Kirkus Take a peek at art from a variety of different literal and metaphorical angles.Veritably daring readers to look at art in a fresh new way, this innovatively designed board book features a variety of foldouts, flaps, and die cuts. From its disorienting upside-down first page, the authors use the medium to its best advantage. Never gimmicky, the format enhances readers' understanding of the art. A Lichtenstein pop-art page superbly uses a die cut...More

School Library Journal K-Gr 3—The power of one person's kindness and commitment to others is a potent message. Mohammad Alaa Aljaleel's life is "a story about cats and war and people. But most of all, it is a story about love." In this book based on an actual person and real events, Latham tells the tale of an ambulance driver who chose to stay in his hometown of Aleppo, Syria, even after war broke out. He begins to come across hun...More

Book list Gr. 7^-10. Gerald Nickelby, a minor character in Tears of a Tiger (1994), emerges full-fledged and courageous in this companion story. His stable life with a firm but loving aunt (who is caring for him while his mother serves a prison sentence for child neglect) is shattered when his mother returns to claim him on his ninth birthday. With her is a young daughter, Angel, to whom Gerald is drawn, and her husband, Jordan, whom Gerald instinctively ...More

Library Journal In a world plagued by cataclysmic tectonic activity, the only way to survive is to constantly prepare for the next fifth season. But no one is ready for the scope of the disaster that strikes when the capital city of a continent-wide empire is subsumed in a massive rift that spreads hundreds of miles. Using alternating points of view, Jemisen explores the lives of several characters in the years leading up to the cataclysmic disaster. -VER...More

Book list *Starred Review* Aslan brings a fine popular style, shorn of all jargon, to bear on the presentation of Jesus of Nazareth as only a man. What's more, as he pares the supernatural or divine away from Jesus, he refrains from deriding it. He isn't interested in attacking religion or even the church, much less in comparing Christianity unfavorably to another religion. He would have us admire Jesus as one of the many would-be messiahs who spr...More

Library Journal In the late 1890s, Wilmington, NC, was a successful mixed-race community with a strong African American middle class that actively participated in a government comprising Republicans and Populists. Then white supremacist Democrats used a black newspaper editorial to foment unrest aimed at overthrowing Wilmington's elected officials, eventually dispatching 2,000 armed night riders to terrorize the populace. At least 60 black men were ki...More

Book list *Starred Review* Diplomat and historian Kennan (1904-2005) cooperated with this biography that in its documentary thoroughness and lucidity about his enigmatic, fragile personality must stand as the definitive portrait. Of undoubted brilliance in his adulthood, Kennan throughout his life was acutely sensitive, solitary, often pessimistic, but ultimately philosophical an outlook encapsulated in his Around the Cragged Hill (1993). The youthful sou...More