Review of Birdie and Me, by J. M. M. Nuanez

Children's Fiction Review, Contemporary 0

Birdie and Me

by J. M. M. Nuanez

Kathy Dawson Books (Penguin Random House), 2020. 252 pages.
Review written May 13, 2020, from a library book.

As Birdie and Me opens, a girl named Jack and her little brother Birdie have to move from Uncle Carl’s apartment to their Uncle Patrick’s home. It’s been decided that Uncle Carl isn’t responsible enough to take care of them, since he’d been letting them miss too many days of school. But Uncle Patrick’s older and doesn’t make them feel welcome. All Jack and Birdie really want to do is go back to Portland, Oregon, where they lived with their Mama.

But Mama died ten months ago, and they didn’t get to stay there in Portland with their elderly neighbor for long. To make matters worse, Birdie’s new teacher tells Uncle Patrick that Birdie is disruptive wearing skirts and sparkly purple clothes to school.

This book is about Jack figuring out how to cope with all this. She makes some plans, which don’t often go as she likes, but she makes some new connections as well.

This was a sad book to me – I don’t like that they lost their Mama. But given that context, I appreciated these characters and their realistic ways of coping. Nobody really got things right on their first try – but that was realistic, and we saw people learning and giving each other grace.

I did enjoy gender-nonconforming Birdie. When he is forced to go shopping for more conforming boys’ clothes, he decides he’s shopping for someone named Norman, who is his exact size. It’s not a perfect solution, but it does get them through the episode. Some of the ways people treated him were painful to see (and made me mad his Mama was gone), but may some kids learn empathy by seeing the situation through the eyes of his sister.

jmmnuanez.com
penguin.com/middle-grade

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Review of Kind of a Big Deal, by Shannon Hale

Paranormal, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Kind of a Big Deal

by Shannon Hale

Roaring Brook Press, 2020. 394 pages.
Review written September 8, 2020, from a library book
Starred Review

Josie Pie was kind of a big deal in high school. She starred in the school musicals ever since she was a Freshman. She went to Washington, DC, and won a Jimmy Award. She got a chance to audition on Broadway, so she dropped out of high school and moved to New York to audition – and struck out. She scrounged for a while, trying to get parts, and took a nanny job to pay the bills.

As the book opens, Josie’s in Missoula, Montana, where the single mom she nannied for decided to move and now is on a trip to Kenya. She has a large credit card debt from New York City. She’s in charge of a preschool girl who’s starting to have some issues. Her boyfriend Justin is communicating with her less and less. She doesn’t know how to make friends with the standoffish other college-age nannies. She goes to a bookstore for some escapist reading.

And then she starts getting sucked into books.

First, it’s the tawdry romance the handsome bookstore clerk gave her. The characters all have the faces of the people she saw before she was sucked in, and the highwayman hero has Justin’s face. In fact, she gets to do some long-missed kissing before she comes back to reality and discovers only a couple minutes have passed.

It happens again with a book called Valentine’s Day that, despite its name, ends up being a post-apocalyptic horror novel. But a man with Justin’s face helps her fight the Zombloid hordes.

I think my favorite of the books she goes into is the graphic novel, told in graphic novel format, of course. As the overall story progresses, Josie has to figure out what’s going on with the books, if she has any control over what’s happening, how can she face life after peaking in high school, and where she’ll go from here.

And yes, there’s some danger if she stays too long in a book. Will she be able to get back to reality?

This is a fun story creatively told by a brilliant fantasy writer. It has more of a Contemporary feel than her other books set in fantasy kingdoms. I enjoyed the scene of Josie failing spectacularly in a community theatre audition. You can’t help but feel for her!

And how nice to have a book about being Kind of a Big Deal in high school. My ex-husband and I used to talk about how we chose our college majors as fields in which we won awards in high school – me in Math and him in Tuba Performance. It took soul-searching and thinking to turn my life toward Library Science instead. For Josie in this book, it hits her sooner, at 17, that maybe she doesn’t have to stick all her life with what made her Kind of a Big Deal in high school. That discovery isn’t easy for her, but it comes with lots of recognition humor for readers.

shannonhale.com
mackids.com

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Review of Kitten Lady’s Big Book of Little Kittens, by Hannah Shaw

Children's Nonfiction Review, Science 0

Kitten Lady’s Big Book of Little Kittens

by Hannah Shaw

Aladdin (Simon & Schuster), 2019. 56 pages.
Review written July 11, 2020, from a library book

A big thank-you for my co-worker Pam Coughlan for alerting me to this book. Reading it makes me sad we didn’t get to booktalk in the schools this year – because the many, many adorable photographs of little kittens that fill this book would make it an absolutely certain hit.

