I Am a Bird is a great bedtime story. The fact that the character is not mentioned if they are male or female allows it to be an “anyone story.” The illustrations are amazing sweet and simple but wonderfully detailed, too. I would assume by the traditionally stereotypical clothing and hair, that it is a father and son story. Therefore, it would make a nice Father’s Day read-together. However, looking at the cover again, I could easily say this was an older brother or even […]
Backyard Fairies
Backyard Fairies is more of a 4.5 rating as I would have liked “something else” (though I am not sure exactly what that would be. Perhaps I would have liked it to be a tad bit longer. I do enjoy the illustrations as they are unique. They have a realistic quality but in a slight unrealistic way. The contradiction of this does make them slightly magical. Phoebe Wahl has been the girl in this story. I would also go as far to say, that she […]
Petra finds herself?
Petra is a mountain. An island. And many other grand things. However, it keeps getting pointed out to her that she is just a rock. However, because of the things she can imagine (and finally the very unique way a young artist imagines Petra) she can be almost anything that she can dream of. At first, I was not sure I would enjoy this picture book. Very basic, simple, text (in fact I have almost already written more words about it then there are words […]
White Dudes Walking
When I picked up this book as the April selection for my local library book club, I was puzzled. “Why are we reading a book about white dudes walking the Appalachian Trail, written in the 90s?” I still don’t have an answer to that question. I mostly find it entertaining because, as has been common in my experience, my local library book club is entirely populated with women, and white women at that, so we are an interesting audience for Bryson’s exercising in navel gazing […]
The Nature of the Unknown
This book felt a lot like Gaiman’s Ocean at the End of the Lane. Very quietly brooding, the horrors sneak up on your when you’re not looking. There is little dialog and the characters have no names, but that takes nothing away from the simplistic beauty of this story. A female biologist and a group of four other women are sent on an expedition to the strange and uncanny Area X, where their mission is to record data on the un-peopled area and figure out […]
Not just for bird nerds
Just a few days after I finished reading The Genius of Birds I observed four adorable white-crowned sparrows in my yard. Every fall I look forward to their arrival, when their journey from parts north ends in my Southern California backyard. Each year they arrive in mid to late September–seemingly bringing more friends each time–and spend the winter and early spring enjoying the Los Angeles weather, until a day comes in late spring when I realize I haven’t seen them in awhile. Next season, the pattern […]