Picture books
A Seed Grows
Antoinette Portis
Read for Librarian Book Group
Few words and simple illustrations depict the seed cycle.
Endlessly Ever After
Laurel Snyder and Dan Santat
Read for Librarian Book Group
A bevy of fairy tales in one book. Aside from being a choose your own adventure, it also had a very fun rhyme scheme.
A River’s Gifts: The Mighty Elwha River Reborn
Patricia Newman and Natasha Donovan
Read for Librarian Book Group
Explores the birth and death of the dams on the Elwha river. Includes some good life cycles including salmon, and the dams themselves. Illustrations were technical and flowery—something that is hard to pull off.
Polar Bear
Candace Fleming, Eric Rohman
Read for Librarian Book Group
Hang out with a polar bear and her cubs during the cubs’ first year of life.
Love in the Library
Tokuda Hall Imama
Read for Librarian Book Group
Minidoka is the camp where the subjects of the book are incarcerated during World War II, and Tama is the camp librarian. I wasn’t sure if the picture book audience would be interested in a story of two people falling in love, but librarians have told me they are. The illustrations really compliment the time period.
Young Adult
Wake the Bones
Elizabeth Kilcoyne
Read for Librarian Book Group
It’s already a good book, what with the Kentucky-based tobacco farm setting and a local girl who dropped out of college and is interested in taxidermy. But then there’s all this weird stuff that makes it even better. Plus, the writing is outstanding. Such a great start to 2023 reading.
We Deserve Monuments
Jas Hammonds
A good take on the dying grandmother story. When her family moves to her mother’s hometown to take care of Avery’s dying grandmother, she learns more about her mother and why her grandmother has been so angry.
How to Excavate a Heart
Jake Maia Arlow
Figuring out how much time to allot to a relationship is tough! This is a good exploration of that learning curve. Plus, a DC setting and an internship.
Nine Liars
Maureen Johnson
Stevie and the crew head to London to visit David and learn stuff. (It is an official school visit.) As is known to happen, Stevie is soon embroiled in a mystery. Johnson gets to write her manor mystery and provides an abrupt ending that begins the long wait for the next book.
Once Upon a Quinceañera
Monica Gomez-Hira (add to list)s
Carmen needs a summer internship to get her diploma, and working as a Dreams Come True Disney character also means getting hired for her cousin’s quinceañera. But her family has been estranged since Carmen’s own quinceañera was cancelled.
Aside from quinceañera details, there are a lot of feelings about family in this book. Nicely done.
Hope and Other Punchlines
Julie Buxbaum
I haven’t read many 9/11 YA novels. It’s possible that they were written before I started reading a lot of YA? I liked this exploration of being a face of 9/11 (as a one-year-old) and still being recognized fifteen years later. The back and forth narration is shared with a boy whose father died in the 9/11 attacks.
What to Say Next
Julie Buxbaum
Kat’s mourning her father, dead in a car accident. David has autism and is working hard to survive high school. This engaging book is about how their friendship develops.
I’m not the biggest fan of two main characters narrating, but Buxbaum does it well.
Young Nonfiction
The Tower of Life: How Yaffa Eliach Rebuilt Her Town in Stories and Photographs
Chana Stiefel and Susan Gal
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The story of a woman who chronicled the losses of the Holocaust by putting together a monument to the town where she was born using the photos people sent to relatives.
Tree Hole Homes
Melissa Stewart, Amy Hevron
Read for Librarian Book Group
This book has the same problem The Universe in You did, but not quite to the same extent. The main story pulls the reader from page to page, and doesn’t pause to let the reader take in the extra facts. It was very difficult for me, as an adult reader, to make my way through this book.
The illustration style worked better for this book than for The Tidepool Waits, a previous effort of Hevron.
The Universe in You: A Microscopic Journey
Jason Chin
Read for Librarian Book Group
As always, Chin’s illustrations are incredible. But the structure of the words in this book was frustrating. The ellipses pull readers along to the next page, but there were still many things to read on the current page. In a small font. It made for a very stressful reading experience.
Grownup Fiction
One True Loves
Taylor Jenkins Reed
I enjoyed the back and forth as we learn how Emma ended up with a fiancée and a husband and reflecting about how our lives change as we age.
The Secret to Superhuman Strength
Allison Bechdel
Bechdel explores how exercise came into her life (she’s just old enough to remember life before fitness became ubiquitous) and how it both helped and numbed her through life and life’s passages. She also connects us to how Romantic poets and Transcendentalists used exercise in their lives to support their art.