Review of The City Beautiful, by Aden Polydoros

Historical, Paranormal, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

The City Beautiful

by Aden Polydoros

Inkyard Press, 2021. 462 pages.
Review written February 1, 2022, from a library book
Starred Review
2022 Sidney Taylor Award Winner, Young Adults
2021 Cybils Finalist, Young Adult Speculative Fiction

The City Beautiful is set in 1893 Chicago, during the World’s Fair. Alter Rosen works in a print shop, scraping and saving to bring his mother and sisters to America from Romania, still haunted by the death of his father during their voyage to America.

Then Alter’s best friend Yacov is found dead. Alter hadn’t even been able to admit to himself that he was in love with Yacov. He’s convinced this is connected to the disappearances of other Jewish boys in the neighborhood, but the police scoff at the idea.

And then when Alter is trying to tend Yacov’s body, he gets possessed by Yacov’s dybbuk. He is haunted by Yacov’s memories and a compulsion to find the man who killed Yacov — and his family back in Russia. It’s clear that if Alter doesn’t fulfill this mission soon enough, the dybbuk will take over, and they will both die.

So we’ve got a mystery with some twists and turns. Along the way, we learn about the horrible hatred that followed the Jewish people across the ocean. And a young gay teen trying to come to terms with his emotions. And a young man trying to survive in America and make a home for his family.

The author helps you understand the world of 1893 Chicago and what kids and immigrants were up against, simply trying to survive. One of Alter’s friends works for an anarchist newspaper, and we’ve got background about that movement as well.

This is an atmospheric historical mystery with heart.

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Review of Opening the Road, by Keila V. Dawson, illustrated by Alleanna Harris

Children's Nonfiction Review, History, Starred Review 0

Opening the Road

Victor Hugo Green and His Green Book

by Keila V. Dawson
illustrated by Alleanna Harris

Beaming Books, Minneapolis, 2021. 40 pages.
Review written April 7, 2021, from a library book
Starred Review

Opening the Road is a picture book that explains in simple and understandable language how Victor Hugo Green saw injustice and inconvenience and turned it into an opportunity.

First, in several spreads the book lays out the situation:

Black motorists were told:
No food . . .
No vacancy . . .
No bathroom . . .
for Black people.

White American travelers could stop at any roadside restaurant, hotel, or restroom.

But Black Americans had to pack cold food, blankets, and pillows for sleeping in the car . . . and a make-do toilet.

Then it tells how Victor saw a Kosher Food Guide put out by a Jewish newspaper and wondered if he could make a book with similar information for Black Americans.

So Victor asked his friends and neighbors in Harlem where they safely dined, shopped, and played in the city. Victor worked as a mail carrier. Along his postal route, Victor asked folks about places that were welcoming to Black people too.

It tells how The Negro Motorist Green Book took off and expanded so Black travelers took it with them to safely travel the country. I like the detail that black female entrepreneurs rented out rooms in their homes in cities with no hotels willing to rent to Black people. The discrimination turned into an opportunity.

A lovely and interesting picture book about a pertinent and inspiring bit of history.

beamingbooks.com

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Review of Look, Grandma! Ni, Elisi!, by Art Coulson, illustrated by Madelyn Goodnight

Contemporary, Mathematical, Picture Book Review, Starred Review 0

Look, Grandma!
Ni, Elisi!

by Art Coulson
illustrated by Madelyn Goodnight

Storytelling Math (Charlesbridge), 2021. 32 pages.
Review written December 29, 2021, from a library book
Starred Review

Here’s another book from the amazingly good Storytelling Math series. All of them present math concepts in a real-life setting that will appeal to children. All of them also present cultural information, not presented as “other” or “exotic” or “different,” but from the perspective of a child within that culture, excited and proud and enjoying things their family does.

In this book, Bo is working on large colorful stone marbles for the Cherokee National Holiday coming up. The marbles are used in the game Cherokee marbles, digadayosdi, and Bo wants to sell them in his family’s booth at the festival.

Bo has a lot of marbles, and he wants to display them at the booth. But when he finds a nice tray to use to display them, Grandma tells him that the tray is too big. Their booth is small and he can display the marbles in the booth, but whatever he uses needs to fit on a small mat she shows him.

