Category: Books

Young Adult

Any Way the Wind Blows
Rainbow Rowell

This is the #1 book published in 2021 that gets a certain Queen stuck in my head. Rowell does a great job putting roadblocks in the Simon/Baz relationship over three books, yet still has me rooting for them. We’re back in England for this book, and our heroes are trying to find their way in the early adult years.

Of the three, I think the second one is my favorite, mostly for the American road trip flavor. But it has been a while since I read the first.

Fly Girls: Lux, the New Girl
Ashley Woodfolk

Very, very, very short book that might be great for reluctant readers. It was short enough that it felt like only part of a story and it will be interesting to see what the other three volumes bring.

As with all of Woodfolk’s stories, great emotion!

Fly Girls: Micah: The Good Girl
Ashley Woodfolk

Micah tries to meet her parents’ expectations regarding church and god as she balances those expectations with her own desires and thoughts.

This book relies heavily on ellipses and those are a punctuation mark that I find rob a story of rich details.

Fly Girls: Noelle: The Mean Girl
Ashley Woodfolk

As you might imagine, Noelle’s meanness comes from a place.

While I’m all for short, accessible YA stories, it seems the price of the book would be slimmed down to reflect its smaller size.

Fly Girls: Tobyn: The It Girl
Ashley Woodfolk

Oddly, the library had hard copies of the first three of this series and only an ebook for the fourth. The fourth book tells Tobyn’s story and wraps up all three of the other fly girls. And now we have finished the short saga.

I’m hoping for a longer book from Woodfolk next.

Watch Us Rise
Reneé Watson & Ellen Hagan

While things happen in this novel, there’s not a ton of tension—which isn’t a criticism, sometimes its nice to float along through a school year. I also enjoyed the differing views of what the administrators and teachers of a social justice–focused high school saw as justice, vs. the protagonists’ view of fairness and justice.

Instructions for Dancing
Nicola Yoon

Just a big of magic—the ability to see how couples’ relationships end—and sad feelings about divorce drive this sort-of ballroom dance book. I say sort of because we start strong with ballroom, then wander away from ballroom for the middle chunk of the book before returning for the end.

I was all in for the romance.

Young Nonfiction

In the Shadow of the Fallen Towers
Don Brown
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I’m used to Don Brown’s books using a laser-like focus to draw attention to a big event. This felt much more diffused. Maybe it’s an event that is just too complex?

Wonder Women of Science
Tiera Fletcher and Ginger Rue
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Great things: a wide variety of women scientists working today; profiles include information about their work and their lives.

Not so great: very unpolished and informal writing style including ellipses misused and parentheses and brackets deployed much more often than they should be; sometimes details were stretched to make a point in a way that felt disingenuous, like with the whole “invisible car” discussion; I would have preferred some captions on the photos that were included.

It ended up being a hate read, which was disappointing, because I really liked the concept.

Grownup Nonfiction

History vs. Women
Anita Sarkeesian and Ebony Adams

Sarkeesian and Adams find a host of important women you might never have heard of and give you short biographies about their lives. Each one has a beautiful pencil illustration.

Grownup Fiction

The Visible Man
Chuck Klosterman

Klosterman weaves a gripping tale of a counselor treating a man who can render himself invisible. Uncomfortable feelings abound. I’m curious how counselors who read this book might feel about its protagonist.

The Library Book
Susan Orlean

Orlean’s powers of observation, research, and description bring to life the 1986 fire at the Los Angeles Central Library. The book also includes a history of the library along with daily life in the central library.

I listened to the first few chapters during a car trip before switching to a printed copy. I’m glad Orlean was there to read me the chapter of the library’s fire because I don’t think I would have made it through the chronology. So many things lost.

Picture Books

The Old Boat
Jarrett and Jerome Pumphery
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An old boat shows us relationships with people and the ocean. Very fun generational through line.

The Museum of Everything
Lynne Rae Perkins
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I had a lot of uncanny valley-type feelings—is that an illustration or does it actually exist? This left me uncomfortable, but also intrigued. But mostly uncomfortable.

The concept was so very good, a five-star concept, especially the Museum of Hiding Things page and the Museum of Shadows. But the uncanny valley feelings outweighed the concept. I might page through it again and see if my feelings have changed.

Itty Bitty Kitty Corn
Shannon Hale & LeUyen Pham
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Despite the Statler and Waldorfing by Parakeet and Gecko, Kitty thinks she might be a unicorn in this sparkly pink and purple book.

Best pages: the endpapers give us a few more Kitty, Gecko, and Parakeet stories.

Watercress
Andrea Wang, Jason Chin
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Chin’s perfect illustrations highlight a childhood memory of when one event lead to a bigger story.

Best page: From the depths of the trunk, they unearth a brown paper bag, rusty scissors, and a longing for China.

Keeping the City Going
Brian Floca
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A great time capsule of the quarantine, this also has an illustration style that complements the subject.

Best page: the spread of delivery trucks. So much detail!

Middle Grade

The Girl From the Sea
Molly Knox Ostertag
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Graphic novel about falling in love and coming out set on an island off the coast of Nova Scotia. Fans of the Secret of Roan Inish will like this. (And vice versa! Don’t miss out on the Secret of Roan Inish!)

Young Adult

Slingshot
Mercedes Helnwein

A debut novel that I bet has been being written for more than a decade, give its length. It does a thing I hate, which is to have a modern teenager listen only to the music of someone born in 1979 (as the author was.) Very few teenagers listen exclusively to the music of a previous generation, but you wouldn’t know that from some YA novels.

