The Book Search

 It's been lovely having time to read over the last few weeks.  Not working is awesome.  I will, of course, be happy to go back to work, but having time away is pretty terrific too.  And happily, I've been on something of a tear with really great books.  Here are two realistic ones you should totally look for. The first one is called Ahmed Aziz's Epic Year by Nina Hamza.  It's her debut novel and I hope there are more coming, because this one was great!  It's about Ahmed, who's family is moving from Hawaii (where he's lived all his life) to Minnesota (his dad's home town).  The family (mom, dad, little sister Sara, and Ahmed) because his dad has a debilitating (and potentially fatal) liver disease and he can get a hopefully life saving treatment in Minnesota.  It turns out that Ahmed's dad left Minnesota as a young man, partially because his younger brother died of the same liver disease that Ahmed's dad has.  He died as a young man so A...

Yesterday, I looked at one of my favorite websites for finding kids books, The Non-Fiction Detectives. Louise and Cathy work really hard at reviewing great non fiction books for kids and they do an AWESOME job. Click here if you want to check out their blog. So I was looking for some of the books they suggested. Of course, it's never that easy to just go to the bookstore and find the exact 12 books you were looking for (they only had a few of the ones I wanted) and there were several that caught my eye that I didn't even know I should be looking for so here are the best ones I saw today. The first one was "Eye to Eye", by Steve Jenkins. Steve Jenkins is a great author. He wrote another book that I really liked called "What do you do with a tail like this?" "Eye to eye" is a similar kind of book that focuses just on animals eyes. You can find out a lot about different kinds of eyes and how eyes have evolved. The pictures are really beautiful too. ...