Category Archives: Read This

Read This!: IT’S A MYSTERY, PIG FACE! by Wendy McLead MacKnight

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It's a Mystery, Pig Face!It’s a Mystery, Pig Face! by Wendy McLeod MacKnight

Summary: Eleven-year-old Tracy Munroe and her family have just gotten back from their family vacation—why did no one realize that her little brother, Lester, a.k.a. Pig Face, was allergic to sand, salt air, and the ocean before they decided to go to the beach?—and now she has three big goals to accomplish before she goes back to school: Figure out a fantastic end of summer adventure with her best friend, Ralph, budding Michelin-star chef. (And no, Ralph, perfecting a soufflé does not count.) Make sure Pig Face does not tag along. Get the gorgeous new boy next door, Zach, to know she even exists. But when Tracy and Ralph discover an envelope stuffed with money in the dugout at the baseball field (and Lester forces them to let him tag along), they have a mystery on their hands. Did someone lose the cash? Or, did someone steal it? St. Stephen has always seemed like a quiet place to live, but soon the town is brimming with suspects. Now they’re on a hunt to discover the truth, before the trio is accused of the crime themselves.

It’s a mystery, all right – and it’s a great middle grade read, too! Tracy isn’t so excited when her little brother Lester, AKA Pig Face, inserts himself into the amateur detective work that she and her best friend Ralph have decided to undertake. But it turns out that the precocious, if annoying, nine-year-old is just what they need to keep them grounded as the case of the found bag of money spins out of control, and Tracy’s own attempts to hang with the cool kids get the better of her. A funny, tender, and achingly real tale of friendship and sibling bonds.

IT’S A MYSTERY, PIG FACE! is out now.

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Read This!: IVORY AND BONE by Julie Eshbaugh

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Ivory and Bone (Ivory and Bone, #1)Ivory and Bone by Julie Eshbaugh

Summary: Hunting, gathering, and keeping his family safe—that’s the life seventeen-year-old Kol knows. Then bold, enigmatic Mya arrives from the south with her family, and Kol is captivated. He wants her to like and trust him, but any hopes of impressing her are ruined when he makes a careless—and nearly grave—mistake. However, there’s something more to Mya’s cool disdain…a history wrought with loss that comes to light when another clan arrives. With them is Lo, an enemy from Mya’s past who Mya swears has ulterior motives.
As Kol gets to know Lo, tensions between Mya and Lo escalate until violence erupts. Faced with shattering losses, Kol is forced to question every person he’s trusted. One thing is for sure: this was a war that Mya or Lo—Kol doesn’t know which—had been planning all along.

I don’t know what I was expecting when I went into this book, but I know I wasn’t expecting to be immediately transported back to prehistoric times, rooting for a surprisingly sensitive and 100% endearing teenage boy. Kol’s sense of duty to his clan was apparent, but also apparent was the love that tied him to every member of his family. Mya was an enigma, and like Kol, I was intrigued and sometimes annoyed with her. What struck me most about this book was how tautly Eshbaugh wove the inter-clan relationships – even though each of the three clans in the story only had a few dozen people, the full scale of human relationships, politics, and the horrors of warfare played out in the story. I listened to the audiobook, and the narrator, Michael Curran-Dorsano, was a perfect match for Kol’s thoughtful, solid personality. This book is perfect for anyone who really is looking to read something new and different.

IVORY AND BONE is out now.

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Read This!: LOVING VS. VIRGINIA by Patricia Hruby Powell

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Loving vs. Virginia: A Documentary Novel of the Landmark Civil Rights CaseLoving vs. Virginia: A Documentary Novel of the Landmark Civil Rights Case by Patricia Hruby Powell

Summary: From acclaimed author Patricia Hruby Powell comes the story of a landmark civil rights case, told in spare and gorgeous verse. In 1955, in Caroline County, Virginia, amidst segregation and prejudice, injustice and cruelty, two teenagers fell in love. Their life together broke the law, but their determination would change it. Richard and Mildred Loving were at the heart of a Supreme Court case that legalized marriage between races, and a story of the devoted couple who faced discrimination, fought it, and won.