However! The book makes up for this by really diving in on the teenage feelings of anger and obstinance and oh-my-god-I-love-him!

You’ll Miss Me When I’m Gone
Rachel Lynn Soloman

Twin sisters undergo genetic testing when they turn eighteen to see if they have the gene that will lead them down the same path their mother is living: Huntington’s disease.

Lots of complex sibling feelings!

A Sitting in St. James
Rita Williams-Garcia
Read for Librarian Book Group.

My ire for publishers that shelve novels in the YA section just because their authors have written middle grade and YA in the past continues. The character that this story revolves around is an octogenarian! This is adult fiction through and thorough and should be read by a wide swath of the population. By designating it YA, a bunch of people will never find it.

I thought a lot about Gone with the Wind when reading this. Like most white people living in the twentieth century, I went right along with the depictions of the enslaved people in that book. Williams-Garcia moves the focus of her plantation novel to include the many people who keep the plantation going, though white characters are included.

Raping enslaved girls and women (and some boys and men) is a basic fact of this book. While it’s mentioned in passing, the resulting children make for very complicated emotion and politics in this novel. (Another thing Gone With the Wind tra-la-la’d right past.)

And all that is to say, this is a long, gripping, incredibly rewarding book that gives a full picture of plantation life in Louisiana right before the Civil War. Nearing the end, I hoped for a sequel. How would everyone’s life change with the coming war? But alas, it looks like this is a one-off. Williams-Garcia includes an epilogue summing up the characters’ lives.

Concrete Rose
Angie Thomas

Readers of The Hate U Give will know Maverick as Star’s father. But back in the 90s, he was a teenager figuring things out. Aside from getting to spend time with Big Mav, there is a lot of wondering what it means to be a man. Good stuff!

Curses
Lish McBride

A large cast—thankfully McBride includes a cast of characters in the front—tell a new version of Beauty and the Beast. Solid fairy tale setting with interesting magical things.

Young Nonfiction

Secrets of the Sea
Griffith & Stone
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Learn about a nineteenth century pioneering marine biologist. I found some details were confusing. Though she looked much younger, the back matter made it clear that Jeanne Power was in her late thirties at the time most of the illustrations depict.

Delicious!
Julie Larios & Julie Paschkis (sp)
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Very short poems about different kinds of street food from around the world. The illustrations were as fun as the poems. I would have liked the back matter to be consistent when explaining the foods.

From a Whisper to a Rallying Cry
Paula Yoo
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A deep dive into Vincent Chin’s 1982 murder. Yoo’s description of the murder is gripping and she does a great job showing how the crime unified the Asian-American communities. I wish the captions to the pictures did not spoil what was coming in the chapter.

In the Shadow of the Moon
Amy Cherrix
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This book begins with a letter from the author arguing that readers should read this book because the subject is still important. It kind of comes off as begging, though I’m sure to children born after the year 2000, the early space program is a very old bit of history.

Cherrix provides us with great details and shows us the differences between the U.S. and U.S.S.R.’s space programs. The book illustrates how having a focused goal and money to back it up leads to success.

Violet & Daisy
Sarah Miller
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Miller provides a ton of details about Violet & Daisy, the famous (in the early 20th century) conjoined twins. We follow them from birth to death. Pictures were abundant and details were mostly fully explained (there was a very quick mention of one of the twins having a child that was given up for adoption.)

Grownup Fiction

The Other Miss Bridgerton
Julia Quinn

How to make a kidnapping okay and the kidnapper (a privateer) worth falling for? This book answers that question.

(p.s. Kidnapping is never okay.)

Arcadia
Lauren Goff

I thought I hadn’t read this, though reading the first paragraph reminded me I had. However, I enjoyed it enough the first time, I kept reading and was rewarded with Goff’s excellent descriptions of life on a hippie commune.

The last part is the weakest, but it does, in 2012, center part of that section in the future where it is 2018 and a severe flu is causing problems. It’s quite fun to compare and contrast. Also to realize what was being described in 2012 sounded pretty bad. We had no idea what we were in for.

Picture Books

Fox at Night
Corey R. Tabor
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Fox finds a lot of things scary. In the meantime, readers get to guess what things are are scaring Fox.

Tag Team
Raúl the Third, Elaine Bly
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El Toro and La Oink Oink get (as my father would say: you don’t have to, you get to!) to clean up the Caliseo after their big match. This is all thanks to Mal Burro and Peeky Pequeño who have skipped out on their obligations. This book was mostly written in English, with Spanish written in purple. Sometimes the English or Spanish was repeated, sometimes phrases were used alone.

I was mostly annoyed that El Toro and La Oink Oink cleaned the Caliseo.

Training Day
Raúl the Third, Elaine Bly
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El Toro isn’t up for training until Kooky Dooky finds a way to motivate him.

Middle Grade

Finding Junie Kim
Ellen Oh
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I had a goodly amount of whiplash as the book flipped back and forth between Junie’s story of a depressive episode and her grandparents’ time in Korea during the Korean war. But ultimately enjoyed details of all the stories.

Korean War books are few. Authors need to get on that, STAT!

Young Adult

The Box in the Woods
Maureen Johnson

We reunite with Stevie and it’s the summer after she’s solved the Ellingham mystery. She’s back at home and experiencing the comedown that is normal life. (I felt her deli-ham-slicing pain.) Luckily, she is whisked off to a summer camp where she is supposed to solve a 1978 murder of four teenagers.

