Break out your black-and-white garb, bird buffs! It’s #WorldPenguinDay. Timed to coincide with the Adélie penguin’s annual migration northward, the initiative, which began in 1972, aims to raise awareness about our flightless friends to the south. There are 17 to 19 species of penguins worldwide, and over 50 percent of those are considered endangered or […]
Cindy: New Year’s healthy eating resolutions usually start to flag by February, so it’s perfect timing for us to share a 2018 title that’s a great fit for Booklist‘s Spotlight on Health & Wellness. Eat This! How Fast Food Marketing Gets You to Buy Junk (and How to Fight Back) by Andrea Curtis offers lessons […]
Cindy: The nature artist Gwen Frostic (1906-2001) is a Michigan treasure, so when Lynn found her new picture-book biography, Nature’s Friend: The Gwen Frostic Story, (2018) at the public library, I was delighted. Frostic was born in the thumb of Michigan’s mitten-shaped lower peninsula but eventually settled on the other side of the state, in the woods of […]
Cindy: What a surprise awaits inside these pages! The warning in the title, Do Not Lick This Book (2018), should be heeded—it is, indeed, full of germs! But don’t let that steer you away from reading it. Journey along with Min, a microbe who travels, via your finger, from the paper of the book’s pages […]
Cindy: Monopoly has an interesting history and Tanya Lee Stone has produced a thought-provoking picture book about it: Pass Go and Collect $200: The Real Story of How Monopoly Was Invented (2018). Originally called The Landlord’s Game, it was created by Lizzie Magie, who was looking for a way to demonstrate the unfair relationship between landlords and tenants […]
Cindy: Lynn and I teased Bookends readers about this fascinating book in an earlier post after we both read it on the plane home from the ALA Annual Conference. This week, we’re participating in the blog tour for Spooked! How a Radio Broadcast and The War of the Worlds Sparked the 1938 Invasion of America (2018). For […]
Lynn: There’s nothing more fun for kids (and many adults) than grubbing in the dirt. Any gardener or small child knows that there are a lot of fascinating things to be found there—many of them wonderfully wiggly. But I had no idea of either the huge variety of critters to be found there or their […]
Marking the triumphs of Midwestern authors published in 2017, the Society of Midland Authors announced the winners of its annual award today. The ceremony will be held in downtown Chicago on Tuesday, May 8th, to commemorate the winners and their works from the last year. The winning and honored titles, linked to their Booklist reviews when possible, are […]
Lynn: Barb Rosenstock and Katherine Roy’s new picture book, Otis and Will Discover the Deep: the Record-Setting Dive of the Bathysphere (2018), is the fascinating story of how the groundbreaking submarine came to be. It is also a celebration of curiosity, persistence, and the unexpected places those qualities can lead. Otis Barton and William Beebe, […]
Lynn: Not too many kids (or adult reviewers) can resist the allure of books about elephants. In fact, we have two outstanding books on that large subject. The first is a nonfiction “fact” book, How to Be an Elephant: Growing Up in the African Wild (2017), by Katherine Roy. This is no dry, ordinary, facts-about-animals […]
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