So it’s a volume problem. Bo is trying to find a container with a base as small as the mat that will still display the marbles well. And not so tall that it’s hard to reach inside.

After Bo finds the perfect container (which takes lots of tries), they show him happily displaying them in his family’s booth — and then playing Cherokee marbles together to get a break.

The book weaves in some Cherokee words, and there’s a glossary at the back along with the feature at the back of every Storytelling Math book called “Exploring the Math.” In this book, that section gives ideas of activities to help kids explore volume and area. I love the way these stories are jumping-off places for more learning.

artcoulson.com
madelyngoodnight.com
terc.edu
charlesbridge.com

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Review of The Total Eclipse of Nestor Lopez, by Adrianna Cuevos

Children's Fiction Review, Fantasy 0

The Total Eclipse of Nestor Lopez

by Adrianna Cuevas

read by Anthony Rey Perez

Dreamscape Media, 2020. 6 hours, 5 minutes.
Review written March 17, 2021, from a library eaudiobook
2021 Pura Belpré Honor Book

The Total Eclipse of Nestor Lopez was fun to listen to, though I had to suspend my disbelief regarding the fantasy.

The premise is fun – Nestor Lopez can understand animals and talk to animals. How the story goes – that there happens to be an animal witch in the woods near his new home and that this powerful witch needs the help of a local bully in Brandon’s grade and that it would resort to threatening children to stop trying to thwart it – well, I almost expected the Scooby-Doo line, “And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn’t been for those pesky kids!”

Why did I keep listening though? I kept listening because I really liked Nestor and his new friends. Even if what the animals said didn’t seem very animal-like, I still enjoyed his ability. But mostly I felt for Nestor always having to move to a new town, with his father in the army, and never staying long enough to make friends.

Now his dad’s in Afghanistan, and Nestor’s got a lot of worries about that. But this time, they decided to go back to the town where his dad grew up and stay with his abuela.

It also just so happens that this year the sixth grade trivia team has a focus on animal facts. I could accept that coincidence because it added to the fun. It was a little harder to believe the faculty sponsor of the trivia team would be personally involved with the witch. (Or that she’d have gone to a place due to have an eclipse if she was trying to stop being involved – but that’s a little close to being a spoiler.)

So even though I have a lot of quibbles with the story line – even if I accept that Nestor can talk to animals – this book was still a whole lot of fun to listen to. I also appreciated that the narrator slipped in and out of Spanish as naturally as Nestor and his family would do. And I liked a book about a kid having to deal with his dad being deployed over and over again.

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Review of Wholehearted Faith, by Rachel Held Evans

Christian, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review 0

Wholehearted Faith

by Rachel Held Evans
with Jeff Chu

HarperOne, 2021. 196 pages.
Review written March 10, 2022, from a library book
Starred Review

Beloved author Rachel Held Evans passed away suddenly in 2019 at 37 years old. She had unpublished work and manuscripts, and her husband asked her friend and collaborator Jeff Chu to finish and edit the book for her. The beginning and end of the book include tributes to Rachel and an explanation of how this book came to be.

This book is beautiful. The bulk of it is entirely in Rachel’s voice. I learned once again how much I relate to her personally — how much my own spiritual journey has been like hers. We were both good Sunday school students, winning prizes for knowing the Bible. We both went even more all-in during college at a conservative Christian college. And we both wound up in a much more progressive and gracious place than where we were brought up to be, though our adult journeys diverged much more than our youths did — but the end result seems very much the same.

And I love everything she writes in this book. From our similar backgrounds, I’ve got some of the same hang-ups as she did – for example, growing up with a focus on sin and what we “deserve.” I, too, am blown away by the thought from a poem by Daniel Ladinsky that God adores His creation.

These words seemed dangerous, heretical even. They seemed too good to be true. And yet did they not call to mind the poetry of the prophets, who spoke to Israel of a God who “will exult over you with loud singing,” who has “called you by name,” and who has “loved you with an everlasting love”? Did they not sound like the God of Hebrew Scripture, who soared over creation in the beginning and declared every flower and fish and tree and human in it “good”? Did they not echo the letters of a saint who proclaimed that “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God”? Did they not sound like Jesus, who, through the smooth laminate of my AWANA workbook, first told me that “God so loved the world”?

