I got the chance to share some of my favorite topics from Super Cities!: Baltimore in the June issue of Baltimore’s Child! Check it out here! (My article is on page 32.)
Learn more about Super Cities!: Baltimore here.
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Super Cities!: Baltimore in Baltimore Fishbowl
My new book Super Cities!: Baltimore (Arcadi Publishign, 2023) was recently featured in the Mother/Daughter Corner at BaltimoreFishbowl.com! Ana Preger Hart and her six-year-old daughter Mia explored the book together and shared their favorite things about the book:
“After 19 years of living in Baltimore, 10 of them spent covering the city streets on a bicycle (my only mode of transportation during that time), and seven moves across the city’s neighborhoods, I didn’t think there was much left for me to discover about Charm City. Even so, I’d be hard-pressed to compile an exhaustive list of everything that makes our city the greatest. Kathy MacMillan’s done some of the work for us in Super Cities! Baltimore…’I basically liked all of the book,’ Mila told me after we’d finished reading. ‘It felt like I was really there.'”
Read the whole thing here: “Mother/Daughter Corner: Ana and Mila Hart Review ‘Super Cities! Baltimore’”, Baltimore Fishbowl
Order Super Cities!: Baltimore now from Deaf Camps, Inc. Online Bookstore (Autographed by the author and supports a great cause!) | Arcadia Publishing | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Bookshop.org
Read This!: UNRAVEL by Amelia Loken
Summary: Sixteen-year-old Marguerite knows her uncle doesn’t like her. True, she’s in line for the throne before him and he contends she’s too deaf to rule, but she’s known since he broke her hand to keep her from using sign language. Now, as the kingdom’s Bishop-Princep, Uncle Reichard has declared war on magic and Marguerite must hide the fact that she’s a witch. While witnessing her first witch trial, Marguerite rescues a child from death with the help of a handsome, itinerant acrobat, Tys. Marguerite flees, hiding in the neighboring empire where magical gifts can flourish. Before her training is complete, war threatens. She returns home, only to witness her uncle seizing the throne. He isolates and imprisons her. Marguerite’s love for her people drives her to continue defying him. But to challenge him means she’ll have to rely on her homemade invisibility cloak, questionable allies, and Tys, the one boy she never should have trusted.
This beautifully-written novel full of adventure, magic, and romance grabbed hold of my heart and never let go! Marguerite is a compassionate and resourceful heroine who knows who she is even when the world tries to define that for her. I never knew how much I needed a story about textile magic until I read this book! The author wove her own experience as a deaf/hard-of-hearing individual and ASL interpreter into Marguerite’s story, and the results are a gorgeous tapestry of political intrigue, swordplay, romance, and feminist magic.
UNRAVEL is out now.
NITA’S FIRST SIGNS featured in CBC Showcase
Nita’s First Signs has been selected for the Children’s Book Council’s Spring 2023 Showcase: Spring Into a New You! Check out the complete list of recommended titles that help kids try new activities and hobbies.
Read This!: GOOD DIFFERENT by Meg Eden Kuyatt
Good Different by Meg Eden Kuyatt
Summary: Selah knows her rules for being normal. She always, always sticks to them. This means keeping her feelings locked tightly inside, despite the way they build up inside her as each school day goes on, so that she has to run to the bathroom and hide in the stall until she can calm down. So that she has to tear off her normal-person mask the second she gets home from school, and listen to her favorite pop song on repeat, trying to recharge. Selah feels like a dragon stuck in a world of humans, but she knows how to hide it. Until the day she explodes and hits a fellow student. Selah’s friends pull away from her, her school threatens expulsion, and her comfortable, familiar world starts to crumble. But as Selah starts to figure out more about who she is, she comes to understand that different doesn’t mean damaged. Can she get her school to understand that, too, before it’s too late?
How I adore this book! The author’s gorgeous use of imagery puts us directly into Selah’s point of view. I felt the itchiness of that school uniform and smelled that sour milk big-box store smell. Every detail, from Selah’s dragon metaphors to Pop’s four-colored pen to a through-the-bathroom-stall-wall conversation at FantasyCon, is pitch perfect. This deeply realized and beautifully rendered OwnVoices novel should be on every reading list.
GOOD DIFFERENT is out now.
Stories By Hand with Kathy MacMillan 