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Earlier this Autumn, Newbery Medal winner Christopher Paul Curtis returned to Buxton, Canada, with The Madman of Piney Woods.  It’s forty years later than his last visit and the children we met have grown and the town has flourished.  11 year old “Benji” Alston loves roaming the Piney Woods that surround Buxton, whether he’s playing American Civil War with his friends, or visiting the secret swimming hole, or just passing time outside.  Benji’s set his sights on being a newspaper man and is thrilled when he gets an apprenticeship at the newspaper in neighboring Chatham.  “Red” Stockard is a scientist, observing the world around himRead More →

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In a few decades, the long-standing gender selection of choosing boy children over girls will result in a 5 to 1 ratio of boys to girls across India and violence will erupt as the availability of this scarce resource (eligible, healthy young women) dries up and people realize the mistake they and their government have made for far too long.  A small group of powerful, forward-thinking women promise a respite: a new country within the boundaries of India, sealed off, safe, and a haven for families with daughters, Koyanagar.  People from across the country flock to the emergent nation, hopes buoyed by the promise ofRead More →

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In his last published work,On a Clear Day, Walter Dean Myers imagines a world not too different from the one we live in today: globalization has enabled 8 giant, multi-national corporations to take over every aspect of our lives, entrenching people into rigid socio-economic classes with little hope of upward mobility; millions living on the edge of poverty turn towards racial and class violence as a means of survival; the food supply is heavily regulated and people are starving to death on a daily basis; terrorism is on the rise in all parts of the world; and the global education system has been dismantled in favor ofRead More →

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A fearsome force, Susan McCallum is determined, ruthless, and in-charge, but she’s only ten years old and a girl—ineligible for military service during the World War II era.  When the brothers she idolizes, Hank and Theo, decide to serve their country in the navy, Susan is beyond angry.  Their typically stoic, Scottish father, who fears that he may lose both sons, forbids that they serve in the same branch of the military.  So, Theo joins the Army Air Corps, and the two brothers—the best defensive in-fielders in the game of baseball in Accokeek, Maryland—vow to play catch across the world, one aboard an aircraft carrierRead More →

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Nothing is going right for 11-year old Jarrett: he’s gotta pass summer school at an all-boys charter school if he wants to advance to seventh grade, and he overheard the teacher tell the principal she thinks he stupid and won’t pass; his best friend Ennis, recently back from his summer trip to see his dad in Jamaica, is acting aloof and strange; he’s scared to tell the girl he likes, Caprice, about his feelings for her; but worst of all, the most recent foster baby that his mom has taken in came to them with an older brother, Kevon, who’s Jarrett’s age and has takenRead More →

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I don’t even know where to begin, exactly. Jacqueline Woodson‘s lyrical, exquisite, and lovingly crafted verse memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, seems beyond my abilities to critique.  Poems spanning her birth in February 1963 through her fifth grade year take us from Columbus, Ohio to Greenville, South Carolina, and ultimately to Brooklyn, New York.  Born on the edge of the Civil Rights movement, Jackie’s childhood is framed by the Jim Crow south and the hope of the Great Migration, but its richness, texture, and heft comes from her beloved family: her grandfather Gunnar, called Daddy, and grandmother Irby, who raised Jackie and her brother Hope andRead More →

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I’ve waxed on before about how much I love it when a book transports me into a life I’ll never have the chance to live – into a culture, or a time, or a circumstance – because isn’t that the whole point of reading books?  And in a way, that’s the point of all art – whether its a book, a painting, music, theatre – they’re all expressions of the human experience that we share with others to connect us and celebrate the variety and similarity of our time here on Earth.  Last night I started, and was so transported byPadma Venkatraman‘s newest, A Time toRead More →

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Laden with pain that she sometimes forgets to hide, pain from the loss of a brother on the day she was born, twelve-year-old Jewel Campbell wonders where joy goes when it leaves a family.  A Jamaican/White/Mexican mixed race girl living in Caledonia, Iowa, Jewel feels like a misfit.  In Caledonia, where folks think “that Jamaica is some country in Africa” (62), mixing doesn’t happen—except in Jewel’s family.  Outside of Caledonia, people ask Jewel what she is, a question that makes Jewel bristle: “Shouldn’t they ask who I am?  Why am I a what?” (62).   Jewel wonders what it would be like to have two parentsRead More →

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In Katherine Kirkpatrick‘s Between Two Worlds, travelers on a race to the top of the world interrupted life during the 1900’s in Greenland.  The Greenland Inuits were amazed at the expansive wooden ships that rammed upon their shores bringing white men, women in impractical dresses, and canned food. Billy Bah was not exempt from the amazement. She followed the captain of the ship – Captain Peary – and spent time with his wife, especially after the birth of their daughter in the barren tundra of Greenland.  When the Peary’s sail home to America they ask to take Billy Bah with them – the first “Eskimo” toRead More →