Props to Maureen Johnson for the fun tech bro details and the many period details about the mystery.

I really love this series.

Aetherbound
E.K. Johnston

The versatile Johnston tackles sci-fi with the story of Pendt, who grows up on her family’s space cruiser. She’s the runt of her family and her life is shaped because of that.

Johnston is great at writing books that stick with me.

This is Not a Love Scene
S.C. Megale

Maeve is a powerhouse who knows how to get things done—including the student film she’s directing. This is an interesting and engaging #OwnVoices story about being a teenager. And also living with muscular dystrophy.

Our Year of Maybe
Rachel Lynn Soloman

Best friends Sophie and Peter have been close since they were children. But when Sophie gives Peter one of her kidneys, his world opens up and their friendship changes.

An excellent exploration of how relationships are formed and the personal growth that comes when they flex.

Goodbye Perfect
Sara Barnard

What happens when your best friend runs off with her boyfriend? Sara Barnard plumbs the emotions of friendship. I’m excited to read more from her.

Along for the Ride
Sarah Dessen

Auden is saddled with terrible parents (they are currently winning the 2021 award for worst fictional parents who are not physically or psychologically abusive) and keeps to her studies and herself. When she flees to her father’s house, she spends the summer meeting her new sister, learning that people are complex, and that bicycles are freedom.

This is Sarah Dessen at her best.

The Truth Is
NoNieqa Ramos

There was a dark cloud over this book. That dark cloud was instantly recognizable when I finished reading and realized Ramos also wrote the Disturbed Girl’s Dictionary. Enjoyable and hard, that book was.

In this book, Verdad has boxed herself off and is lonely after her friend dies. But when she meets Danny her relationship with her mother goes south and her friendship world opens up. So many uncomfortable feelings!

Destination Anywhere
Sara Barnard

Payton takes a desperation flight from her home in Great Britain to Canada because it’s the only way she can think of to escape her parents’ insistence she attend school. Her attempts at travel are guided by a bunch of tourists she meets. As she gains confidence, we learn more about her lonely life and what happened the previous year.

Barnard goes hard into heavy feelings, and just as hard into the joys and miseries of of travel and forming friendships.

A Quiet Kind of Thunder
Sara Barnard

The U.S. of A. doesn’t tend to turn out a lot of selective mute children (we trend toward the depressed or the ADHD diagnosis) but Steffi (a Brit, not an American) has been working to overcome her selective mute diagnosis for years. When she’s paired up with Rhys because he uses British Sign Language and she has some passable BSL skills, her world changes.

I was interested in the way BSL was depicted in bold in the novel and wondered how someone fluent in BSL would feel about that. I think the author did it to show Steffi’s progress mastering the language, but I’m curious how others felt.

Young Nonfiction

The People’s Painter: How Ben Shahn Fought for Justice with Art
Cynthia Levinson, Evan Turk
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I think the art was supposed to make a point about the subject’s style, but I found it messy and off-putting.

Sunrise Summer
Swason and Behr
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Spend the summer in Alaska, fishing for salmon on a small, family-owned piece of land. There were many interesting details and great back matter.

Twenty-One Steps: Guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier
Jeff Gottesfeld and Matt Tavares
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Who are the people who guard the tomb of the unknown solider and why do they serve? There are a lot of great close-up details and expansive views in this picture book.

Grownup Nonfiction

The Anthropocene Reviewed
John Green

I’m a bit of a John Green completionist (Vlogbrothers, Dear Hank & John, novels, the Anthropocene Reviewed podcast) so I’d heard Green reading versions of many of these essays on his podcasts. I appreciate the podcast version more, but the essays are fine in print form.

By the way, I’m writing this review while listening to a YouTube livestream from February where Green was autographing one part of the 250,000 first printing pages. I preordered, so I got a signed copy. It was a green signature, and the pen was clearly on the downslope. I gave my John Green autograph 2 stars.

Grownup Fiction

The Duke and I
Julia Quinn

A day at the beach and I had finished my book. What to do, what to do? Instead of downloading another ebook, I wandered into Seaside’s Beach Books and found a perfect beach companion.

Lady Whistledown—an excellent device for delivering backstory! And who doesn’t love a big family, romance between wealthy people, and the Regency period? Well, maybe not you, but I’m a fan.

I’m excited to see if I can beat the next season of Bridgerton and finish all eight of this series.

Kindling the Moon
Jenn Bennett

Bennett’s debut novel featured pacing that didn’t quite crackle along, but this urban fantasy had all the sexy romance markers.

Picture Books

We Wait for the Sun
Dovey Johnson Roundtree, Katie McCabe, Raissa Figueroa
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A moment from Dovey Johnson Roundtree’s childhood beautifully illustrated by Raissa Figueroa

The One Thing You’d Save
Linda Sue Park & Rober Sae-Heng
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A collection of poems written in Sijo—a Korean style—about a class assignment of the one thing students would save from a fire.

I often struggled to follow who was speaking.

Mornings with Monet
Barb Rosenstock and Mary GrandPré
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Learn how Monet painted a series of paintings of the Seine in this very interesting picture book that also gives the flavor of a Monet painting.

Rabbit! Rabbit! Rabbit!
Lorna Scobie
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An only-child rabbit gets a bevy of new siblings an must adjust. It took a turn at the end that I wasn’t expecting.

