Yellow Time by Lauren Stringer

Rating: ★★★★

Genre: Children’s lit, picturebook

Synopsis: Yellow is the color of fall, when the leaves begin to finally drop from the trees.

Review: This artistic book celebrates the beauty of the changing seasons, the beauty of leaves flying through the wind, settling on the ground.  It evokes Matisse’s “Dance”, and in doing so compares the beauty of such a painting to the beauty that emanates from young children excited about playing outside.  This book is just fantastic, fun, and overall perfect for the changing seasons.  Great for grades K-2.

Yasmina and the Potato Eaters by Wauter Mannaert

Rating: ★★★★★

Genre: Comics

Synopsis: Yasmina and her father live in a small apartment.  Her father works for every euro they make, and Yasmina repays her father’s hard work by creating gourmet meals from ingredients found at community gardens.  But when a potato farmer levels the gardens and creates a new breed of potato that nobody can resist, things begin to go awry…

Review: What a fun and beautiful comic!  Filled to the brim with beautiful illustrations and text serving only to continue the narrative where the illustrations cannot, Yasmina and the Potato Eaters is an incredible comic about community, surviving in poverty, and critiquing capitalist endeavors.

Yasmina is a fun-loving, food-loving cook who creates incredible gourmet meals, and each character we meet along the way holds various opinions and manners of interacting with food.  Is natural best?  Do pesticides work?  What’s best–community-run or capitalist-run?  What can we learn from vegetables?  What can we learn from their production?

I would love to introduce this to my professor–there’s so much to think about in terms of environmental criticism and ecofeminism, and a lot can be gleaned from this text.  Overall, this is fun, gorgeous, and really educational!  I’m excited to see where this tale goes and to see how it expands.

Topographies of Whiteness: Mapping Whiteness in Library and Information Science, edited by Gina Schlesselman-Tarango

Rating: ★★★★★

Genre: Non-fiction, library science

Synopsis: This compilation looks to the past, present, and future of libraries in relation to how they uphold whiteness inside their walls.

Review: This is a powerful book filled with essays on how librarianship is both intentionally and unintentionally racist, how it upholds white supremacy.  Each essay brings up important topics, such as how racism works in the archives, in academic libraries, how workplaces are made inaccessible and intolerant, how both micro- and macro-aggressions appear within the library walls.

I learned so much from this book both in regards to the academic citations as well as through the personal experiences these authors shared.  I’m excited to recommend this book to my colleagues and use the knowledge I gleaned from this moving forward.

This compilation shines a light on a hugely important topic in the field today, and it’s incredibly important that we not only acknowledge it, but continue to put in the effort to deconstruct preconceived notions and to build a better institution.  Overall, I’d say that this is a must read if you’re going into the library profession, or if you’re already working as a librarian.  It’s an important topic, and one that needs to be discussed.

Pete’s a Pizza by William Steig

Rating: ★★★★

Genre: Children’s lit, picturebook

Synopsis: On a rainy day with nothing to do, two parents transform their son into a pizza.

Review: This book truly represents the ideal family: one that is creative, humorous, and well-natured.  The parents in this book clearly care about their son, and the child loves interacting with them.  All of the illustrations, additionally, are just so adorable and fun, and it made me want a pizza child of my own.  Great for grades PreK-2, and absolutely perfect for a rainy day.

The Extraordinary eTab of Julian Newcomber by Michael Seese

Rating: ★★★1/2

Genre: Middle grade lit, sci-fi, ARC

Synopsis: Julian is used to moving from town to town, thanks to his father’s zany inventions.  But when his father invents an eTab, a device not unsimilar to an iPad, things begin to go awry when Julian discovers he can travel through time.  And then a 20 year old version of himself bursts into the room…

Review: This book has a lot of potential and a distinct tone of voice.  When Julian’s 20 year old self bursts into the scene, he has a lot of explaining to do.  Such as what happened in the future?  The past?  And how is time travel even possible, anyway?  Filled with sly puns and quick beats of humor, this is sure to entertain the middle grade child interested in humor, science, wacky problems, and even wackier solutions.

Along the River by Vanina Starkoff, translated by Jane Springer

Rating: ★★★★★

Genre: Children’s lit, picturebook

Synopsis: Who will you meet on the river?

Review: What a beautiful book! Its size, those bright colors, the design–all of it is so well done!  The narrative discusses who can be found on the river, what boats can be found sailing.  Taking place in Brazil, this book also illuminates readers to alternative modes of transportation, social customs, and social norms.  There are many details and recurring motifs in this book, making it perfect for the child who loves detail.  Great for kids K-2, and perfect for kids interested in other cultures!

Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi

Rating: ★★★★★

Genre: Retelling, fiction

Synopsis: Boy Novak has escaped to rural Massachusetts and finds herself entangled with Arturo and his daughter, Snow Whitman.  But when Boy gives birth and discovers that her daughter is black, she’s catapulted into an unexpected life of privileging beauty, and being a stepmother who could do much better.

