Reviews RSS

Books for Children and Young Adults Bara Seal & Emily too by Tom Beal. Terra Alta, West Virginia: Headline Kids, 2018. 40 pages illustrated by Elea Paybins. Oversized hardback in dust jacket, $19.95. In this children’s picture book, suitable to read to kids or for early readers, young Emily and her pet seal – yes, pet seal – leave the house in search of some yummy fish on a rainy day without asking anyone’s permission. That’s a good start, but their adventurousness is just beginning and will take them, literally, all over the world! “Along the way, author Thomas Beal...

FICTION Shelved Under Murder by Victoria Gilbert. New York: Crooked Lane Books, 2018. 327 pages. Hardback in dust jacket, $26.99. What does a woman who has been obsessed with reading since she was a little girl – like Victoria Gilbert - do when she grows up?  She becomes a librarian and then an author, of course! This, Gilbert’s second Blue Ridge Library Mystery, begins with preparations for the annual small-town Heritage Festival designed to lure Virginia’s visiting fall leaf-peepers. The plot thickens when librarian Amy Webber and her assistant discover the dead body of a local artist and then heats...

BOOKS FOR CHILDREN AND YOUTH Library on Wheels: Mary Lemist Titcomb and America’s First Bookmobile by Sharlee Glenn.  New York: Abrams Books for Young Readers, 2018. 52 pages, replete with photos, Notes, and a Select Bibliography.  An oversized hardback in dust jacket, $18.99. Sure, this is a kid’s book, but I enjoyed it and learned a lot from it, despite my more than seven decades of living! The illustrations make it suitable for preschoolers and fascinating for adults, and the text is written so that it can be read by bright upper-elementary students but is not too basic for older...

FICTION: The Atomic City Girls by Janet Beard. New York, New York: William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2018. 353 pages with several authentic photos plus 18 more pages of “Insights, Interviews and More.” Trade paperback, $15.99. This novel’s Atomic City girls are young women who got jobs during World War II in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, without knowing that the town of 75,000 was built from scratch by the Army Corps of Engineers in relatively isolated East Tennessee valleys served by unlimited Tennessee Valley Authority electricity in order to develop an atomic bomb before Hitler did. “The Atomic City Girls explores love, war and...

FICTION Bearskin by James A. McLaughlin. New York: Ecco/HarperCollins, 2018. 343 pages. Hardback in dust jacket, $26.99. The protagonist of this novel, Rice Moore, is working as the caretaker of a forest preserve in the mountains of Virginia. When he begins to find bear carcasses on the land, his efforts to stop the poachers are complicated. He needs to keep his identity secret because before he took this job he aroused the murderous ire of some drug cartel operatives.  And he needs to decide how to relate to the woman who had this job before him, a scientist who has...