Picture books
Standing in the Need of Prayer: A Modern Retelling of the Classic Spiritual
Carole Boston Weatherford, Frank Morrison
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Weatherford and Morrison work their magic as they show Black history through the classic spiritual. Great endpapers!
Gibberish
Young Vo
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We spend the day with Dat as he goes to school where a different language than his language is spoken. Illustrations show the nuances of the day.
Young Chapter Books
Cress Watercress
Gregory Maguire and David Litchfield
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An old-fashioned (possibly pedantic?) children’s book with gorgeous illustrations. The story centers on Cress, the daughter of a family of rabbits that has lost their their father.
Middle Grade
Maizy Chen’s Last Chance
Lisa Yee
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This otherwise interesting story of a California Girl who spends her summer at her Minnesota grandparent’s Chinese restaurant and learns about paper sons is hampered by a lot of telling not showing that prevented this reader from making a deeper connection to the material.
Iveliz Explains it All
Andrea Beatriz Avogo
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A novel in verse that is also journal entries in verse about the titular character who is having trouble taking care of her mental health after losing her father.
Young Adult
The Epic Story of Every Living Thing
Deb Caletti
Caletti does a lot with Harper and Instagram culture and being on a cell phone all the time. Plus sperm donors and helicopter parents. I loved watching the new bonds form between Harper and her half-siblings. The story felt unwieldy in the middle, but a plot twist perked it right back up.
Young Nonfiction
Yes! No! Subtitle Goes Here
Megan Madison and Jessica Ralli
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Introduced the concept of consent in a perfectly adequate way. I appreciated the note at the beginning suggesting the grownup readers to ask the child or children they are reading to if they want to read the book together. Good modeling.
American Murderer
Gail Jarrow
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While saddled with a true-crime-type title, this is actually an engaging study of how hookworm affected Southerners in the U.S. I learned a ton including that very few rural people in the South had any outhouse facility. Those that did often had unsanitary privies that leaked. Includes a ton of great photos and articles and pamphlets from the time. The photos are nearly all of white people, which makes sense for the times, but I would have liked that unpacked a little bit more.
Victory. Stand!: Raising My Fist for Justice
Tommie Smith, Dawud Anyabwile, Derrick Barnes
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Anyabwile’s masterful illustrations lead Smith’s story of one of the athletes to gave the Black Panther salute at the Mexico Olympics. This wobbles a bit at the end, but it’s tough to sum up decades of discrimination that resulted from a few minutes of protest.
Grownup Nonfiction
Sure, I’ll Be Your Black Friend
Ben Phillippe
Phillippe offers to be your, yes your, black friend in this interesting memoir about his life as a Haitian-born Canadian immigrant who now lives in the U.S. and is an author and academic. His humor-—so present in his books—makes an appearance here. And I agree with his ranking of Rory’s boyfriends.
The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey
Rinker Buck
A coworker has asked me twice if I’d read this, and I read it so I will be ready to say yes the next time he asks. This is a long book, and about halfway through I figured out what bugged me about it. It was the taking for granted that wanting to travel on the Oregon Trail in a covered wagon pulled by donkeys would result in actually getting to do that. That’s one thing that Millennials are much better at than any generation that has come before: recognizing and calling out their privilege. Just a nod that not everyone gets to spend $30k on just the wagon, not to mention taking months off of work to ramble, would have gone a long way.
It took until three-quarters of the way through the book to figure out the other thing that wasn’t working. Buck has a tin ear for dialogue. Compact histories of trail-related minutia? Top notch! Descriptions of landscapes and the people in them? Well done! Relaying conversations. Not good at all.
It’s also a book that brings in Buck’s family of origin quite a bit, but that very large family is boiled down to his father, his brother, and a few passing mentions of other siblings. I was very curious about his mother and his sisters, but they were not to be found. It’s a very male-centered world.
With all of that said, I enjoyed many parts of this book. His summation of how donkeys built the US changed my view of those animals and their place in history. It was interesting to see him prepare for his trip and the many things that unfolded during the journey.
Where Am I Now?
Mara Wilson
“Oh yeah, her,” I said when the library hold arrived. I came by this book because Wilson was a guest on a podcast I listen to. These essays give insight into her time as a child start, the death of her mother when she was eight, and her transition into adulthood as a formerly famous child start. It was enjoyable to read about a child star making it to adulthood without falling into the usual traps of alcohol and other drugs.