Review: What an incredible book!  Oyeyemi won my heart over a few years ago, so I was so glad to finally get cracking on this.  Funnily enough, I decided to read this without knowing what it was about literally the day after we finished our Snow White week in my fairy tales class.  At the very least, it gave me much to think about!

In this case, the fairest of them all doesn’t only pertain to beauty, but how whiteness correlates with beauty, how whiteness is perceived as niceness.  This adds a really intriguing layer to the tale of Snow White, one that jars the usual expectations.

But Boy, Snow, and Bird’s perspectives all speak to their experiences about race, life, family, love, and carving a new path for one’s self.  Love is a powerful tool, and it can easily be transformed into a weapon.  Mirrors and beauty mean something different in this tale, and reflections and perceptions are what–or possibly what don’t–matter.

Oyeyemi does such a good job layering this fairy tale over real life and by complicating it even further through means of race, gender, and class.  Overall, a fantastic book that I can’t help but to recommend to literally everybody.

Who Needs Donuts? by Mark Alan Stamaty

Rating: ★★★★★

Genre: Children’s lit, picturebook

Synopsis: Sam loves donuts and goes to the big city to get more.  And when he meets a donut collector, it seems as though his dreams have come true.

Review: This is probably the most bizarre picturebook I’ve ever read, and I’ve read some weird ones, nihilistic ones, and absurd ones.  Sam loves donuts to the point where he goes all by himself to the big city to get even more.  And he does get more–so many in fact, that he doesn’t quite know what to do with himself.  But those donuts come strangely in handy as a woman almost drowns.

Each illustration is incredibly detailed, filled with small jokes, puns, plays on advertising, metafiction, intertextuality, social norms.  It’s a book that I could stare at for hours.  There’s so much going on, and there’s so much to look at.  Ultimately, this is a strangely incredible book that has just enough absurdity to entertain a child, and endless amounts of absurdity for the children’s literature academic.

Uncle Jed’s Barbershop by Margaree King Mitchell, illustrated by James E. Ransome

Rating: ★★★★★

Genre: Children’s lit, picturebook

Synopsis: Uncle Jed has been saving for a barbershop his whole life.  Will he ever get it?

Review: What a sweet book!  Taking place before, during, and after The Great Depression, Uncle Jed’s Barbershop demonstrates the dedication that is needed to achieve one’s dreams, even while facing financial setbacks.  Sometimes the setbacks are for reasons one cares about deeply, and sometimes the setbacks are entirely out of one’s control.  The narrative is one of love and admiration for Uncle Jed, and of absolute celebration of his life and his work.  Even when nobody could afford a haircut, Uncle Jed still provided.  Alongside Mitchell’s narrative are Ransome’s illustrations, which are realistic and beautiful, illuminating the text’s richness.

This is an incredible book, and one worth having on your shelves.

Marcelo in the Real World by Francisco X. Stork

Rating: ★★★★1/2

Genre: YA lit

Synopsis: Marcelo has an Aspergers-like audio impairment that affects him and how he navigates the world.  But in the summer before his senior year at Patterson, a school for kids with disabilities and impairments, his father makes him to go work in the mail room of his law firm.  There, he meets Jasmine and Wendell, who help him–one way or another–navigate the real world.

Review: The first half of this book made me think.  A lot.  How could I assess the validity of how reality is structured in this book when I don’t have any tools to measure how realistic this character’s portrayal of autism is?  Not only that, but his portrayal of autism is so unlike that of how I’ve seen some of my friends be–so then, is that inaccurate?  Or ignorant on my part?  Or perhaps its stereotypical?  But after speaking with a friend about how to gauge this book’s realism in terms of Marcelo’s diagnosis (Aspergers-like, it is said), we came to the conclusion that what Stork does with this book is in fact create an opening for others who have similar cognitive realities, similar neurodivergences to come together and find representation in Marcelo’s character.

There were some other things my class and I discussed about this book as well.  Like Wendell’s character–what an asshole, right?  He’s certainly the antagonist as well as Marcelo’s foil, but what he plans to do to Jasmine didn’t settle well with me.  Must we really have another plotline surrounding a boy saving a girl, and a boy wanting to sexually assault someone?  I’m tired of threats of sexual assault being used as plot devices.  Yes, they’re real things, but it just felt odd for me to read about it.

Not only that, but we discussed Marcelo’s eventual sexual awakening–he begins to understand feelings such as jealousy, romance, sexual attraction.  So does this mean he’s becoming more ‘normal’, more socially acceptable, which is not radical?  Or is Stork giving him, an autistic person, sexuality, which is radical?

There’s a lot of questions that arise from this book, and there’s a lot to be unpacked.  A lot of it made me uncomfortable, but after having conversations with my autistic friends and discussing this text in a class, I feel much better about navigating this novel and understanding it.  And ultimately, I have to say that I really like it!  My initial thoughts on this book were wrong, and I’m glad for it.  This book ended up being enjoyable, ethically interesting, and eye-opening.  It’s definitely worth a read.