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: One of the best – and most humbling – benefits of being a book reviewer is the constant collision with new knowledge.  As an adult I’ve come to appreciate Dickens’ writing much more than I did in my high school years when we painfully dissected his novels in class.  I knew only a little [...]

Lynn: I usually don’t think much about my age but while I certainly wasn’t around in 1896, the time of Basketball Belles:  How Two Teams and One Scrappy Player Put Women’s Hoops on the Map (Holiday 2011), I did play “Girl’s Basketball” rules in high school.  Girls were considered too delicate to do more than [...]

Lynn: I am sad to report that I am horrible at math – so horrible that the thought of anything even vaguely math-related is enough to make me break out in a cold sweat!  So the fact that I am writing about a book that has the word “equation” in the title should be a [...]

Lynn:  My family are zoo and museum-addicts.  I freely admit it and will further admit that we have sometimes eschewed a famous site or two for the pleasure of going to yet another zoo or crazy museum.  So I was instantly drawn to Strange Creatures:  The Story of Walter Rothschild and His Museum (Disney/Hyperion 2011).  [...]

Lynn: “Some people think it’s just smelly swamps.”  Yezerski shows us how wrong this notion is in Meadowlands (Farrar 2011) but it wasn’t too long ago that this vibrant ecosystem nestled on the Hackensack River was poisoned and foul.  Illustrated with beautiful water color paintings, Yezersky takes us back to pre-colonial times when the wetlands [...]

Lynn: Cindy discovered Bug Butts (EarlyLight 2011), took one look and handed it off to me and the Focus Group straight away.  Let’s see, bugs with shooting butts, spinning butts, exploding butts, bubble butts – hmmm, need I say more about small boy appeal?  The EWWW Meter is pegged on this book and while the [...]

Lynn: I love books that start out with warnings to the reader!  “The Editors” caution us on the first page: Be advised that the author of this book, Huckleberry Finn, is NOT A WRITER! The stage is set, the tone established and the fun begins as Huckleberry Finn himself (with considerable help from Robert Burleigh [...]

Lynn: It was a sunny Saturday, March 25, 1911.  New Yorkers were enjoying the weather in the park when they heard the fire engines racing to a ten-story building housing the Triangle Waist Company.  The top three floors were ablaze in what was to be the deadliest workplace fire for 90 years.  Albert Marrin recounts [...]

Lynn: Energy is a topic on everyone’s minds these days and finding a way to talk about this complex issue with children is more important than ever.  So I am especially happy to write about Energy Island:  How One Community Harnessed the Wind and Changed Their World (Farrar/Frances Foster 2011) which is the first of [...]

Lynn: “Can a girl get a job fighting death,” asks 16-year-old Prudence Galewski in her diary.  It is 1906 and Prudence sees death everywhere in New York City, wonders how illness occurs and how it can be conquered.  Deadly (S&S/Atheneum 2011) is a riveting historical novel told in the diary entries of a young girl [...]