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Deborah Hopkinson

Children's & YAMiddle Grade

Fallout

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

Bestselling author Steve Sheinkin is best known for his 2012 book, Bomb: The Race to Build—and Steal—the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon, which was a National Book Award finalist, a Newbery Honor book and winner of the Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Medal. Fallout: Spies, Superbombs, and the Ultimate Cold War Showdown is another engrossing work of nonfiction that reads like a page-turning spy thriller as it takes up the issue of nuclear weapons and international politics in a wide-ranging, information-packed account of the Cold War, including the development of the hydrogen bomb and the tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States that nearly erupted into war during the Cuban missile crisis.

Sheinkin clearly knows this terrain like the back of his hand, and his narrative jumps nimbly from Soviet spy Rudolf Abel’s secretive life in New York City (which will remind adult readers of the popular FX show “The Americans”), to the rise of Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev after the death of Josef Stalin, to the scientists developing the hydrogen bomb, and finally to President John F. Kennedy as he faced a terrifying standoff in October 1962. The Cuban missile crisis, Sheinkin observes, “was a bit like a chess match between grandmasters.” As he depicts the conflict between two world powers, even readers familiar with the details of the crisis and its resolution will find themselves on the edge of their seats.

Although Fallout’s primary narrative ends there, Sheinkin follows up on the players in an epilogue, where he also includes a personal touch. He reflects on how, as a teen, he fully expected that he would experience nuclear war before he graduated from high school. 

In short chapters written in his signature energetic style, Sheinkin provides vivid details that keep interest high, such as 13 year-old paperboy Jimmy Bozart’s discovery of a nickel with a secret code hidden inside or the intricate tradecraft practiced by two Soviet agents as they jump out of subway cars at the last minute to lose a tail while en route to a secret meeting at the Bronx Zoo. (Who would have thought the Bronx Zoo was a rendezvous point for spies?) Even minor characters on this international chess board stand out. Sheinkin expertly balances action, historical context and the events of his narrative. Meticulously researched, Fallout includes copious source notes and an extensive bibliography. 

Fallout is a compelling read that provides a riveting picture of the events of the Cold War. It’s the work of a nonfiction master at his best.

Fallout is a compelling read that provides a riveting picture of the events of the Cold War. It’s the work of a nonfiction master at his best.

NonfictionNatureEnvironment

Believers

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

Poet, essayist and cultural commentator Lisa Wells takes on the complexities of our relationship to the climate crisis in Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World, a thought-provoking and heady mix of memoir, journalism and philosophy. Wells isn’t writing as a scientist or futurist here but as a former teenage idealist—someone who, as she puts it, “drifted into adulthood” after dropping out of high school and spending months in a wilderness survival program to gain the knowledge and skills needed to “form egalitarian villages on the post-apocalyptic frontier.”

Wells grew up in the Pacific Northwest in the 1990s and threads her personal journey throughout the book. “When we were kids, my friends and I went looking for a unified and stable theory of how to live—propping up idols and knocking them off their pedestals,” she writes. Eventually Wells realizes, “There is no solution to the problems we face, but there are solutions.”

Exploring those solutions drives the narrative of Believers. Wells seeks out a variety of people whose radical responses to the climate crisis challenge and defy the norm. The characters she profiles are varied and fascinating, and their stories may resonate with older readers who remember their own idealism during the 1960s counterculture movement.

One particularly strong presence in the book is the late Finisia Medrano, whom Wells met while Medrano was leading a group of ecological activists in the dry desert landscape of eastern Oregon. Wells dubs her “an itinerant outlaw,” dedicated to rewilding the American desert with foragable food so people can survive the eventual collapse of society.

Wells also explores the growing severity of wildfires in the West. One section details the work of Indigenous Americans such as Ron Goode, the Tribal Chairman of the North Fork Mono in California, to revitalize the landscape by reintroducing traditional practices like controlled burns and to shift our cultural understanding of the West’s fire-adapted landscapes.

While Wells is adept at communicating her own coming-of-age story and life journey, Believers is most compelling when the author allows the fascinating people she meets to speak for themselves, providing a rich mosaic of perspectives on life in the 21st century. Believers is a reckoning with climate change and a testimony about how to live on our threatened planet that will engage thoughtful citizens everywhere.