Nicky & Vera: A Quiet Hero of the Holocaust and the Children He Rescued
Peter Sis
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Yet another story of the Holocaust. It’s interesting, but gets swallowed up by odd page layouts.

The Lost Package
Richard Ho & Jessica Lanan
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The kind of picture book I adore. Spare words, and tons of details to go back and find. The author’s note tells of his personal appreciation of USPS.

Hello, Rain
Maclear, Chris Turnham
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A lot of great description of rain paired with whimsical illustrations.

We Become Jaguars
Eggars, White
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A boy and his grandmother become jaguars and explore the land around them. Packed with visual delights. Also this sentence: “She laughed like great thunder and I laughed like lesser thunder and we jaguared on.”

Jump at the Sun
Alicia D. Williams and Jacqueline Alcántara
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Picture book biography of Zora Neale Hurston. Great leaping illustrations complement the text.

Middle Grade

The Sea in Winter
Christine Day
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The stakes were low, but middle grade readers who are separated from the thing they love due to injury might feel differently about this story of a girl nursing a knee injury that is keeping her from dancing. It’s also a good chronicle of taking things out on your family.

This book was at the bottom of the to-read pile for a long time because the cover was conveying that this story was set in perhaps Norway, and there would be fairies and ogres and many magical things. Imagine my surprise when I started to read and found out it was a contemporary middle grade set in Seattle and Olympic National Park.

Unsettled
Reem Faruqi
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In this novel in verse, a Pakistani girl comes to the US with her family and finds her new life is improved by swimming.

Pity Party
Kathleen Lane
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This book is chock full-o-fun! Quizzes, short (some very short) stories, ads. All very tongue-in-cheek and aimed at middle school kids feeling awkward.

Young Adult

Last Night at the Telegraph Club
Malinda Lo
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The core of the book, Lily’s story of finding the Telegraph Club and falling in love, is strong and rich with period details.

There’s some backstory that felt like it bogged down the narrative, which is too bad because this is otherwise a solid historical fiction.

That Summer
Sarah Dessen

This is a little clunky, pacing-wise, but does a great job at really drilling into those teenage feelings that happen when everything goes wrong and you are the cause of a large portion of it.

Some things are grounded in the 90s, when this book was written, and best left there. I winced at a description of a minor character: he was as whipped as any man can be.

The Seventh Raven
David Elliott
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Here’s the deal. For about 80% of novels in verse, I think the story would be better served if the author undid their free verse, made them into sentences, added additional sentences to make paragraphs, and then had themselves a novel.

But a small portion of novels in verse I can appreciate, like this one. Elliott uses poetic forms which gave me something to chew on as I read this story of a family of boys transformed into ravens to save their newborn sister.

What We Left Behind
Robin Talley

The fate of happy high school couples as they head off to college is well-known. Usually it’s not a happy ending for the couple. But this sad outcome does provide a lot of plot.

This happy couple also has complicating factors due to genderqueer processing. The book does a great job of exploring the many wedges that are driven between a couple as they head off to college, plus it might be handy to read for older people who are curious about these young people and their discussions of pronouns and gender exploration. It’s also from 2016, so some things might be out of date.

Note that this has a lot of one-star reviews on Goodreads written by people who have problems with how the genderqueer identity was explored.

Lies We Tell Ourselves
Robin Talley

Alternating perspectives of two girls. One is integrating a high school and one is the daughter of the publisher of the town paper who is anti-integration. I had some interesting feelings re: whose story this was to tell. It also got me thinking about some assumptions I have about people who did integrate all-white high schools.

We Are Inevitable
Gayle Forman

I like that Forman has built a YA career with a bunch of books that tell the stories of young people who have graduated high school.

And so it goes with this story of a guy who is going down with the particular sinking ship of a local bookstore run by his family.

The Lady Rogue
Jenn Bennett

Jen Bennett’s excellent skilz of romance-telling take a back seat for a story set in Romania in the 1930s and a particular cursed ring.

It was very fun to see Bennet flex her historical fiction muscles. I haven’t seen them in play since she switched over to YA. Also, I’ve visited the region, so I enjoyed the travel.

Someone Like You
Sarah Dessen

I read this after reading Dessen’s That Summer because the two books were adapted into a movie. Because of that, when I started reading this book, I was supremely confused because nothing about the two books overlapped. Once I let go of my expectations, I found a story that summed up the emotional highs and lows of one of my own high school relationships. Well done!

The movie, by the way, picks parts from each book and combines them. By doing so, a lot of the feelings are lost and we’re left with a middling teen movie.

Grownup Fiction

The Ex Talk
Rachel Lynn Soloman

Well this is fun! Why are there not more romances set at public radio stations?

Shay (to be honest, not my favorite name) is stuck in a stuck-in-life-phase and new reporter Dominic rubs her the wrong way. But when she has a chance to host a local call-in show, she grabs it, even if it means partnering up with Dominic.

Picture Book

Unspeakable
Carole Boston Weatherford and Floyd Cooper
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A picture book that shows the before and after of Greenwood, Oklahoma, a prosperous town burnt to rubble by white mobs. Descriptions are appropriate for the age the book is aimed at.

Time for Kenny
Brian Pinkney
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A picture book with multiple short stories about Kenny and his life. I found that each story began and ended abruptly. The loose style of the artwork was great a capturing movement, but not so great with faces.

