Publishers Weekly An African-American boy works up the courage to leap from the high dive in Cornwall's warm and genuine debut. "I'm a great jumper... so I'm not scared at all!" announces Jabari as he arrives at an outdoor city pool with his father and sister. "Looks easy," he adds as he watches kids jump from the towering board, but "when his dad squeezed his hand, Jabari squeezed back." With understated humor an...More

School Library Journal Gr 4-8-Curious tidbits of personal information and national history combine with humorously drawn caricatures to give this tongue-in-cheek picture book a quirky appeal. "There are good things about being President and there are bad things about being President." So begins a walk through a brief history of facts, successes, oddities, and mishaps. For example, most readers won't know that William Howard Taft weighed over...More

Book list Nelson and Christie know the proper way to open a western with a showdown. Young readers first see outlaw Jim Webb bursting through a glass window; then lawman Bass Reeves' eye sighting down the barrel of his Winchester rifle. After that, kids will have no trouble loping into this picture-book biography. Born a slave, Reeves became one of the most feared and respected Deputy U.S. Marshals to tame the West. Nelson's anecdotal account give...More

School Library Journal Adult/High School-A blend of near-future science fiction and police procedural, this novel is a successful example of the hybrid genre so popular of late. In a contemporary time period, two fantastical cities somewhere between Europe and Asia exist, not adjacent to one another, but by literally occupying the same area. Forbidden to acknowledge the existence of one another-a discipline imposed by the shadowy and terrifying enti...More

Library Journal Walter's newest book (after The Financial Lives of the Poets) will have readers checking out Richard Burton movies and Cinque Terre guidebooks after marveling at his imagination and spot-on characters. It's 1962, and Dee Moray, an American starlet, has just fled the tumultuous Roman set of Cleopatra to hole up in a dilapidated hotel in an obscure Italian seaside village. Pasquale Tursi, the young proprietor of the Hotel Adequ...More

Library Journal A lifelong love of Antarctica puts a sheltered 14-year-old in grave danger in this 2008 Printz Award winner. Symone's hearing disability and disinterest in boys alienate her from her peer group. Her only friend is Capt. Laurence "Titus" Oates, a long-dead victim of Robert Falcon Scott's 1912 expedition to the South Pole. She will need his expertise when her Uncle Victor invites her along on his own polar exploration...More

Book list *Starred Review* Biss calls our attention to things so intrinsic to our lives they have become invisible, such as telephone poles and our assumptions about race. Family was the focus of her first book, The Balloonists (2002). In her second, a collection of fishhook essays, she grabs readers with compelling personal disclosures, then heads into the rapids of racial identity. Whether she is writing about white and black dolls, her whiteness within...More