Poet and cultural commentator Lisa Wells profiles a variety of people whose radical responses to the climate crisis defy the norm.
NonfictionMemoirAnimals

London’s Number One Dog-Walking Agency

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

“It was pigeons that started it all, not dogs.” So begins Kate MacDougall’s charming coming-of-age memoir, London’s Number One Dog-Walking Agency. After knocking the heads off some ugly porcelain pigeons at her desk in the antiques department of an auction house, she decided to change careers—and, it must be said, her life. She’d recently had a conversation with a dog walker, so she chose that as her next job. Her mother was blunt: “This is a GHASTLY mistake.”

Still, MacDougall plunged in. Her first client was an impossibly energetic Jack Russell named Frank (a girl) who loved her special ball more than anything. It started fabulously but didn’t end well—a Rottweiler ate Frank’s ball—and with that first mishap, the young entrepreneur began to grasp that while dog walking sounded simple enough, there were challenges galore when it came to getting clients, keeping them happy and making enough money to live on.

As MacDougall figured out her new career, she realized that humans were often harder to handle, especially where their beloved “dog children” were concerned. One owner sent a stern email with the subject line “Mud.” It read, “Winston is NOT allowed in mud—as you know. I presume this was an awful accident?” Needless to say, the blissfully mud-rolling Winston had not been consulted about this rule.

Each chapter of this lively memoir features a dog (or two), some humans, adventures, laughter, tears and a running tally of how many dogs MacDougall has walked (beginning with one in 2006 and ending with 100 in 2014). There were some setbacks, including the 2008 recession. But there was love and growth, too, as she and her boyfriend married and acquired their own dog, Mabel.

If MacDougall is as skilled with dogs as she is with a pen, it’s no wonder her agency became number one. London’s Number One Dog-Walking Agency bounds along with the energy of a rambunctious pup and exudes the wisdom of a beloved canine with an old soul (you know the type). MacDougall’s writing sparkles with humor, joy and wit. And for dog lovers, of course, the best part is: It’s all about dogs.

If Kate MacDougall is as skilled with dogs as she is with a pen, it’s no wonder her dog-walking agency became number one.
Children's & YAPicture Book

Dakota Crumb: Tiny Treasure Hunter

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

A museum at night is the setting of this inventive picture book starring the plucky and determined Dakota Crumb, a mouse on a mission. As the story opens, the big-city museum has closed; only guards are visible as Dakota creeps out, carrying a sack and her trusty treasure map. She is seeking a “famous priceless treasure.” It’s hidden somewhere, and naturally X marks the spot. Will the intrepid mouse be able to find it?

Young readers will enjoy joining this small scavenger as she slips past knights in armor mounted on huge steeds and sweeps minute objects such as a postage stamp and an action-figure toy into her sack, staying just out of the reach of a cleaner’s broom. Her quest brings her to the land of Egypt, where an enormous cat statue stands watch. Could the ancient temple hold the ultimate prize?

Dakota Crumb: Tiny Treasure Hunter is successful on several levels: as an introduction to museums, as an adventure story and as a seek-and-find book. The treasures Dakota collects throughout the book provide a fun opportunity for kids to explore what can constitute a museum collection. 

Illustrator Kelly Murphy’s clear, colorful pen and ink images entice readers to look closely at paintings on the museum’s walls and tiny details in the exhibits. Her linework is particularly effective and will make it easy for young children to identify the many objects included in each spread. Activities at the end of the book add to the clever design. Preschoolers and early elementary-age readers will especially enjoy going back through the pages to find the items on Dakota’s list of treasures, which Murphy has sprinkled throughout the pages. 

Dakota Crumb is a delight that readers will return to again and again. In that way, it’s a bit like a favorite, fabulous museum. 

A museum at night is the setting of this inventive picture book starring the plucky and determined Dakota Crumb, a mouse on a mission.

Children's & YAPicture Book

The Cot in the Living Room

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

Author Hilda Eunice Burgos’ heartfelt first picture book is the story of a Dominican American girl who lives in Washington Heights, a New York City neighborhood. The girl’s parents keep a cot in their living room where children whose parents work late or overnight shifts can sleep.

Like Burgos herself as a child, the narrator must share a bedroom—and her big sister snores!—so she’s jealous of her family’s overnight guests and the attention they receive. “It would be so much fun to have the whole living room to myself!” she declares, not fully grasping that for children like Lisa, whose grandmother cleans offices, or Edgardo, whose mother plays music gigs that last until the wee hours of the morning, it’s not that simple.