Don’t Hug Doug (He Doesn’t Like It)
Carrie Finison and Daniel Wiseman
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As we start to come out of quarantine, it’s good to remind yourself that some people aren’t huggers. Like Doug. Alternative are presented.

I am Not a Penguin: A Pangolin’s Lament
Liz Wong
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Poor pangolin! He only wants to explain about himself, but all the other animals only want to learn about penguins. But in all the confusion, readers will learn a lot about pangolins.

Milo Imagines the World
Matt de la Pena and Christian Robinson
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Milo and his sister are headed somewhere on the subway. While on the train, Milo imagines the lives of those around him.

Mel Fell
Corey R. Taylor
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Mel’s decided today’s the day to get out of the tree in this uniquely oriented book.

Runaway: The Daring Escape of Ona Judge
Ray Anthony Shepard & Keith Mallett
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You know what’s in the historical record? That Ona Judge self-emancipated from George Washington’s household.

Short sentences give a lot of information about Judge’s daily life with the Washingtons.

Middle Grade

Just Like That
Gary D. Schmidt
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An old-fashioned telling of a girl and a boy who are both dealing with loss. Set in the 1960s at a girls boarding school in New England, this book has all the feelings.

Red White and Whole
Jajani Larocca
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Meets all the novel-in-verse standards and feature an Indian American girl balancing her own wishes and her parents’ expectations.

Starfish
Lisa Fipps
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A novel in verse about a middle schooler whose large body causes her a lot of trouble, especially from her mother. While body fat is omnipresent, I felt this book leaned too far in the “too much” realm.

Young Adult

The Wide Starlight
Nicole Lesperance
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Nordic fairy tales twine with present-day Eli as she searches for her missing mother. This was an interesting premise that felt a bit sloggy.

We Are the Ashes We are the Fire
Joy McCullough
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Part story of a young woman mourning the injustice dealt by the justice system after her sister was raped, part long-form poem about a medieval woman.

I confess, I skimmed the poem.

Fat Chance, Charlie Vega
Crystal Maldonado
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Charlie Vega is fat. And also many other things. Maldonado illustrates day-to-day life lived in a large body (it is so hard to shave behind your knees!) and gives us a story of friendship, romance, navigating unsupportive parents, and dealing with grief.

Amber & Clay
Laura Amy Schlitz
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While I groaned at the thought of another novel in verse, Schlitz pulled me in by bringing Ancient Greece to life. Telling the story through artifacts was super interesting, and I loved the details about daily life.

The Initial Insult
Mindy McGuinnis

Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” is a very short story. I know, because I reread it after reading this novel. I find that Poe’s story lacks detail.

This book updates the bones of the story to present day and adds many layers of detail. It was unsatisfying in different ways, though. I found some of the details (like the secret one character kept) to not be realistic, and it escalated in a way that was overly dramatic. Normally McGinnis’s drama is so very good, but not so for me this time. Plus, the panther spoke in verse. There was much too much verse in the reading lineup this month. (Which isn’t this book’s fault, but didn’t help.)

The Love Curse of Melody McIntire
Robin Talley

Despite my love of live theater and interest in things the stage crew is responsible for (sewing, building things, being persnickety about small details) I never got involved with the drama kids. They were just so obvious about their drama, and I say this as a fairly dramatic person.

So the kids in this were a bit much for me—the superstition just felt silly, and thus the credence given to it felt silly. But I was impressed that Talley balanced a huge (Les Miz size) cast of characters and the many theater details she included were interesting. Though there were multiple mentions of the sitzprobe and I never saw whatever that was happen. (I’ve looked it up, it’s apparently a rehearsal where the singers and the orchestra focus on blending together.)

I also enjoyed how the story was advanced using different devices like that middle section that was all dialog, but totally worked. Given the amount of detail in this story, I assumed the author was a drama kid from birth, but it turns out the details came from a lot of research.

Kate in Waiting
Becky Albertalli

Book two of two set during a musical production put on by a high school. (The first was The Love Curse of Melody McIntire) In this book, it’s a fall musical, which seems to be a thing that exists for plot purposes, as every high school I’ve ever encountered has spring musicals.

Anyhoo, Kate hasn’t yet made it out of the chorus, but she’s hoping that she and her friend Anderson will get some juicy roles in the production of Once Upon a Mattress.

From a plot standpoint, I was amazed at how Albertalli set this up and then sent us off through a delight of things hitting just when they should. It’s also a great friendship book, and has a sweet romance.

Love is a Revolution
Renée Watson
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Nala lives with her aunt, uncle and cousin/sister/friend in Harlem. She meets Tye and stretches the truth about herself. From there, we have a great story of a relationship, friendships, and family dynamics that does a great job of exploring the boxes we put ourselves in. And the boxes that others put us in.

Picture Books

The Bear in my Family
Maya Tatsukawa
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Readers may wonder early on who the bear really is.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Carole Boston Weatherford and Frank Morrison
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The illustrations and rhyming storytelling is top-notch in this picture book about the Queen of Soul. But what really pushes the book to greatness is the cover hidden under the jacket.

Young Adult

Rent a Boyfriend
Gloria Cho

Cho imagines a world where young Asian-American women can rent a boyfriend to get their parents off their backs. (This is, apparently, a thing that does happen in Asian countries.)

This was a fun romance.

Let Me Hear a Rhyme
Tiffany D. Jackson

This book is a love letter to a time and place (90s Brooklyn). I had trouble with the back and forth of the narrative, but enjoyed the mystery and the antics.

