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:  For so many children, milk is something that is found in large white bottles at the local store.  They know it comes from cows but how it gets from cows to store is pretty vague.  It’s Milking Time (Random 2013) provides an exploration of that process using a surprising amount of detail while doing [...]

Lynn:  Count me as one who never tires of immigration stories!  They are the heart and soul of who we are as a nation and each one brings a new version of the experience.  There are so many good ones but Paul Fleischman and Bagram Ibatoulline have teamed up to give us something special in [...]

Lynn:  Don Brown brings a pivotal historical event to life for young readers in Henry and the Cannons:  An Extraordinary True Story of the American Revolution (Roaring Brook, 2013).  This IS an extraordinary story!   I remember studying this in school in Boston and thinking it was pretty cool but it wasn’t till we visited [...]

Cindy: We believe that poetry should be celebrated every month (every day!) and not just during April, but here’s a perfect book for those April is Poetry Month celebrations. Gone Fishing: A Novel in Verse (Houghton 2013) is a story in 40+ poems using 30+ different poetic forms. Haikus and Limericks and Free Verse are [...]

Lynn:  It’s March and we bloggers have mostly leaped into the new publishing year.   I’m still playing catch-up though and I’m so glad I didn’t miss Shadow on the Mountain (Abrams/Amulet 2012).  Preus writes about a part of WWII history that most of us know little about and bases her book on the “true [...]

Lynn:   Desperate people with armed men intent on their capture, an entire town racing to their rescue, facing down the villains and risking their very lives for what is right.   It sounds like the plot for a terrific action movie but this is the true story being told in The Price of Freedom:  How [...]

Cindy: I started reading Lincoln’s Grave Robbers (Scholastic 2013) on the plane ride home from ALA Midwinter the day that Sheinkin won a 2013 Newbery Honor and the 2013 YALSA Nonfiction Award and the 2013 Sibert Medal for Bomb. This one may not be quite as destined for award stickers at the end of the year, [...]

Lynn:  It was one of those shining moments in history when “the first Negro enlisted man accepted for the airborne forces…and the first officer” met.  They were the start of the 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion, the first black paratroopers in our nation’s history created in the midst of the dark days of WWII.  Tanya Stone [...]

Cindy: I feel as if I shouldn’t really say anything about this wordless picture book, Unspoken: A Story from the Underground Railroad (Scholastic 2012), other than to urge you to set your eyes on a copy and “read” it with a child. The story opens with a quilt draped over a farm rail fence and [...]

Cindy: The aspiring teen writer in me wishes this book had been available 35 years ago. Barring the development of a time machine, I will have to settle for sharing it with kindred spirits in my book club, and I am eager to do so. The Curiosities (Carolrhoda LAB 2012) is the joint effort of [...]