Being separated from their families and sleeping on the unfamiliar cot affects each overnight guest differently. Raquel asks to keep the light on, while Edgardo discovers that the narrator’s mother doesn’t know his favorite lullaby. The narrator nonetheless maintains that the situation is unfair until one night when the cot isn’t occupied and she sleeps on it herself. Suddenly, she realizes how scary it is to try to fall asleep in a strange, dark room, and her newfound empathy helps her to come up with a creative way to comfort Raquel the next time she comes to stay.

Gaby D’Alessandro’s warm illustrations depict the family’s home as a safe and welcoming place. City buildings appear through the windows and on blocks of the colorful quilt that’s depicted on the book’s bright, decorative endpapers. Both Burgos and D’Alessandro are Dominican American, and D’Alessandro incorporates subtle cultural details, such as floral paintings and a Carnival mask displayed on the family’s living room walls.

Burgos, author of the middle grade novel Ana Maria Reyes Does Not Live in a Castle (2018), writes in spare, evocative prose that makes the narrator’s journey of personal growth feel natural and genuine. Text and art work in harmony to create a portrait of a close-knit community where neighbors help one another through small but meaningful acts and where hard work is a way of life. The Cot in the Living Room beautifully captures the gifts we receive when we open our hearts to others.

Author Hilda Eunice Burgos’ heartfelt first picture book is the story of a Dominican American girl who lives in Washington Heights, a New York City neighborhood. The girl’s parents keep a cot in their living room where children whose parents work late or overnight shifts can sleep.

Children's & YAPicture Book

Many Shapes of Clay

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

Author-illustrator Kenesha Sneed is a Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist who mines her own artistic background in her evocative first picture book, Many Shapes of Clay: A Story of Healing.

Eisha lives with her mother, a clay artist whose studio is in the basement of their apartment, and their cat, who loves long naps. When Eisha wonders why her mother leaves her molded clay shapes on the shelves instead of playing with them, her mother explains that the shapes are fragile, then gives Eisha a piece of clay to experiment with.

As Eisha moves the clay in her hands, it evokes ideas and memories, including a day last summer when she picked lemons with her father. Eisha molds her clay into the shape of a lemon and paints it yellow. She brings it outside to the apartment stoop when she and Mama take a break from their hard work. “Sweat drips down from the top of her head to the tip of her chin. Mama misses Papa too,” Sneed writes, offering the book’s first indication that Mama and Eisha have suffered a terrible loss.

Outside, Eisha notices that when she taps on the clay lemon, it makes a musical sound, but she taps a little too hard and it breaks, shattering into many pieces. “Each piece reflects the sadness she feels,” Sneed writes. Eisha’s mother acknowledges her daughter’s grief and helps her to create something new from the broken pieces of clay that will help carry her memories and love for her father with her into each new day.

With its subtle and perceptive depiction of grief, Many Shapes of Clay stands out among children’s books that deal with this topic. The story unfolds gently as Sneed slowly reveals the intensity of Eisha and Mama’s loss. Eisha’s contemplation of her inability to put her broken pieces of clay back together is particularly moving: “What Eisha feels is hard to describe—like something that is too heavy to lift. Like something that might last forever.” Sneed’s spare, lyrical prose and earth-tone illustrations come together beautifully to depict the uneven, uncertain process of healing.

Many Shapes of Clay heralds the arrival of a talented new picture book creator.

Author-illustrator Kenesha Sneed is a Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist who mines her own artistic background in her evocative first picture book, Many Shapes of Clay: A Story of Healing.

NonfictionWomen's HistoryHistory

The Secret History of Home Economics

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

Whatever stereotypes we associate with the profession of home economics, Danielle Dreilinger is here to assure us that everything we think we know is wrong. As she explicates in her thoroughly entertaining book, The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live, home economics in the United States is much more complex than we might have imagined.

Since the time of Catharine Beecher, who published A Treatise on Domestic Economy in 1841, home economists have not simply reacted to societal changes and trends but have helped shape them. For starters, we have home economists to thank for things like food groups, the designation of a federal poverty level and the consumer protection movement. Home economics also opened doors for some women, including women of color, to enter careers in science that may have otherwise been closed to them.

As a journalist, Dreilinger knows the power of storytelling and makes the women from this history come to life. For example, she mines oral histories to shed light on the challenges Dr. Flemmie Kittrell faced as an African American nutritionist visiting South Africa in 1967. Dreilinger also provides overall historical context, delineating the marginalization of Black women in the home economics field.