The book is written by the “Kitten Lady,” who fosters hundreds of kittens every year, getting them to a point where they can be adopted into a forever family.

Fostering is when you give temporary care to a homeless animal. Once the kittens are healthy and old enough, they go to a permanent home with a loving adopter, and then my house is empty so I can save even more kittens.

It’s like a revolving door of tiny tigers!

She goes on to talk about the care the kittens need and steps in their growth. It’s all loaded with photographs. I think my favorites are the ones of kittens learning to eat solid food. I had no idea that kittens could be just as messy as babies – more so, because instead of putting their hands in the food like babies, kittens put their feet in the food.

Of course, that was also the page that kept me from rushing out to foster a kitten myself. Be warned that if you expose your kids to this book, you should probably be prepared for them to want to start a new family activity of fostering kittens.

But if you just want an overload of cuteness, this book will do the trick.

KittenLady.org
simonandschuster.com/kids

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Source: This review is based on a book from Fairfax County Public Library.

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 Bake Infinite Pie with X + Y, by Eugenia Cheng, illustrated by Amber Ren

Children's Nonfiction Review, Mathematical, Picture Book Review, Starred Review 0

Bake Infinite Pie with X + Y

by Eugenia Cheng
illustrated by Amber Ren

Little, Brown and Company, 2022. 32 pages.
Review written July 13, 2022, from a library book
Starred Review

My readers won’t be surprised that every time mathematician Eugenia Cheng writes a picture book, it delights my heart. I’ll list this under Children’s Nonfiction, because although it is a story, the emphasis is on the ideas.

This one tells of two kids, named X and Y, who are dreaming of infinite pie — X, pie that is infinitely wide, and Y, pie that is infinitely tall. They think of course that such pie isn’t real, but they ask their Aunt Z, who can create amazing things with her brain.

The book that follows explores infinity in many different ways, and all of them involve pie!

There are infinitely different ways you can make pie, and once it’s done, if you keep eating half your pie, it will last until infinity.

You can make a pie with infinite corners, cut pie crust infinite ways, and even make pastry with infinite layers.

I hope that gives you the idea of ways to explore infinity with pie — it’s all presented in a family setting with a fun aunt bending kids’ minds with tasty treats.

And there’s even a recipe for pie at the back! (After a spread that lays out mathematical ideas presented.) The recipe is for Banana Butterscotch Pie — and believe it or not, I couldn’t resist trying it out. (I hadn’t made a pie with crust in decades.) The pie was indeed delicious, but alas – the instructions didn’t specify how big your pie pan should be. I used a 9-inch one, and my pie was more of a tart — the filling only went about halfway up the pie crust. I think an 8-inch pie pan would do nicely. And it still tasted wonderful.

eugeniacheng.com
amber-ren.com
lbyr.com

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Review of The Princess in Black and the Bathtime Battle

Beginning Chapter Books, Children's Fiction Review, Fantasy, Starred Review 0

The Princess in Black and the Bathtime Battle

by Shannon Hale & Dean Hale

illustrated by LeUyen Pham

Candlewick Press, 2019. 90 pages.
Starred Review
Review written December 9, 2019, from a library book

I love the Princess in Black! These are simple chapter books with lots of pictures. They include fun stories about princesses who disguise themselves as heroes who fight monsters – and one goat boy who disguises himself as the Goat Avenger. They are rewarding for beginning readers and a whole lot of fun.

In this latest installment, the foe is a horrible stinky smell. How do you fight a smell?

As the Princess in Black and the Goat Avenger manage to blow the stink away, it goes into other kingdoms, so other heroes come and investigate. But that’s a good thing. When they discover that the source of all the trouble is a super-stinky monster, the stink is so bad, it takes all the heroes working together to clean up the stink.

I like the way Shannon Hale and Dean Hale use some of the same elements in each book – but add something new every time. In this book, the battle is about bathtime. And I love that all the heroes get to take part.

