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:  “Lulu was famous for animals,” is the opening sentence of the engaging Lulu and the Duck in the Park (Albert Whitman 2012), the first in an irresistible new series for early readers.  Fortunately for Lulu, her mother’s rule is “the more the merrier as long as Lulu cleans up after them.”  Unfortunately for Lulu [...]

Cindy: Browsing the new book shelf at the public library usually means hauling home a stack of books and with luck finding a gem. In this case I found a new nonfiction series for young elementary school readers about endangered animals. I brought home Brown Bear by Suzi Eszterhas (Frances Lincoln 2012). The cover of a [...]

Lynn:  Sometimes a book goes right to my heart and takes me right back to my childhood.  Twelve Kinds of Ice (Houghton 2012) is that kind of book.  This is the story of one of the great pleasures of winter and how one family makes that pleasure something truly special. The First Ice The first [...]

Cindy: It’s impossible for me to pick a favorite page in this book. Okay, maybe I am partial to the grasshopper opposite the title page. The angle of the photograph makes it appear as if the little guy is flying overhead. But there’s no poetry on that page, so that can’t be my favorite. 2011 [...]

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: I SO needed this book a few years ago when the focus group and I embarked on our first monarch hatching!  We muddled through and have watched many many caterpillars turn dutifully into butterflies and fly away but there’s nothing like the joy of an instructional guide.  Even though we’re veterans now, we love [...]

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 [...]

Cindy: I just picked my first tomatoes of the summer from my small deck garden so Secrets of the Garden: Food Chains and the Food Web in our Backyard (Knopf 2012) is perfect reading this week. The illustrated story of a family planning, planting and harvesting a vegetable garden is heartwarming but it so much [...]

Lynn:  Pandas are so familiar to us today that it is hard to realize that in 1934 hardly anyone in the West had ever seen one.  We wait in long queues to see them in zoos, watch them on live cams and the World Wildlife Federation has adopted its image as their symbol.  The fascinating [...]