The Rest of the Story
Sarah Dessen

A great summer-at-the-lake story with observations about class, family, and addiction. I sometimes felt whiplashed by Dessen’s technique of jumping forward and then looping us in, and I wished I had made a character list at the beginning. But the characters were great and they kept me reading.

The Way You Make Me Feel
Maureen Goo

Trying on and shedding personalities is one of the most interesting things about being a teenager. Due to a prank gone awry at her junior prom, Clara starts spending more time with new people and that makes apparent what her current attitude leaves out of her life.

As usual with Goo, really great characters!

Fan Art
Sarah Tregay

This book is set in Boise and I’m pretty sure the high school in this book is standing in for my high school. Aside from that very specific enjoyment, I liked that the main character was out to his parents and not out to his friends. It’s rare to see that combo.

My Calamity Jane
Hand, Ashton, Meadows

Calamity Jane, Annie Oakley, Frank Butler, and Wild Bill Hickock take us on an alternate history trip as they hunt garou, what we call werewolves. Full of the patented asides the Janies are famous for, this was a great trip, though I suspect Wild Bill’s actual show spent a lot of time talking about killing Indians, not garou, which dampened my enjoyment some.

Grownup Fiction

The Nickel Boys
Colson Whitehead

Elwood’s life before, after, and during his time at the Nickel Academy is rich with detail in this engaging, heartbreaking book. The acknowledgements have links to connections with the real-life reform school the Nickel Academy is based on.

Young Nonfiction

Paper Son
Julie Leung & Chris Sasaki
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Not only the story of pioneering (and uncredited) Disney animator Tyrus Wong, but also an introduction to paper sons and daughters.

The Snow Fell Three Graves Deep
Allan Wolf

Wolf provides a good balance of poetry and prose as he tells the tale of the Donner Party.

Gone to the Woods
Gary Paulsen
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Paulsen’s memoir of his childhood is rich with language, vivid, joyful, and heartbreaking. Life has changed a lot since Paulsen was a boy and hopefully not as many children lose their childhoods as he did.

Grownup Nonfiction

Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town
Jon Krakauer

Krakauer’s coverage of a “rape scandal” (which really was a lower-than-average series of rapes) is full of things to be frustrated about. New to me was David Lisak’s work on serial rapists and the role of prosecutors in charging or not charging rapists. The women’s stories—all of them—are gasp inducing and the aftermath (legally and personally) is rough. I read this book in a 24-hour period.

Shit, Actually: The Definitive, 100% Objective Guide to Modern Cinema
Lindy West

I greatly enjoyed this “objective” tour through modern cinema. Lindy West’s asides and observations brought much mirth to the household as I read.

Translation: the boyfriend heard a lot of this book as read by an up-and-coming Audible narrator: me.

Picture Books

All the Way to the Top: How One Girl’s Fight For Americans with Disabilities Changed Everything
Annette Bay Pimentel and Nabigal-Nayagam Haider Ali
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Another Jennifer, changing the world. This Jennifer climbed to the top of the capital steps to advocate for passage of the ADA.

The note from Jennifer Keelan-Chaffins about how lack of access made schooling difficult added to the story.

¡Vamos! Let’s Go Eat
Raúl the Third & Elaine Bay
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Little Lobo must supply food to el Toro and a bunch of other hungry wrestlers. So we get to visit a variety of food carts and a tour of a lot of different kinds of food.

A Place Inside of Me
Zetta Elliott and Noa Denmon
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As the subtitle says, this is a poem to heal the heart. Great illustrations.

Magnificent Homespun Brown: A Celebration
Samara Cole Doyon & Kaylani Juanita
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Gorgeous prose and winning illustrations combine into a homage to all the brown colors.

We Are Little Feminists: On-the-Go
Little Feminist
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A board book about getting from here to there that shows a variety of people and body types.

Welcoming Elijah: A Passover Tale with a Tail
Lesléa Newman and Susan Gal
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For everyone who waits with excited anticipation to see if Elijah appears.

Danbi Leads the School Parade
Anna Kim
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Kim’s illustrations are calibrated at just my level of swoopy. Delightful!

The Catman of Aleppo
Irene Latham, Karim Shamsi-Basha, and Yuko Shimizu
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When you need a bit of insight into a war and abandoned cats, you have this book to turn to.

Middle Grade

Get a Grip, Vivy Cohen
Sarah Capit
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Vivy Cohen shares her initials with knuckleball pitcher VJ Capello and like him she excels at the knuckleball. Unlike him, she doesn’t play for a team.

Told via correspondence between the two VJCs we see Vivy’s first season playing for a baseball team and watch her navigate her parents’ worries about combining a neurotypical kid with a baseball team. She also has to deal with a bully on the team.

This does a great job capturing the sneaky othering of middle school and the frustrating feelings when parents take over.

The Total Eclipse of Nestor Lopez
Adrianna Cuevas
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This story of a boy who feels adrift due to his family’s constant moves because his father is in the army. But when he and his mother go to live with his grandmother while his father is deployed, some weird things happen.

This book had just the right amount of magical realism.

Lupe Wong Won’t Dance
Donna Barba Higuera
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Let’s talk about what this book does well: it captures the sneaky mean and aggressive acts that middle schoolers carry out right under grownup noses.

I also feel for girls who love to play baseball and dream of being in the majors. Maybe their granddaughters will have a shot, but there’s no way in hell MLB is letting women in any time soon.

