Readers of Carl Hiaasen and Katherine Applegate will likely enjoy The Secret Language of Birds by Lynne Kelly. Set in Houston, Texas, Kelly’s novel for middle grade readers features thirteen-year-old Nina whose parents are investment bankers. Nina spends her time immersed in her birding apps, but flounders when it comes to making friends, believing she was absent on the day any instruction manuals were handed out. For example, although she tries to befriend Iris, a hearing impaired classmate, she fails in that attempt. When Nina’s older sister Sage encounters the concept of zugunruhe and its impact on the bird brain, she wonders if something insideRead More →

In her novel The Whispering Dark, Kelly Andrew explores the question, to what extremes does love drive us? To tell her tale, Andrew creates seventeen-year-old Delaney Meyer-Petrov as her female lead and twenty-one year old Colton Price as her male lead. In this telling, there is also a villain: the Apostle. As a young girl, Delaney endured a near-death episode that left her hearing impaired and rendered her parents overly attentive. With her hearing gone, Delaney personifies the darkness and imagines it alive and restless. Lane whispers her secrets to the shadows. Wishing to be defined by the sum of her achievements and her abilitiesRead More →