The Darkest Part of the Forest (Little Brown Books for Young Readers) by Holly Black, $18.00 In the woods is a glass coffin. It rests on the ground, and in it sleeps a boy with horns on his head and…
Category: Social Issues – Friendship
Making Up for the Past: A Review of Saving Baby Doe
When 13-year-old Lionel Perez sneaks onto a construction site with his best friend, Anisa, he has no idea that their lives will change forever. Anisa hears what she thinks is a cat trapped inside a portable toilet, but it turns…
Review: George by Alex Gino
“It’s true, and I have to say what’s true,” says Charlotte in Chapter 5 of E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. One can imagine the 10-year-old main character of Alex Gino’s debut middle grade novel George (Scholastic Press, August 2015) saying something…
Grief and What We Have in Common: A Review of The Boy in the Black Suit
Seventeen-year-old Matt has just lost his mother to cancer. His father has slid into alcoholism, and Matt takes a job at family friend Willie Ray’s funeral home ostensibly for the money but really because he finds solace in the grief…
WHAT FLOWERS REMEMBER
WHAT FLOWERS REMEMBER by SHANNON WIERSBITZKY “Heirloom flowers are born from seeds that…have been handed down from generation to generation….While gathering seeds in my hand, some big, some as tiny as a grain of sand, I’ve wondered if they hold…
Destigmatizing Mental Illness: A Review of Don’t Touch
Cadence Finn has undergone many changes in her life—notably, her father leaving and starting a new school. She also has a lot to prove, because, in her father’s absence, she is pursuing her interest in theater in defiance of his…
Claiming the Life You Deserve: Girls Like Us
Biddy and Quincy have just turned 18 and graduated from their high school’s Special Education program. Their counselor has arranged for them to live together, with Biddy helping Elizabeth, an older woman with a neurological disorder, and Quincy working as…
The Poetic Voice of Jacqueline Woodson
Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson (Nancy Paulson Books) $16.99 Sometimes we pick up a book because we know the voice will be poetry. That’s always the case with novels written by Jacqueline Woodson. Through poetic snapshots in Brown Girl…
Two: exploring the politics of exclusion and us v. them
When you think of counting books, what do you think of? For the most part, a pretty basic book, right? Something that teaches kids about numbers, or a number, and tries to make it fun, but doesn’t, at the same…
Review: Tomboy by Liz Prince
Liz Prince‘s graphic memoir Tomboy (Zest Books, September 2014) chronicles her 31-year journey to define who she is in a world bent on doing it for her, and her evolution from rejecting all that is “girl” to someone who embraces who…