This book tells Rachel’s story of getting to that place where she could believe those words, and then continues on to “Essays on the Christian Life.” The result is short chapters that I could read easily one per day – and I was always uplifted.

There’s a chapter on the Sabbath, and I loved the thought that God asks us to do less, not more.

My point in dwelling on the Sabbath — my own hope in dwelling in the Sabbath — is to remember that our beginnings were grace and rest, and our ends will be too. If there’s any truth in any of this Christianity thing, it is that our existence started with rest, with the opportunity to glory in having earned nothing and done nothing, and it will find its culmination in rest, with the joy of feasting in the knowledge that we earned none of this abundance and had to do nothing to enjoy this goodness, nothing, that is, other than to simply receive.

But my very favorite section in the whole book comes in the essay Jeff Chu chose to put at the end of the book, as Rachel’s last message to her readers:

We can be gracious because we are grateful. We can love because we have been loved.

On the days when I believe, I know all this to be true. On the days when you believe, I hope you’ll know this to be true too. I hope you’ll feel deep within your heart and with every cell of your being that you are held and embraced by the God who made you, the God who redeemed you, and the God who accompanies you through every end and onward to every beginning.

Even on the days when I’m not sure I can believe it wholeheartedly, this is still the story I’m willing to be wrong about.

This book makes me sad that it’s the last one we’ll get from Rachel Held Evans, but the words of this book fill me with joy. Highly recommended.

rachelheldevans.com

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Review of Much Ado About Baseball, by Rajani LaRocca

Children's Fiction Review, Contemporary, Fantasy, Mathematical, Paranormal 0

Much Ado About Baseball

by Rajani LaRocca

Yellow Jacket (Little Bee), 2021. 312 pages.
Review written January 4, 2022, from a library book
2022 Mathical Honor Book, grades 6-8

12-year-old Trish is new in town. She’s used to being the only girl on the baseball team and the only girl and sixth grader on the Math Puzzler team – but just when her old teammates had gotten used to her, now she has to win over a new team. Her brother Sanjay has encouraged her to win them over by being good at baseball.

Ben is back on the baseball team this summer after two years off. And he’s upset when he sees Trish – the girl who beat him for the Individual Math Puzzler championship. Now she’s going to do better than him at baseball? But they both love math and baseball, so shouldn’t they be friends?

There are hints of something magical happening this summer, some amazing treats, and then two magical books of math puzzles show up at Trish’s house and at Ben’s house. Ben right away figures out it’s magic, but Trish thinks it’s probably some special formula invisible ink. But either way, there are some fun and challenging math puzzles to solve, woven into this story of baseball, rivalry, and friendship.

Perhaps if I knew the Shakespeare play Much Ado About Nothing better, the plot wouldn’t have seemed quite as random. The magic didn’t really seem to operate with rules, but perhaps chaotic fairy magic, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream doesn’t need to. Anyway, it was a fun story, and for me the math puzzles woven in made it even more fun. There’s material at the back taking some of the concepts further.

RajaniLaRocca.com
yellowjacketreads.com

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Review of Gender: A Graphic Guide, by Meg-John Barker and Jules Scheele

Current Issues, Nonfiction Review, Starred Review 0

Gender

A Graphic Guide

by Meg-John Barker and Jules Scheele

Icon Books, 2019. 176 pages.
Review written July 31, 2020, from a library book
Starred Review

This book explores, in graphic format, more aspects of gender than I even realized existed.

Here’s some text from a page at the start titled “Multiple Meanings”:

Gender is both in the world around us and within us in our own experience. Gender is socially constructed: our culture develops and passes on strong messages about what it means to be each gender – and related roles and behaviours – through media, laws, education, and so on. At the same time we all have a lived experience of our gender which impacts how we experience our body, our feelings, our relationships, and pretty much everything in life. The way gender is socially constructed in the time and place that we live is part of what shapes our lived experience, but it’s not the whole story, and different people relate to gender in different ways.

