Booklist Online: More than 130,000 book reviews for librarians, book groups, and book lovers - from the trusted experts at the American Library Association

Lynn:  In an age of expensive entertainment, the opening sentence of Look Up!:  Bird-Watching in Your Own Backyard (Candlewick 2013) has a refreshing simplicity: “You don’t have to go anywhere fancy to watch birds!” In fact, Cate goes on to assure young readers that all they really need to do is learn to keep quiet [...]

Lynn:  Who would have thought, gentle readers, that such a thing as a chicken rescue shelter would be necessary?  Apparently many city dwellers are now permitted to raise chickens and many have no idea how much work that actually is.  City Chickens (Houghton 2012) tells the story of Chicken Run Rescue in Minneapolis and the [...]

Lynn:  Revered writer (by me anyway) Phillip Hoose turns his attention to the bird world again with an amazing book about an equally amazing type of bird, the Red Knot, and more specifically a very special individual bird – B95.  Moonbird:  A Year On the Wind With the Great Survivor B95 (Farrar 2012) introduces readers [...]

Lynn:  Have you ever wondered what all that cheeping, twittering and singing is all about?  More importantly, have you thought to encourage the children around you to wonder about that too?  Bird Talk:  What Birds are Saying and Why (Roaring Brook 2012) is a terrific introduction not only to the fascinating world of bird communication [...]

Lynn:  I’m always a sucker for books about rescued wildlife but even the most indifferent of hearts will be charmed by Puffling Patrol (Lee & Low 2012), the latest from the award-winning Lewins.  At the end of summer, adult puffins leave their babies and and fly away to spend the winter in the northern seas.  [...]

Lynn: Our focus group loves science and I think they share that love with lots of kids.  We’re always looking for great new science-related books for the younger set and this week we have something a little unusual – picture books that are fiction yet also present scientific topics.  These two are ideal for common [...]

Lynn: Animals have always been a big part of my life and that has also meant I love to read about animals almost as much I like being around them. There wasn’t any such thing as YA literature when I was a young teen so I turned to adult books. Probably my favorites were the [...]

Cindy: I came home a few weeks ago to find a wild turkey strutting through my front yard. I frequently have to slow down and wait for a flock to saunter across the road on my way to work, but that was the first one to walk my garden path. Jim Arnosky’s new picture book, [...]

Cindy: We haven’t gotten over our fall fascination with the National Parks and so this week for Nonfiction Monday we are headed to California to explore the mighty redwoods. According to Redwoods (Roaring Brook/Flashpoint, 2009) since 1850 and the advent of large-scale logging “more than 95% of the original redwood forests have been destroyed. Only [...]

Cindy: Biome research never looked so gorgeous as it does in Life in the Boreal Forest (Henry Holt, 2009). My sixth graders know this biome as the “tiaga” but Guiberson references that alternate name for this important ecosystem. The boreal forest covers most of the Northern Hemisphere and shelters so many creatures, many of which [...]