Accessible, relatable, and compelling, this book makes an important piece of history come alive. The description “documentary novel” perfectly describes this book. The bulk of the story is told in verse from the alternating points of view of Mildred and Richard Loving, with historical photographs, documents, and quotes seamlessly woven in, placing the very personal struggle of the Lovings in its larger historical context. Loose drawings by Shadra Strickland, deliberately done in the style of visual journalism used in the 1950s, illustrate the verse portions of the story. Mildred and Richard’s romance unfolds from their childhood home of Central Point, Virginia, immersed in the sensory details of blue homespun napkins and pick-up softball games, along with the everyday experience of blunt racism. As the couple falls in love, marries, and moves to Washington, D.C. to avoid being arrested for the crime of interracial marriage, it becomes clear that they never set out to become activists or heroes – they just wanted to be with their families and raise their children in peace. The nonfiction elements are a perfect touch and beautifully integrated into the story, providing context without ever drawing focus from the effects of unjust laws on the lives of real people. The backmatter details the extensive research the author undertook, including interviews with many of the couple’s friends and relatives. In our current climate, this book is even more necessary.

LOVING VS. VIRGINIA is available now.

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Read This!: HOUR OF THE BEES by Lindsay Eagar

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Hour of the BeesHour of the Bees by Lindsay Eagar

Summary: While her friends are spending their summers having pool parties and sleepovers, twelve-year-old Carolina — Carol — is spending hers in the middle of the New Mexico desert, helping her parents move the grandfather she’s never met into a home for people with dementia. At first, Carol avoids prickly Grandpa Serge. But as the summer wears on and the heat bears down, Carol finds herself drawn to him, fascinated by the crazy stories he tells her about a healing tree, a green-glass lake, and the bees that will bring back the rain and end a hundred years of drought. As the thin line between magic and reality starts to blur, Carol must decide for herself what is possible — and what it means to be true to her roots. Readers who dream that there’s something more out there will be enchanted by this captivating novel of family, renewal, and discovering the wonder of the world.

Absorbing, emotional, and bursting with magical realism, Hour of the Bees is a book that challenges readers’ ideas about what they know and what they think they know. Carol is a relatable, imperfect protagonist, struggling to deal with the changes in her family and her relationships and her own sense of who she is. Her resistance to the impossible ideas her grandfather states with such conviction is believable, as is her slow change of heart when unexplainable events support his tales of a life-giving tree in the desert. The details of the story may shimmer between literal and figurative like waves of heat in the desert, but the reader, like Carol, comes to see that it doesn’t matter if her grandfather’s stories are real or not – only that they are true.

HOUR OF THE BEES is out now.

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Read This!: PHANTOM LIMBS by Paula Garner

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Phantom LimbsPhantom Limbs by Paula Garner

Summary: Otis and Meg were inseparable until her family abruptly moved away after the terrible accident that left Otis’s little brother dead and both of their families changed forever. Since then, it’s been three years of radio silence, during which time Otis has become the unlikely protégé of eighteen-year-old Dara—part drill sergeant, part friend—who’s hell-bent on transforming Otis into the Olympic swimmer she can no longer be. But when Otis learns that Meg is coming back to town, he must face some difficult truths about the girl he’s never forgotten and the brother he’s never stopped grieving. As it becomes achingly clear that he and Meg are not the same people they were, Otis must decide what to hold on to and what to leave behind. Quietly affecting, this compulsively readable debut novel captures all the confusion, heartbreak, and fragile hope of three teens struggling to accept profound absences in their lives.

How do you bear the unbearable? That’s the question that plagues the characters in this sensitive, searing novel, as they all grapple with huge losses. Otis, the narrator, lost his little brother in a tragic accident, only to lose Meg, his best friend and first love, not long after. Only when Meg returns four years later does he begin to see how much Meg had suffered too, and how blind his own grief made him to hers. Fortunately, Otis has his smart-mouthed and prickly swimming mentor/best friend Dara, herself suffering literal phantom pains from the loss of her arm, to keep him grounded. Part sweet romance, part coming of age story, this is an immersive tale of redemption and emotional survival.

PHANTOM LIMBS is out now.

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