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

Cindy: I was excited and a little nervous when I heard there was to be a new Shel Silverstein collection. Post-humous publications often disappoint, but this one is successful. Every Thing On It (Harper 2011) has over 130 poems with his trademark line drawings, selected by his family from his archives and published her for [...]

Cindy: The 7th graders that I booktalked Bootleg: Murder, Moonshine, and the Lawless Years of Prohibition (Roaring Brook 2011) to last week were shocked that alcohol was once illegal. They are quite familiar with medical marijuana legislation but only one student in eight classes could tell me what the word “prohibition” meant. One girl did [...]

Lynn: It’s waaay too early to begin making lists but Balloons Over Broadway:  The True Story of the Puppeteer of Macy’s Parade (Houghton 2011) is already one of my favorites for this year.  First there is the fascinating story of how the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade came to have its signature giant balloons.  Then there [...]

Lynn: Talk about a dream team!  Caldecott winning illustrator Beth Krommes teams up again with Joyce Sidman, winner of three Newbery Honor medals in the exquisite Swirl By Swirl:  Spirals in Nature (Houghton 2011).  The result is just what you would expect – another brilliantly crafted book.  This time the subject is the ” spiral: [...]

Cindy: When my oldest daughter first took guitar lessons, she struggled as the instructor made her pluck out the notes for ”Mary Had a Little Lamb.” My brother was disdainful of that method. He said, “I can teach her three chords and she’ll be able to play any Bob Dylan song she wants, and what more would she [...]

Lynn: Halloween is a BIG deal with our focus group despite the current politically correct efforts in our local school to homogenize it.  The boys start planning their costumes the minute the first leaf falls and have lofty schemes for decorating the front of my house this year.  They also love to cook so when [...]

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 [...]

Cindy: Lynn found this delightful autobiography of a man who befriended Picasso as a child. The Boy Who Bit Picasso (Abrams 2011) obviously illuminated the great painter’s life, but in a unique way for a youth biography: looking at a famous figure from the perspective of someone who sat on his lap, visited his studio [...]

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: “It was as if I didn’t exist without music,” Leonard Bernstein.  It is Berenstein’s intense purpose that is the focal point of Rubin’s outstanding new biography, Music Was IT!:  Young Leonard Bernstein (Charlesbridge 2011). Teens with a similar driving passion in their lives will discover a strong connection to the incredibly gifted young man [...]