This means gender is both deeply political and personal, which can make it complex – and emotionally charged – to talk about.

The chapters cover the history of gender, the science and philosophy of gender, masculinities, femininities, non-binary genders, transgender & cisgender, the future of gender, and sums up thinking about gender. It’s wonderfully comprehensive, bringing up different aspects even of the stereotypes, topics like intersectionality and colonialism, and quoting a wide range of sociologists and thinkers.

Gender is such a part of our lives, we may not even realize all these aspects exist. This is a wonderful way to give more consideration to something that’s a fundamental part of your life.

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Review of Call and Response, by Veronica Chambers

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

Call and Response

The Story of Black Lives Matter

by Veronica Chambers

Versify (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), 2021. 152 pages.
Review written October 22, 2021, from a library book
Starred Review

When I checked out this book, I wasn’t sure I’d actually read it. But once I got started, I couldn’t stop. It’s got informative, detailed, and current information about the Black Lives Matter movement, including the widespread protests of Summer 2020. A project with The New York Times, the book is packed with photographs that keep the reader engaged.

I learned so much when reading this book, not only about the Black Lives Matter movement, but also about the Civil Rights Movement as a whole. The author placed current events in the context of an ongoing struggle.

I also learned about what goes into an effective protest. There was a short section about the roles of marshal, bike patrol, frontline, street medics, supplier, and legal observer. This is a book about history – recent history plus background – but it is also a book about ways that individuals can work for justice and change.

With all the pictures, this book took me longer to read than I expected. But the pages are large (the better to hold large photos), and a whole lot of information is presented in creative ways.

Whether you’re critical or supportive of the Black Lives Matter movement, this book will help you understand what they are trying to accomplish and how they rose to the moment.

The final chapter is titled “Never Too Young to Lead,” and features young leaders of various movements, including the Civil Rights movement in the sixties and the Black Lives Matter movement today, but also young people like Greta Thunberg against climate change and the Parkland survivors against gun violence – leaving kids with inspiration to find ways to step out and get involved.

veronicachambers.com
hmhbooks.com

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Review of Iron Widow, by Xiran Jay Zhao

Science Fiction, Teen Fiction Review 0

Iron Widow

by Xiran Jay Zhao

Penguin Teen, 2021. 394 pages.
Review written January 27, 2022, from my own copy sent by the publishers for the 2022 Cybils
2022 Cybils Finalist, Young Adult Speculative Fiction

Iron Widow is about an angry young woman who starts out seeking vengeance and moves on to destroy the patriarchy. It’s set in a completely different world, but with a culture reminiscent of elements of Chinese history.

Huaxia is besieged by aliens called Hunduns, made of spirit metal. But pilots can fight them, using their qi to control giant Chrysalises to battle and destroy the Hunduns. But pilots can’t channel all that qi alone. They need a pilot-concubine in the cockpit next to them, contributing qi and helping to channel it. There’s one major problem: More often than not, the concubine can’t handle that much qi and dies.

Zetian’s older sister was sold off by her family to be a pilot-concubine, but she didn’t even live long enough to die in battle before the pilot, one of the biggest celebrities in the country, killed her. So now Zetian is determined to enlist as a concubine — and kill him. But before she has the chance to carry out her vengeance, the alarm goes off and they’re pulled into battle. And it turns out that Zetian’s qi is so strong, the one who is overwhelmed and ends up dead is the pilot.

But that’s not the end for Zetian. Next, the army matches her up with the Iron Demon, a man who murdered his family before he became the most powerful pilot of them all. And he is not what Zetian expects. But the more involved she gets, the more she finds out about the pilot system and how it treats girls as disposable.

Zetian herself has bound and broken feet, so it’s always painful to walk. Her feet were broken by her grandmother when she was five years old, so that she would be refined and acceptable to men.

This book has a love triangle with a rich boy Zetian has known for years, but the love triangle has bonds of love (and off-page sex), rather than jealousy, between all three. I tried not to think about whether it would be likely that all three would feel that way about each other. We do see Zetian learn to see and understand more deeply than externals.