Now let’s talk about what had me sighing in annoyance and crowning this the worst book of my 2021 reading year so far.

I’m a square dancer and one of the things that square dancers think is the worst recruiting tool is to make middle school kids square dance. They hate it, they think it’s dumb, most of the time it’s not taught by a competent caller and so they think they’ve been square dancing, but they haven’t. (Though I loved the short square dancing unit we did in fourth grade. I wished there would have been another one in junior high school.)

Because I’m a square dancer, I can tell you that the hardest part of square dancing is having even multiples of eight. It’s rare to have everyone in the room dancing, and most of the time there are a handful of people sitting out because there weren’t enough people to make a full square.

Not in this book! Every single square dancing day there the exact nearly correct number of students were there. No one got sick, or had an orthodontist appointment or transferred to a different school, or showed up mid-unit having transferred from a different school. It was always the exact number to leave the squares one person short so Lupe had to dance alone. Every. Single. Time.

It’s not realistic. And this book was littered with unrealistic things happening just to stretch the story. “Since 1938 middle school students have learned to square dance in sixth grade.” No they haven’t. Because there weren’t middle schools in 1938. “The boys must ask the girls and once you choose your partner you can’t trade.” “We always dance to Cotten Eye’d Joe.” Given that the PE teacher had experienced her own trauma during her middle school square dancing unit, there’s no way she wouldn’t have mixed things up. Teachers run their classrooms how they see fit. There’s no square dancing overlord who dictates how things must be.

There are plenty of opportunities to make amusing conundrums from square dancing. But when it’s not grounded in any sort of reality the book isn’t funny, it’s just not very well written.

Granted, this book is written for kids, not adults, so a lot of these details will fly by the intended audience. But I think that shows a certain level of disrespect for the reader. Because you know who’s harder on books that don’t get things right than adults? Kids.

A Wish in the Dark
Christina Soontornvat
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Soontornvat builds an interesting world in this story that opens with two orphan children living in a prison. They were born there and must remain in the prison until they are thirteen.

This is an adventure with a lot of (slightly heavy handed) conundrums.

The Midwife’s Apprentice
Karen Cushman

I appreciate Cushman’s commitment to all the characters being horrible to Alyce. She’s also great at weaving in period details without devolving into lecture.

Young Adult

Furia
Yamile Saied Menez
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Camila has been sneaking around playing soccer for a team in her barrio. She’s balancing her life as a student, an athlete, and the sister of a professional footballer. She’s also the daughter of an abusive father and a mother who is trying to get by.

I loved the layers of this book, and Furia was an amazing character!

Catherine Called Birdy
Karen Cushman

This Newbery honor from the 90s is packed with everyday details about a fourteen-year-old girl living in 1200s-era England. It’s amusing and gives a full picture of her life. It’s also been optioned for a film, so read it now while you still have the chance to make your own images in your head.

We Are Not From Here
Jenny Torrest Sanchez
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A tense story of three teenagers attempting to get to the US from Guatemala where they all face death due to gangs and abusive relationships. Recommended reading for people who have strong feelings about asylum seekers.

Dancing at the Pity Party
Tyler Feder
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This graphic novel about the death of the author’s mother when she was nineteen is engaging and delightful. It’s a sad situation, and the sadness resonates, but it’s also an incredibly fun read. My favorite page was the Dos and Don’ts list of things to do when interacting with someone who has lost their mother.

One Way or Another
Kara McDowell

I was irritable through the first half of this book. This was partly because indecisive people drive me batty and partly because I was rooting for neither guy. But things shaped up once the extent of Paige’s anxiety disorder came into focus and the guys rounded out.

The Code for Love and Heartbreak
Jillian Cantor

A serviceable retelling of Emma, with a high school coding club as the setting.

While I don’t mind reading retellings of Jane Austin books, I also don’t feel the need to spend a lot of time thinking about what to say when reviewing them. We know the story.

Displacement
Kiku Hughes
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Through an inventive device that handily sums up generational trauma, a modern-day Seattle teenager experiences the Japanese internment that her grandmother also experienced.

Grown
Tiffany D. Jackson

This is the third novel I’ve read by Jackson and I love how her stories make me feel uncomfortable and angry throughout my reading experience, yet I cannot put the book down.

Enchanted’s love of singing leads her on a fraught and dangerous path.

Aside from a crackling bit of fiction, this book also has an incredible cover and a great author note.

Felix Ever After
Kacen Callender
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Callender has written a roller coaster of emotion that takes place during Felix’s summer school session.

Though Felix’s world was very different than mine, I related to his confusing feelings about love. I also appreciate his calling me out during this passage:

“He kind of reminds me of a golden retriever, with his floppy blond hair and blue eyes. The first time I saw him in acrylics class, I kind of immediately hated the guy. He’s the sort of person the world adores, just based on the way he looks, a little like the way people obsess over men like Chris Hemsworth and Chris Evans and Chris Pine and all the other famous Chrises, plus Ryan Gosling, claiming that they’re liberal and that they’re feminists, but not really thinking about why they’re so obsessed with white men, and why they don’t love any people of color the same way.”

Throwaway Girls
Andrea Contos

A good little adventure/suspense/thriller that was bogged down with an alternate viewpoint that confused me every single time I encountered it. There was also a switch up at the end I didn’t find successful. Overall, the book was enjoyable but flawed.

