In my crotchety old age, sleep is a major challenge, so I usually end up taking a pile of must-reads to bed. In spite of the lack of zzzzs, my stacks aren't exactly shrinking, but how grateful am I to never be without bookish company...
Two sisters, born three months apart on the same Alabama plantation, could not have more different lives. As the daughter of a slave, Sarah is Master Allen's property; as the legitimate Mrs. Allen's youngest child, Clarissa is a pampered young lady of means. Playmates as...
Counting books seem to be a dime a dozen, and some you wouldn't even pay that much for! How satisfying, then, to discover this priceless One Gorilla. The concept is simple – it's a counting book, after all: each bold, sensational double-page spread features a numeral and...
A dear friend lost her mother this week; even if a parent is granted almost a century of life well lived, the surviving child's loss resonates for always. When a parent dies while the child is still very young, to understand and accept such loss...
Meet Liliko, a supermodel of such perfect proportions as can only be ...
For you DC-area-locals who were wondering, debut novelist A.X. Ahmad is one of us ...
Awarded the 2008 Pura Belpré Medal, "presented to a Latino/Latina writer and illustrator whose work best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience in an outstanding work of literature for children and youth," Margarita Engle’s biography-in-verse introduces Cuban poet Juan Francisco Manzano to younger readers. Born into...
The latest biography of "the world's most brilliant stand-up comedian" is the culmination of a project that took more than a decade (originally intended as a three-act screenplay) by screenwriter David Henry and his brother, musician Joe Henry. Born in 1940 in Peoria, IL, Richard...
A Japanese writer, also named Minae Mizumura, recalls her privileged expatriate New York childhood, then witnesses her family devolve in adulthood. A Tokyo-based editor takes a countryside vacation and meets an older woman who shares fantastical memories of some of the inhabitants. A village girl...
"We are on our way to Budapest," 10-year-old Darling announces as NoViolet Bulawayo’s 2013 Booker longlisted debut novel opens. 'We' includes "Bastard and Chipo and Godknows and Sbho and Stina," banded together with plans to steal guavas as they sneak out of Paradise, the ironically named...
Check out the fabulous cover ...
Young Anton of Saint Petersburg, Russia begins and ends his day with music ...
Okay, for the latest full Avatar experience, might I suggest you do a bit of catch-up homework first: To find out what prompts this eponymous ‘search,’ you’ll need to read the three-part Promise which reveals why family relationships matters so much, especially to Aang and Zuko; then...
Even before Naomi Benaron's debut novel hit shelves last year, it earned a substantial literary gold sticker as the winner of the biennial 2010 Bellwether Prize – the largest monetary award for unpublished fiction in North America, which was rebranded in 2011 as the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially...
Although she "knew many things when [she] was eight," what Olemaun didn't know was "how to read the outsiders' books. It was not enough to hear them from my older sister, Rosie. I longed to read them for myself." Against her father's wishes – "[h]e knew things...
Oooh, am I sucker for novels in verse, even though I'm embarrassingly inept with poetry. Who knows why ...
The top of this debut volume proclaims, auf Deutsch, "Poesie des Widerstandes," or 'Poetry of the Resistors.' Poetry is certainly visible in the alpine landscapes and the swirling energy of the constant movement; most pronounced, however, is the tragedy of what happens across the panels...
*STARRED REVIEW Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri's (The Interpreter of Maladies) unparalleled ability to transform the smallest moments into whole lives pinnacles in this extraordinary story of two brothers – so close that one is "the other side" of the other – coming of age in the political...
Emma is hardly the typical Canadian teenager. At 16, she's lived all over the world, thanks to her career diplomat mother, who Emma currently blames for all the latest terrible events in her life: she's in yet another new country – this time Pakistan with some...
Magic happens when narrator George Guidall says "and yet ...