Much more disturbing for me, there’s a scene where the main characters torture and kill someone. This person has tortured many others and deserves whatever he gets, but I’m from the Don’t-Sink-To-Their-Level school of thought. I think an atrocity is still an atrocity, even if the victim has committed multiple atrocities himself.

That scene does highlight how horribly the people currently in power are using their power — and that Zetian will do absolutely anything to fight back. She goes from wanting vengeance for her sister to wanting to topple the entire system and save more girls from being sacrificed to the system. And she’d like to win back the province of Zhou from the Hunduns as well. She does an amazing job of defeating the bad guys, and you can’t help but root for her.

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Review of The Calculating Stars, by Mary Robinette Kowal

Alternate History, Fiction Review, Science Fiction, Starred Review 0

The Calculating Stars

by Mary Robinette Kowal

Tom Doherty Associates, 2018. 431 pages.
Review written September 3, 2021, from my own copy purchased via amazon.com
Starred Review

I tend to love novels where the main character is a mathematician, and when that main character is a woman, that love goes over the top.

The Calculating Stars is set in 1952, featuring Elma, a woman who was a WASP pilot and now works as a computer for NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Her husband is a lead engineer for NACA.

Yes, this is a different timeline from the one we’re living in – and as the book begins, a meteorite strikes the earth, landing in the Chesapeake Bay outside Washington, DC – which is completely wiped out.

Elma and Nathaniel are in the Poconos when the meteorite strikes. I love the way they both know enough about explosions to know it is not an atomic bomb because the radio continues to play, so they know there wasn’t an electromagnetic pulse. Since an earthquake hits four minutes later, they figure out it was a meteorite and know to get to shelter before an air blast hits. This tells the reader these are highly intelligent scientists – but in an extremely tense scenario.

When they do get to safety, after much difficulty, much of the East Coast has been obliterated. As Elma is doing calculations to figure out what the meteorite was made of – she realizes that earth is in trouble. After some years of extreme cold, things are going to heat up until earth is uninhabitable.

So the rest of the book happens in 1956 and is about the push to go into space – much more quickly than happened in our timeline. Because if those calculations are correct, humans are going to need to build colonies off our home planet.

Elma is an experienced pilot and a genius mathematician – but it’s 1956, and she’s a woman. Many believe that a woman’s place is in the home. Can she prove she has what it takes to become an astronaut? And doesn’t anybody understand they’re going to need women in space to establish colonies, anyway?

This book had me following the gripping storyline all the way through. Elma’s voice telling the story is practical but engaging. I love the way she built in actual things about the space program in our timeline – for example that engineers were male but human computers were female – and that women were allowed to train to be astronauts but were not accepted – and the discrimination that was prevalent at that time. All of this is built into what feels like a very realistic story.

It was disconcerting to read about a disaster that would render earth uninhabitable at the same time fires are raging and huge hurricanes are striking and a pandemic is killing people all over the world. I thought it was just as well she set the disaster in the past so it didn’t feel like something that might soon happen. I could reassure myself this was just fiction!

One thing puzzled me a little after I finished the book. Elma and her husband are young and healthy, and they have lots of sex throughout the book. The book covers five years, but Elma never gets pregnant. Perhaps she’s on birth control pills (maybe developed earlier in that alternate reality?), but she sees a doctor and doesn’t talk about that. And medication for anxiety becomes a big issue for her career. Plus at one point she vomits from anxiety and her husband thinks she’s pregnant, but she tells him she just had her period a week ago. If they’re taking steps not to be pregnant, why would he think that, but if they’re not taking steps, why aren’t they concerned? The book covers five years, so I’d expect a young married couple having lots of sex to be thinking about this issue, one way or another. And especially if they’re living in the 1950s. And even more so if they’re making the case that women need to go into space to help build a colony. Perhaps this will be an issue, one way or the other, in later books.

But that’s a minor quibble. The only time it occurred to me when I was reading the book was when I was puzzled the husband thought she was pregnant. By then, I’d assumed there were strong reasons she wasn’t.

One thing I do know: I want to read the next two books in the series. I’m hoping the lady astronauts will help save mankind.

maryrobinettekowal.com
us.macmillan.com/tomdohertyassociates

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