I spoke with author Toni Buzzeo upon publication of her book MY BIBI ALWAYS REMEMBERS, illustrated by Mike Wohnoutka. MY BIBI is a tale featuring the remarkable communication among elephants. I asked Toni to talk about what drew her to…
Category: Environment
The Boy on the Page: a celebration of life and love
I started shivering as I read The Boy on the Page by Peter Carnavas (Kane Miller), shivering with delight. A young boy shows up on a blank page in a book and wonders, “Why am I here?” Soon he starts…
A Cat’s View of Palestine: Deborah Ellis does it again
You know, if somebody just told me the premise of this book (“American girl dies suddenly and finds herself reincarnated, with all her memories intact, as a cat living in Palestine”) I would have thought, That is too cheesy for…
GREEN EARTH BOOK AWARDS
BOOKS ABOUT OUR NATURAL WORLD PLUS ENVIRONMENTAL RESPONSIBILITY: Green Earth Book Award Winners GREEN EARTH celebrated its 10th anniversary of the Green Earth Book Award last month events at the Read Green Festival. Part of this celebration included a donation…
SONG OF THE EARTH
SONG OF THE EARTH C. Susan Nunn’s novel, SONG OF THE EARTH, is an unusual book. It weaves intrigue, mystery, page-turning adventure and hot romance set in the “Borderlands,” the barbed-wired, patrolled border along northern Mexico. This “New Adult” novel…
Chernobyl’s Wild Kingdom: Life in the Dead Zone
As young adult literature should be, this book by Rebecca L. Johnson is about hope, despite the infamous noun in its title, and the spooky photographs at the beginning. Its 88 pages are packed with well-researched information which Johnson is…
The Post-Apocalyptic Present: A Bird on Water Street
The landscape resembles the surface of a distant, inhospitable planet. The air smells of sulfur. Children carry inhalers and adults die young of cancer. There are no trees, no birds, no insects even. Periodically, alarms sound as victims of mining…
“Too Big to Fail?”–the tension between institutions and individuals in The Gospel of Winter by Brendan Kiely
I love novels like Brendan Kiely’s The Gospel of Winter. Besides being an engaging read, it thoughtfully examines wide-ranging and important issues in society—indeed, the questions that Kiely explores imply issues well beyond the novel’s premise of a young man…
Making the Invisible Visible: Estela Bernal’s Can You See Me Now?
I met Estela Bernal at a novel revision workshop led by the wise and generous Barbara Seuling. Estela and I shared a room and she told me about her work rescuing abused animals and educating people about responsible pet ownership.…
Environmental Awareness for the Very Young: Stacy Nyikos’s Toby
It is often hard to convince people of the value of saving endangered species. One can argue for the importance of biodiversity, but when one asks people to sacrifice—whether not to build that beach resort, for instance—there has to be…