Grownup Fiction

Majesty
Katharine McGee

The continuing saga of Beatrice, Nina, Samantha, and Daphne as Queen Beatrice negotiates her first months as a ruler. McGee is great at balancing so many characters and, unlike the first book, this one comes to an end, while still leaving room for a sequel.

That Daphne!

Young Nonfiction

Sharuko: Peruvian Archeologist Julio C. Tello
Monica Brown and Elisa Chavarri
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Who is studying which cultures? Peru was lucky to have Julio C. Tello, and you can learn about him in this bilingual picture book.

Grownup Nonfiction

An Architectural Guidebook to Portland
Bart King

Bart King is funny and loves architecture. I’m on board with both of these things. Take a gander at his eco-roof definition:

Any roof that you could grow salad greens on qualifies. An eco-roof insulates the building, limits water run-off, and lasts twice as long as a conventional roof. But without a caretaker and/or good drainage, an eco-roof can turn into a dead weedroof, which isn’t as impressive.

Young Adult

This is My Brain in Love
I.W. Gregorio
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This book gets all up in the emotions of its two protagonists. It’s also a solid love story with realistic complications. Win!

Just Patty
Jean Webster

Given that for my first 21 years, I was called Patty, I grabbed this Little Free Library find for the title. I found a delightful collection of stories about three friends attending St. Ursula’s, a progressive girls boarding school.

The book was published in 1911, and my copy was from 1911, so I got to delight in typography that has gone out of fashion (so many spaces!) and also thick paper and illustrations. I wonder if Maud Hart Lovelace was inspired by this book when she wrote her Betsy-Tacy series?

Given its age, there are surprisingly few moments to wince at. A chapter about the Irish-American family next door with oodles of children and a father that drinks too much was firmly ensconced in stereotype. And there’s another chapter where the girls dress as “gypsies” and are very mysterious. But other than that, it was teenagers being teenagers, back before they called them teenagers.

I’ll see if I can track down the other book Jean Webster wrote featuring Patty.

All the Days Past, All the Days to Come
Mildred D. Taylor
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Just as long as its title suggests, this meander of a story is not a young adult book. The main character is finished with college, for gosh sakes, and the book covers her 20s and 30s.

This is a (kinda) character-driven novel, but mostly it takes many asides so the author can explain who a historical figure is or give us details about a historical event. There was no reason for it to end when it did or to go on for as long as it did.

I gather that this continues the story of a character or characters in books I haven’t read. Perhaps it would have been a more satisfying read from that standpoint. As it was, this was a long slog.

Everything Sad is Untrue
Daniel Nayeri
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A YA book* destined to be shelved in the wrong area and never found by the readers who need it the most, Nayeri’s tale of life in America and Iran dazzles with matter-of-fact recounting.

*Just because the narrator is twelve doesn’t mean it belongs in the middle grade section! The themes are too mature for middle grade readers! This means that most kids who do find this book won’t be old enough for it, and older teenagers will pass it by.

They Went Left
Monica Hesse
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We know many stories of the people imprisoned in concentration camps during World War II, but what happened after?

Zophia’s quest to find her brother sheds light on one story.

If These Wings Could Fly
Kyrie McCauley
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As a resident of a town where crows have flocked, I loved how McCauley wove the birds’ appearance with the escalating abusive situation in this novel. I found the magical realism to be less successful.

It was nice to see toxic masculinity defeated by something other than toxic masculinity.

Never Look Back
Lilliam Rivera
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Duel narrator retelling of a myth I’m not overly familiar with Great magical realism elements.

Legendborn
Tracy Deonn
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When a fantasy novel can capture this reluctant fantasy reader, you know it was written by a gifted author. Bree’s discovery of odd things afoot at her Early College program is just the beginning of a wild ride. I’m looking forward to a big long series about her journey.

There’s a small Twilight callout that had me chuckling.

Young Nonfiction

Box: Henry Brown Mails Himself to Freedom.
Carole Boston Weatherford & Michele Wood
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Poetry and pictures bio of the enslaved man who mailed himself to freedom.

How We Got to the Moon
John Rocco
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Having lived in the long, long shadow of the baby boomers for more than four decades, I felt I had absorbed more than enough about the moon landing. But then: this book.

John Rocco looks at the cornucopia of problems the US needed to solve to get to the moon and he lays out a solution for each problem. His big picture viewpoint highlights many people behind the scenes including the seamstresses who made the parachutes that deployed after the astronauts reentered earth’s atmosphere.

Rocco uses illustrations rather than photographs, and I thought this was a brilliant decision. The illustrations convey the many small details about the bits and bobs of the infrastructure that was part of the US Space Program. Highly recommended.

The Cat I Never Named
Anna Sabic-el-Rayes with Laura L. Sullivan
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Like most of the rest of the world, I didn’t pay much attention to the war happening in what we used to call the former Yugoslavia. Even though I knew two people from the area. So it is a gift to have Anna’s story of her time in the Bosnian town of Bihać during the war.

The horrors of the war are not glossed over, but they aren’t so explicit that a reader will check out. The humanity of everyone involved is shown again and again.

Catherine’s War
Julia Billet & Claire Fowel
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A graphic novel about one of the many Jewish children hidden in plain sight in Vichy France.

Itzak: A Boy Who Loved the Violin
Tracy Newman & Abigail Halpin
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Picture book that caused me to wonder if this is the only picture book I’ve seen depicting a child with polio.

I liked the colors.