“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…
Tag: reviews
Frank Conversations About Race and Class: A Review of This Side of Home
Wherever it occurs, the process of gentrification inspires heated debate. On the one hand, new residents fix up crumbling buildings and bring new businesses to the neighborhood. On the other, these residents raise housing prices and displace longtime residents and…
Learning From the Past to Stand Up for Our Rights: A Review of Audacity
The early part of the twenty-first century has been called the New Gilded Age because of growing inequality, worsening work conditions, and the way that the richest Americans have used their economic power to gain special favors from politicians at…
Today’s Teens Fighting for Their Communities: A Review of Pig Park
Claudia Guadalupe Martinez’s Pig Park (Cinco Puntos, 2014) is a contemporary novel that depicts with affection and a light touch a bustling, though little-known, neighborhood in Chicago and an “unholy alliance” between business interests and politicians. Ever since the rendering…
The Twentieth Century from the Eyes of a Bear
The first children’s book that I’ve translated from Portuguese into English, The World in a Second, is coming out next month, and I’m currently looking for other books to translate. I’d like to translate young adult novels, to do my…
Surviving the Armenian Genocide: A Review of Like Water on Stone
In the summer of 1984 Dana Walrath and her husband traveled to the city of Palu in Western Armenia, inside the present-day border of Turkey. There, she saw the mill and lands that once belonged to her ancestors on her…
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…
Morris Award Finalist Blog Tour: The Carnival at Bray
Welcome back to the Morris Award Finalist Blog Tour, where I am posting at the last minute due to shoveling more than a foot of snow from my driveway, sidewalk, and roof and then being too tired to do anything…
Civil Rights and Intersectionality: Lies We Tell Ourselves
The past ten years have seen 50-year milestones for significant events in the Civil Rights Movement, and with them have come a number of books, fiction and non-fiction, for young readers. Stories of school desegregation, in which a white student…
Three Books on Questioning Religious Belief
With Hanukkah and Christmas at hand, this seems an inopportune time to review books about teens who question the religious beliefs of their elders. Still, adolescence is a time of questioning, and whatever decision a young person makes about faith…