As for the role of home economics in the 21st century, Dreilinger says the most common response she received when telling others about writing this book was, “We should bring that back.” Dreilinger closes with several suggestions for doing just that, including diversifying the profession to include more people of color and teaching home economics as an interdisciplinary field that explores the connection between our homes and the world, “with an eye to addressing the root causes of problems such as hunger, homelessness, isolation, and environmental devastation.”

Dreilinger, who completed her book during the COVID-19 pandemic, correctly notes that people have been thinking about the meaning of home and how homes work more than ever before. As we look toward the future, it’s always good to consider where we’ve been, and The Secret History of Home Economics helps us do that.

Whatever stereotypes we associate with home economics, Danielle Dreilinger is here to assure us that everything we think we know is wrong.
Nonfiction

North by Shakespeare

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

In his entertaining new work, North by Shakespeare: A Rogue Scholar’s Quest for the Truth Behind the Bard’s Work, bestselling author and investigative journalist Michael Blanding digs deep into the world of Shakespearean scholarship. He chronicles the tireless research of Dennis McCarthy, an outsider in academia, about links between Shakespeare’s plays and the writings of Sir Thomas North, a member of Queen Elizabeth’s court.

Blanding first met McCarthy in October of 2015, at a dinner reception after a lecture. Readers’ first reaction to McCarthy’s beliefs may be similar to Blanding’s: dismay at the prospect of yet another conspiracy theory about the true author behind Shakespeare’s work.

Yet there are certainly many mysteries about Shakespeare’s life that have given rise to speculation—for example, “how a glover’s son from Stratford could have had the intimate knowledge of Italy” apparent in his plays. McCarthy’s theory seeks to explain such discrepancies. He doesn’t believe the plays’ authorship belongs to the aristocratic North, however. Rather, he thinks Shakespeare borrowed specific phrasings, plot lines and scenes from North’s published and unpublished writings.

Blanding’s energetic narrative traces McCarthy’s search for more of North’s writings and his use of plagiarism software to provide evidence for their influence on Shakespeare. He also delves into Tudor history, illuminating North’s life as a traveler and aristocrat. Along the way, Blanding considers “what it takes to change established ways of thinking” within academic communities.

It’s unclear if Blanding’s highly enjoyable foray into the field will have an impact on Shakespearean scholars, but at the very least, North by Shakespeare will provide readers with the tools to enter the fray themselves. The book includes McCarthy’s estimated timeline of North’s plays next to a timeline of Shakespeare’s work, which readers can use along with McCarthy’s other techniques to examine passages from both North and Shakespeare themselves. It’s almost as much fun as sitting in a theater.

Michael Blanding’s deep dive into the world of Shakespearean scholarship is almost as much fun as sitting in a theater.
NonfictionWomen's HistoryBiography

You Don’t Belong Here

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

Award-winning journalist Elizabeth Becker turns her insightful gaze on three women who covered the Vietnam War in You Don’t Belong Here. Becker, who has firsthand experience of Southeast Asia and the challenges facing women in the field of journalism, begins her book with a personal anecdote. In 1973, while she was on her way to Cambodia to become a war correspondent at the age of 25, Becker met Kate Webb, a New Zealand-born Australian journalist who had survived capture by the North Vietnamese. Webb posed one question to the young reporter: Why had she crossed the ocean to cover a war?

Becker’s examination of three journalists’ careers—Webb, Frances FitzGerald from America and Catherine Leroy of France—powers this absorbing narrative about the challenges of covering the Vietnam War. As Becker explores the significance of these women’s legacies, she notes that “it took us decades to understand what we had accomplished as women on the front line of war.”

A few women (such as World War II reporter Martha Gellhorn, who stowed away on a hospital ship on D-Day) had done their best to report on wars in the past, but the United States military didn’t make it easy for women seeking to be war correspondents. Up until the war in Vietnam, women were forbidden on the battlefield. Even after that changed, news organizations still sent male journalists as a matter of course, with the result that most of the women covering the Vietnam War had to pay their own way and fight to stay.

Many of these barriers were eventually broken, thanks in part to the extraordinary women Becker profiles so adroitly here, combining their personal histories with the major events of the conflict. Leroy, a French photojournalist who died in 2006, was an experienced parachutist who used her skills to cover a parachute jump into combat and whose searing images appeared in Life magazine. Webb was one of the few journalists on the Navy command ship when the order to evacuate came, and she was able to file a report on April 30, 1975, the very day the war ended. FitzGerald later wrote a book about her experience on the ground, Fire in the Lake, which looked at the history of Vietnam and its people and won both the Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award.

