Mark Flowers
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A New Take on Sleeping Beauty (No, Not *That* One)
You all know how much I love fairy tales. Indeed, it almost physically hurt me to assign Elizabeth Blackwell’s While Beauty Slept to another reviewer, but I just didn’t have time in my reading schedule to get to it. Now that I’ve read our review, I’m going to make time. Blackwell’s entry-point is a character [...]
The Ongoing Saga of The Southern Reach
Today we look at Authority, the second book in Jeff VanderMeer’s extraordinary Southern Reach trilogy. Since I raved about Annihilation in February, it has only grown in my estimation, and Authority lives up to the high standard set by the first novel, while wisely strikes out in an utterly different direction. As I mentioned in my [...]
National Poetry Month – A Month Late
I usually try to get up at least a post or two about poetry during April, which is National Poetry Month. But somehow it completely slipped my mind this year. So, here we have, a month late (or four months late, considering they were both published in January), reviews of two wonderful new poetry collections [...]
Two Books That Probe the Darkness Beneath
Today we look at two books that take very different looks at the dark secrets we keep. In Bittersweet, Miranda Beverly-Whittemore’s plays up the skeletons in the closets of the wealthy Winslow family for fun and entertainment: as a young college student begins to uncover the secrets of her new roommate’s family, the tone turns [...]
More News on The Griots of Oakland
Last week, I posted our review of The Griots of Oakland, edited by Angela Zusman, lamenting that the book hasn’t gotten more attention, and hey, what do you know, it’s gotten some more attention! It has now been nominated for YALSA’s Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults list.* I also wanted to point out that the [...]
Books for Lovers of Indiana Jones
Today we have two books that prompted our reviewer to invoke the name of Indiana Jones–and for good reason. Anne Fortier’s The Lost Sisterhood and James Rollins and Rebecca Cantrell’s Innocent Blood are both rollicking adventure stories, starring University professors, and laden with religious and mythological overtones–precisely the elements that make Steven Spielberg’s archaeologist-adventurer so [...]
An Exciting New Way to Understand Einstein
"Jeffrey Bennett’s What is Relativity? is certainly one of the best nonfiction books I’ve read this year: a fast-paced, highly readable account of one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time," writes Mark Flowers on the blog Adult Books 4 Teens.
An Oral History of African American Youth
The Griots of Oakland has been out in bookstores for almost six months now, but as far as I can tell, today’s review will represent its first appearance in a library review journal. Which is a coup for us, but a shame for the other journals, and also strangely fitting the subject matter: the invisibility [...]
The Problem with Stories about Amnesia (Solved by Robert Glancy and Jason Bourne)
Anyone who cares about narrative, movies, or both should be reading Matt Bird’s Cockeyed Caravan blog. He spends most of his time there deconstructing the narrative structure of Hollywood movies and explaining how and why movies do (and don’t) work. But while he only discusses movies (and usually big-budget Hollywood ones at that), his insights [...]
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