This book encourages the reader to think what kind of hero they can be.

candlewick.com

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Review of Black Cake, by Charmaine Wilkerson

Audiobooks, Contemporary, Fiction Review, Starred Review 0

Black Cake

by Charmaine Wilkerson
read by Lynnette R. Freeman and Simone McIntyre

Random House Audio, 2022. 12 hours, 2 minutes.
Review written August 2, 2022, from a library eaudiobook.
Starred Review

This audiobook had me fully drawn in right from the start. It’s a richly textured story, rooted in the present with a brother and his estranged sister shortly after their mother’s death. Byron and Benny think they knew their parents. They think they lived boring lives, both of them orphans from a Caribbean island who met in London and then built a family in California, where they prospered.

But their mother’s lawyer has a recording for them. And a Black Cake sitting in the freezer which they are to eat when the time is right. In the recording, their mother tells her actual story – how she changed identities three times in her decidedly not boring youth. And they have a sister they knew nothing about.

They also learn where their mother learned to make Black Cake — a traditional cake from the island using dried fruit soaked in rum and port and served at weddings and special events. Black Cake has long been an important part of their lives, and now they learn there was Black Cake at a huge turning point in their mother’s life.

The stories of the past and the present are layered together beautifully. When Byron and Benny need a break from the revelations, the reader gets a break, too. The story is dramatic and heart-wrenching and had me transfixed. The narrators use beautiful accents for characters from the many different parts of the world represented.

This book appeared on Barack Obama’s summer reading list. I felt like a winner because my hold on the eaudiobook had just come in — I’m sure then the list got longer.

As a debut novel, this book is amazingly rich and layered, kind of like cake. I highly recommend it, and especially the audio version enhanced by the beautiful accents.

charmspen.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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Review of I’d Like To Be the Window For a Wise Old Dog, by Philip Stead

Delightfully Silly, Picture Book Review, Poetry, Starred Review 0

I’d Like To Be the Window For a Wise Old Dog

words and pictures by Philip Stead

Doubleday Books for Young Readers, 2022. 48 pages.
Review written July 12, 2022, from a library book
Starred Review

This picture book is a beautifully illustrated nonsense poem, and it won my heart. The elephant in the illustrations reminds me of the author’s wife’s Caldecott-winning work in A Sick Day for Amos McGee.

How could I be the window for a wise old dog? I’m not exactly sure, but this book makes me want to be one, too. The Poetry is whimsical and rolls off the tongue. The pictures are lovely and somewhat fantastical, but especially lovable are the pictures of the wise old dog by the window.

Here are some of the lovely lines:

Will I ever be the dawdle of a penguin?

Will I ever be the waddle of a snail?

Will I ever be the tumble of a honeybee?

Will I ever be the bumble…

… of a whale?

And each line has big, bright, colorful pictures.

I never before wanted to be a window for a wise old dog, but this book sends my imagination into flight. I would so love to discuss it with a child — I bet their imagination would fly even further than mine. (This might be one to get for my nieces!)

philipstead.com

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Review of All in a Drop, by Lori Alexander

Children's Nonfiction Review, Science, Starred Review 0

All in a Drop

How Antony van Leeuwenhoek Discovered an Invisible World

by Lori Alexander
illustrated by Vivien Mildenberger

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019. 93 pages.
Review written April 2, 2020, from a library book
Starred Review
2020 Robert F. Sibert Award Honor

This book is about the man who discovered that there were tiny organisms in drops of water. And what surprised me is that even the members of the Royal Society in London didn’t believe him for a whole year after his report.

Born in 1632 in the Netherlands, Antony van Leeuwenhoek never studied science, and he became a draper, a seller of cloth. But to examine cloth closely, they used magnifying lenses. After a trip to London, where he saw a book about a new invention called a microscope, Antony decided to make one himself.

What fascinated me is that Antony didn’t make just one microscope and then look at many different things. Instead, he’d glue his specimens to a base, and then make a new microscope to look at that thing. He devised a system, and he’d shape the glass and screw the lenses into focus. They ended up being the best microscopes in the world at the time.

And Antony proceeded to make discoveries. He discovered that insects didn’t spontaneously generate, as was thought at the time. And he found “little animals” in rivers and streams and also in people’s mouths. In fact, he made discoveries in many different fields of science without ever being trained as a scientist, but simply a curious person.

I love it when I read a children’s book and learn about someone I knew nothing about. This short chapter book is full of fascinating information and tells about a man who changed the way we see the world.

lorialexanderbooks.com
vivien.mildenberger.com

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Source: This review is based on a library book from Fairfax County Public Library.