As to the question Webb posed to the author, perhaps it was best answered by Leroy, who once said, “I wanted to be there, to see it happen.” You Don’t Belong Here is a significant contribution to the history of both the Vietnam War and women in journalism.

Award-winning journalist Elizabeth Becker turns her insightful gaze on three women who covered the Vietnam War in You Don’t Belong Here.
Children's & YAPicture Book

I Dream of Popo

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

A young girl stays in touch with her beloved grandmother, Popo, when her family moves to the United States from Taiwan in this exuberant picture book. Inspired by author Livia Blackburne’s personal experience of emigrating from Taiwan when she was 5 years old, the book also features the work of Taiwanese American illustrator Julia Kuo.

In plainspoken yet evocative first-person narration, the girl recalls her favorite memories of her grandmother, beginning from her babyhood: “I dream with Popo as she walks me in her arms.” Readers see the growing girl and Popo walking in the park, celebrating the new year with special foods and looking at a globe to find San Diego, where the girl moves with her parents. Even though they are apart, Popo remains part of the girl’s life as the two connect online, which is cleverly shown in a fun double-page spread of each person's screen, complete with the small reverse-camera image in the upper right-hand corner.

Kuo’s colors are bright and vibrant, while subtle details effectively capture the differences of daily life in the U.S. and Taiwan. Readers see Chinese characters on a wall calendar and the skyline of Taipei in the backdrop of the park. During their online video call, the protagonist eats a bowl of cereal for breakfast while Popo uses chopsticks to eat her dinner of noodles. In her new home, the young girl gradually adjusts and makes new friends, “kids with hair of every color and skin of every shade.”

Another clever spread shows two sheets of drawings the girl makes at school; she illustrates pictures of the English words she is learning alongside the Chinese characters. As she becomes more familiar with English, she begins to lose some of her first language, and its words become “hard to catch, like fish in a deep well.” But when they return to Taiwan for a visit, her mom reassures her that she can still hug Popo “as tight as before.”

I Dream of Popo balances the bittersweet experience of being separated from family with an affirmation of the enduring bond between grandmother and granddaughter. Its backmatter, which includes reflections and family photos from both the illustrator and author, adds context and depth to its depiction of the contemporary immigrant experience. This is a lyrical and heartfelt tribute to the power of love across geography and generations.

A young girl stays in touch with her beloved grandmother, Popo, when her family moves to the United States from Taiwan in this exuberant picture book.

NonfictionHistoryAmerican History

The Eagles of Heart Mountain

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

In his engrossing and accomplished debut work of nonfiction, The Eagles of Heart Mountain: A True Story of Football, Incarceration, and Resistance in World War II America, Bradford Pearson shines light on a little-known chapter of World War II resistance on the homefront. He sets the stage by confronting the inaccurate vocabulary used to describe the forcible relocation of 120,000 people of Japanese descent in the 1940s, rejecting the commonly used “internment” in favor of the more accurate term “incarceration.”

Pearson’s story revolves around the Eagles, the high school football team of a Japanese incarceration camp located near Heart Mountain, outside of Cody, Wyoming. In the fall of 1943, in its inaugural season, the football team went undefeated against neighboring high schools. Based on meticulous archival research and interviews with surviving family members, Pearson’s narrative provides the political context for the incarceration of Japanese civilians while bringing readers into the lives of several of the teens who came of age in the camp, including Ted Fujioka, George “Horse” Yoshinaga and his best friend, Tamotsu “Babe” Nomura.

Pearson’s tale goes beyond a simple feel-good sports story to encompass the complex political and racial justice issues of the time. In early 1944, for example, after the War Department reinstated the draft for second-generation Japanese men, 63 men imprisoned at Heart Mountain were put on federal trial and found guilty for their decision to resist the draft unless their rights as American citizens were restored.

Pearson weaves this legal fight with the experiences and fates of the young Eagles both during and after World War II. Some went to war, such as Fujioka, who was killed fighting in France. Yoshinaga became a journalist and sports promoter. Nomura returned to California, where he had once been the starting halfback on his high school football team. In December of 1945, he was touted for his impressive reputation on the Los Angeles City College football team as the “nation’s top Japanese-American gridster”—a headline unthinkable only two years before.

The Eagles of Heart Mountain is an inspiring exploration of resistance and a timely examination of how the policy of Japanese incarceration impacted the lives of young people and their families.

The Eagles of Heart Mountain is an inspiring exploration of resistance and a timely examination of how the policy of Japanese incarceration impacted the lives of young people and their families.

