Just Right: Searching for the Goldilocks Planet. by Curtis Manley
Publishers Weekly Readers join a brown-skinned girl with a polka-dotted backpack as she asks questions about the stars and visits a space museum, where she watches exoplanets careen overhead in a planetarium. In sweeping, inky art, Lanan captures the child's dawning awareness of the vastness of the universe. Manley's writing swings gracefully between factual descriptions ("Earth orbits in our solar system's 'habitable zone''&q...More
Publishers Weekly Nighttime paintings by Lin (Where the Mountain Meets the Moon) add magic to this fable about why the moon waxes and wanes. The story's events unfold against the velvety black of the night sky as Mama and Little Star, dressed in black pajamas spangled with yellow stars, work on their mooncake (an Asian holiday treat, Lin explains in an author's note) in the kitchen. Mama takes the cake out of the oven and lays it "onto the ni...More
Hand in Hand Ten Black Men Who Changed America by written by Andrea Davis Pinkney and illustrated by Brian Pinkney
Publishers Weekly Ten influential black men-including Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, Jackie Robinson, and Martin Luther King Jr.-are profiled in this husband-and-wife team's vibrant collaboration. Andrea Davis Pinkney introduces her subjects with powerful poems, before moving into image-rich, introspective, and candid descriptions of each man's influence on civil rights, culture, art, or politics: "[Malcolm X] th...More
Book list When wealthy dowager Lady Schrapnell endows Oxford's mid-twenty-first-century time-travel project, she also dragoons it into an epochal treasure hunt among earlier eras...More
Publishers Weekly When the first Star Wars film conquered the world in 1977, no one could have possibly foreseen it going on to become such an ubiquitous part of our cultural heritage. Now even parenthood can be viewed through the filter of the Sith lord Darth Vader. Jeffrey Brown (Incredible Change-Bots) crashes headlong into George Lucas's galaxy far, far away with endearing, funny-and fully licensed-results. A series of full-page gag cartoons...More
Amity and Prosperity: One Family and the Fracturing of America by Eliza Griswold
Book list *Starred Review* The names Amity and Prosperity conjure up images of tranquility and abundance, and, indeed, historically, the good life was found within these southwestern Pennsylvania towns. Where once coal was king, now hydraulic fracking rules the day, with mining companies competing for rights to drill into the Marcellus Shale's abundant natural-gas reserves. Along with other landowners, single-mother Stacey Haney wrestled with her cons...More
Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter from Haiti by Amy Wilentz
Library Journal Haiti has been marked by colonial oppression, revolution, dictators, and foreign occupation by American imperialism-to say nothing of widespread poverty, social and political turmoil, disease, and the crippling earthquake in 2010. Caught in the remarkable prose of Wilentz (The Rainy Season) the tragedy is told through the eyes of Fred Voodoo, Haiti's fictional everyman, a figure who fits invisibly in Haitian society but whose in...More
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