an older Demon telling about his life. So we know he’s going to survive and get through these awful things. And when things take a particularly bad turn, there’s plenty of foreshadowing, with him wondering if he had done things differently in the events leading up to the disaster, if that would have helped. Or talking about how he didn’t fully appreciate it when things were good — so you know his troubles aren’t over.

When I was in the middle thinking I was tired of listening to it and that I don’t enjoy listening to a rural southern accent as much as a British one — that was when the kids in the story noticed that the media portrays to the world that rural southerners and hillbillies are stupid. Touché! As I began thinking I didn’t really like spending all that time in Demon’s life — then he naturally in the story pointed out that’s how the media wants me to think.

The book also showed the opioid crisis and how it gained full steam. (I’m going to call it Historical because it begins in the 1990s.) The drug companies actually looked for populations likely to get hooked and sent their representatives there, giving doctors kickbacks if they prescribed the addictive painkillers. Damon got hooked after a football injury — beginning by only taking exactly what was prescribed. The whole awful situation is told in a way that reminds the reader that these are people’s lives that were destroyed, not some kind of lazy subhumans who deserved their fate.

And yes, by the time I’d listened to all 21 hours of this book, I was glad I did. I ended up having a much higher view of the folks in the communities portrayed, and I was pleased and proud to have spent so much of my time with a kid who got way more than his share of tough breaks in life, but whose heart shines like gold.

barbarakingsolver.net

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Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of The Code Breaker, by Walter Isaacson with Sarah Durand

Science, Starred Review, Teen Nonfiction 0

The Code Breaker

Jennifer Doudna and the Race to Understand Our Genetic Code

by Walter Isaacson
with Sarah Durand

Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2022. Adapted from The Code Breaker, by Walter Isaacson, 2021. 320 pages.
Review written January 8, 2023, from a library book
Starred Review

This is the young readers’ adaptation of the book for adults by Walter Isaacson. Honestly, I had trouble with the density of this book, so I’m glad I read the young adult version! This was much slower reading than a typical young adult novel, and was packed with details and facts.

But despite the density, this is fascinating reading. The introduction begins with a story of a woman cured of sickle-cell anemia with gene therapy. Then they talk about some other possibilities of these techniques that came from breaking the human genetic code — learning how DNA and RNA work.

The book is the story of the career of Jennifer Doudna, who ended up being a pioneer in the field of gene-editing research and technology. But her story goes much deeper than simply one woman’s accomplishments. This is a section from the introduction:

Doudna’s life offers an up-close look at how science works. Her story helps answer: What actually happens in a lab? To what extent do discoveries depend on individual genius, and how has teamwork become more critical? And has the competition for individual prizes, money, and fame stopped people from working together for the common good?

Most of all, Doudna’s story conveys the importance of basic science, meaning quests that are curiosity-driven rather than geared toward immediate, practical results. Curiosity-driven research plants the seeds — sometimes in unpredictable ways — for later discoveries. For example, a few scientists decided to research basic physics simply because it excited them, and their discoveries eventually led to the invention of the microchip. Similarly, the findings of a handful of researchers who took an interest in an astonishing method that bacteria use to fight off viruses helped generate a revolutionary gene-editing tool that humans now use in their own struggle against viruses.

Jennifer Doudna is the perfect example of that brand of curiosity. Hers is a tale filled with the biggest of questions, from the origins of the universe to the future of the human race. Yet it begins with a sixth-grade girl who loved searching for “sleeping grass” and other fascinating phenomena amid the lava rocks of Hawaii, and who came home from school one day to find on her bed a detective tale about the people who discovered what they believed to be “the secret of life.”

The story in this book is very immediate, with the entire last section talking about using CRISPR technology to detect and fight coronaviruses.

I think it’s especially apt to adapt this book for young adults, since this technology will be something they’re growing up with. The entire last half of the book raises questions about ethics and the morality of editing the genes of humans and possibly our descendants. As more and more becomes possible, it is good to bring to young people’s attention the need to think about ethical concerns.

The science in this book is fascinating, and might end up being something very much a part of young people’s lives. I can’t say that it gave me a new understanding of gene editing, because saying I understand it would be exaggerating. But it at least gave me a new appreciation.

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Teen_Nonfiction/code_breaker.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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Review of You Need to Chill, by Juno Dawson, illustrated by Laura Hughes

Contemporary, Picture Book Review, Starred Review 0

You Need to Chill

A Story of Love and Family

by Juno Dawson
illustrated by Laura Hughes

Sourcebooks Jabberwocky, 2023. First published in the United Kingdom in 2022. 32 pages.
Review written June 27, 2023, from a library book.
Starred Review

This picture book is simple and delightful, and there are many adults out there who I wish would take this message to heart.

The book begins inside the front cover with a picture of a girl and her big sister arriving at school. Then the younger one enters her classroom and here’s how the text starts:

Sometimes people say to me,
“What happened to your brother Bill?

We haven’t seen him in ages.
Is he hiding?
Is he ill?”

“Is he lost in the park?
Is he scared of the dark?
Is he doing his homework still?

That’s when I look them in the eye and say,
“Hey, you need to chill.”

The questions about Bill get sillier and sillier.

“Was he eaten by a WHALE or SHARK?
Was he munched up just like krill?”

But the answer is always the same.

And after several rounds of questions, the girl answers:

“There are NO hungry whales . . .
NO little green men . . .
Your hysteria is silly.

The truth is that my brother Bill . . .

“. . . is now my sister Lily.”

But the book doesn’t leave them there. There are three spreads left in the book, showing a happy family:

“It was maybe quite a shock, at first,
but she’s really just the same.
She looks a little different
and she has a new first name.”

“She’s still clever and funny
and kind and cool.
She’s one in a mil…”

And I bet you can guess what they shout when people have a problem with that.

I like the way this book makes an important point in a light-hearted way. Someone else’s gender identity, child or adult, isn’t something that people outside their family need to worry about.

I honestly think that adults need this book more than kids do, but it’s also a fun way to give the message to any kids who need it. A lot of rhyming picture books try and fail to bring a lilt to a story, but this one pulls it off with flair, and begs to be read aloud.

junodawson.com
sourcebookskids.com

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Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but the views expressed are solely my own, and in no way represent the official views of my employer or of any committee or group of which I am part.

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