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 Collective Wisdom, edited by Grace Bonney

Musings, Nonfiction Review, Photography, Starred Review 0

Collective Wisdom

Lessons, Inspiration, and Advice from Women over 50

edited by Grace Bonney

Artisan, 2021. 399 pages.
Review written July 23, 2022, from a library book
Starred Review

This gorgeous volume of photographs and profiles is a perfect coffee table book to read slowly.
I’ve been reading one profile per day for many months now, and I’m inspired. Yes, in my case I used a library book and simply kept renewing, but this would be a lovely investment to enjoy all over again even after you’ve been through it once, especially since 50 percent of the profits are to be divided among the women featured in the book.

There are 80 profiles in this book, all accompanied by full-page photographic portraits. Most of the profiles are of individual women who are over fifty, but also pairs of intergenerational friends, and some featuring groups of older women who have found community together. The majority of the individual women featured are in their seventies and eighties. These are accomplished women, and there were several writers whose work I knew about and admired. There’s great diversity in the profiles, with I think the majority being BIPOC, and queer and transgender women included as well.

I love rereading the Introduction after having read the whole book, because I think Grace Bonney has succeeded in meeting the goals she expresses there. Here’s a sampling from that:

Since the beginning of time, women have been the keepers of stories, traditions, and wisdom. And for too long, the powerful conversations women have with each other have been overlooked, because society often devalues women, age, and knowledge that is spoken rather than written. Collective Wisdom seeks to rebalance these scales by valuing women who have lived long and complex lives — and the experience and perspective that come with that.

My goal with Collective Wisdom is twofold. I want to gather and share stories and advice that we can all return to, over and over, whenever we need help finding our way. But I also want to remind anyone reading that the most powerful and life-changing tools we all have access to are the connections we form with other women….

In sharing and celebrating the stories and the lessons the women in Collective Wisdom have learned, my hope is that anyone reading will feel uplifted, less alone, inspired to reach out to women who are older or younger than they are right now, and moved to nourish and celebrate the relationships they already have. Your whole world can change when you change whom you listen to. Mine has changed from listening to everyone here.

The editor has met that hope in me with her wonderful book!

Another thing she’s accomplished is that listening to the repeated questions and hearing answers from so many different women, I’m mulling over how I, another woman over fifty, would answer them. Questions like: “What does your current age feel like to you?” “What are you most proud of about yourself?” “What misconceptions about aging would you like to dispel?” “When do you feel your most powerful?” “What role do you feel your ancestors, or the women in your family who came before you, play in your life?” “How has your sense of self-confidence or self-acceptance evolved over time?” “What would you like to learn or experience at this stage in your life?” “Knowing what you know now, what would you go back and tell your younger self?”

There’s so much beauty and wisdom in this book! I love the way the large photographic portraits show that each woman is fabulously beautiful, including those wrinkled with age. This book uplifted, inspired, and encouraged me from start to finish.

artisanbooks.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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Review of Women in Art, by Rachel Ignotofsky

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

Women in Art

50 Fearless Creatives Who Inspired the World

written and illustrated by Rachel Ignotofsky

Ten Speed Press, 2019. 128 pages.
Review written August 5, 2020, from a library book
Starred Review

I’ve gotten a little tired of collective biographies that tell about a bunch of people and after awhile they all lump together. This one was different and distinctive. It probably helped that I had it checked out while the library was closed during the pandemic, because I found I only wanted to read about one artist per day, since there was so much information packed on each spread. I was in no hurry and didn’t have to worry about having to return the book before I was done.

The stylized illustrations are wonderful, featuring a page that highlights a portrait of the artist opposite the page with the text summary of her life and accomplishments. Both the portrait and the text, though, are surrounded with highlights from her life and images of her work.

There was a huge variety in the types of art these women made. The earliest woman featured combined poetry and painting in ancient China. The book includes more painters and sculptors, but also quilters, graphic designers, filmmakers, architects, fashion designers, photographers, and animators. I’d only heard of a small fraction of them before reading this book.

This wonderful book inspired me and reading it became a delight rather than some sort of educational chore. Here’s a paragraph from the conclusion:

Throughout history, female artists have pushed boundaries, created important works, and inspired the world. Many of these artists had to struggle against sexism, classism, racism, or other obstacles to get their work seen and taken seriously. Now we can include these women in their rightful place in art history and celebrate their contributions. Let us honor their legacy by continuing to create. Build what you see in your wildest dreams! Express yourself by creating something new! Share your ideas with the world! And go out there and make your own masterpiece!

RachelIgnotofskyDesign.com
tenspeed.com

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Disclaimer: I am a professional librarian, but I maintain my website and blogs on my own time. 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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