NonfictionHistoryEuropean History

Paper Bullets

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

Although it’s been 75 years since the end of World War II, accounts that reveal the resilience of ordinary individuals in the face of the Nazi regime continue to emerge into the historical record. In Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis, Jeffrey H. Jackson, a Rhodes College professor specializing in European history, unearths the fascinating story of two women, Lucy Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe, whose “resistance activity grew organically out of life-long patterns of fighting against the social norms of their day.”

After 20 years of immersion in the art scene of Paris, Lucy, a photographer and writer who published under the name Claude Cahun, and Suzanne, an illustrator whose professional pseudonym was Marcel Moore, found themselves under German occupation on Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands. The two women had retreated there in 1937 out of concern for Lucy’s chronic health problems, posing as sisters to hide their true relationship.

Jackson links the women’s involvement in resistance work to their personal experiences as artists and lesbians whose lives constantly put them at odds with expectations placed on them as the daughters of wealthy families in France. These expectations included gender identity and expression, which they explored in both their personal lives and art as a fluid spectrum between masculinity, androgyny and femininity. Jackson’s previous works include Making Jazz French: Music and Modern Life in Interwar Paris, and he is adept at bringing the vibrancy of 1920s and 1930s Paris to life, including the cafes, nightclubs and personalities that were part of the thriving gay and lesbian community to which Lucy and Suzanne belonged.

This carefully researched volume also includes fascinating photographs, artwork and excerpts from the women’s letters and articles. The author’s attention to detail and prodigious research skills are also on display as he recounts the saga of the German occupation of Jersey and the women’s growing determination to do something to resist.

They began small enough, ripping down German posters and announcements and making graffiti. They also created their own anti-Nazi artwork and slipped subversive messages (the eponymous “paper bullets”) onto the windshields of police cars or into the pages of German-language magazines on local newsstands. Their efforts at fomenting doubt among the occupying forces escalated, eventually leading to their arrest, imprisonment in solitary confinement and a dramatic trial in which they were sentenced to death in November of 1944. Their sentence was later commuted, but they remained confined until the war ended.

The final section of Paper Bullets details these women's postwar lives. Lucy died in 1954, Suzanne in 1972. In an epilogue entitled “Why Resist?” Jackson addresses some of the issues that led to the women’s commitment to the cause of freedom. Their story, he notes, “invites us to look at a history of the war from the bottom up, to think about the complexities of ground-level responses to conquest.” Impeccably researched and meticulously sourced, Paper Bullets is a welcome and timely portrait of courage and creativity.

Although it’s been 75 years since the end of World War II, accounts that reveal the resilience of ordinary individuals in the face of the Nazi regime continue to emerge into the historical record. In Paper Bullets: Two Artists Who Risked Their Lives to Defy the Nazis, Jeffrey H. Jackson, a Rhodes College professor specializing […]
Children's & YAMiddle Grade

The Way Past Winter

Review by Deborah Hopkinson

The Way Past Winter quickly draws young readers into the magical world of a mysterious, frozen north, where Mila lives with her parents and her siblings, Sanna and Oskar. Their mother, who loves to spin tales of an ancient forest spirit called the Bear, dies giving birth to a baby daughter, Pípa. Five years later, devastated by grief, the children’s father walks into the snowy wilderness and isn't seen again.

Then Oskar disappears after a group of strangers visits their hut, but Mila is convinced he has not gone willingly. Mila and her sisters set out in their dog-drawn birch sleigh to track him, only to discover that other boys in the nearby town, including Sanna’s friend Geir, are missing, too. Bretta, the town’s jarl (a kind of ruler), believes the boys have been lured away by adventure and the promise of money. Most of the townsfolk agree—except for Rune, a mage, herbalist and storyteller. Rune tells Mila that Oskar and the others have been taken by the Bear, who becomes angry when trees are cut down. With no time to waste, Rune, Mila and Pípa set off on a dangerous rescue mission. To save her brother, Mila will have to muster all her courage to confront the Bear—and come to a new understanding of what it means to call the forest her home in order to guard and protect it for the future.

Author Kiran Millwood Hargrave paints her wintery world with poetic, lyrical prose. Her story’s complex magical elements never detract from the page-turning adventure and underlying themes of sibling relationships, responsibility and love of the natural world. The Way Past Winter is a winning and memorable combination of classical fantasy and a call for environmental activism.

The Way Past Winter quickly draws young readers into the magical world of a mysterious, frozen north, where Mila lives with her parents and her siblings, Sanna and Oskar.

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