Read-Along, Learn-Along: Nonfiction for Kids and Adults

There is some incredible non-fiction (for adults) making its way through our store this year. Our bestsellers case and our Books We Love table are crammed with great nonfiction titles across all kinds of genres and topics. But if you've been bringing these books home and you've got small children in the house, you might find that your toddler is not always up to reading a five-hundred-page paperback monster that weighs half as much as they do.  You may find that some of your new favorite books are a little inaccessible to the younger members of your household. You may find it difficult to share your joyful reading experience with everyone in the family.

Happily, diligent authors and illustrators are (as you may recall from my previous post about the real bear behind Winnie-the-Pooh) producing excellent works of nonfiction for the newest readers as well. Take the tome from their tiny hands. Read on! These five adult book/picture book combinations for will keep everyone on the same page.

1.

Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow
 with
Aaron and Alexander by Don Brown and
Hip Hop Speaks to Children by Nikki Giovani*

2.

H Is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
 with
Amazing Animals: Hawks by Kate Riggs and
Primates by Jim Ottaviani & Maris Wicks

3.

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
with 
Rad American Women A-Z by Kate Schatz with art by Mirian Klein Stahl and
Voice of Freedom: Fannie Lou Hamer by Carole Boston Weatherford with art by Ekua Holmes

4.

You Are Here by Thich Nhat Hanh
with
I Am Yoga by Susan Verde with art by Peter Reynolds and
Is Something Nothing? by Thich Nhat Han

5.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
with
These Hands by Margaret H. Mason with art by Floyd Cooper and
The Art of the Possible: An Everyday Guide to Politics by Edward Keenan 
with art by Julie McLaughlin

  

*The staff of Brookline Booksmith unofficially, emphatically recommends listening to Hamilton. You know, the musical. We aren't in the music business, but we are absolutely sure about this one.

Bear In Mind

Christopher Robin's toys, curated by the New York Public Library

Winnie-the-Pooh has never gone out of style, but lately he's seen a non-fiction renaissance--or rather, she has. Although the stuffed bear and his storybook counterpart are gentleman bears, the live bear behind them both was not. In fact, she was a female cub on sale at a Canadian train station, purchased by a sympathetic veterinarian on his way to to England, to serve in World War I. The vet, Harry Colebourn, brought the bear with him to England, naming her Winnie after his home city of Winnepeg. When he left for France, Winnie moved to the London Zoo, where she met Christopher Robin Milne.

The original Winnie's story has been adapted into not one but two very lovely non-fiction picture books this year:

Winnie: The True Story of the Bear Who Inspired Winnie-the-Pooh is written by long-time children's nonfiction author Sally M. Walker. It's the first book for illustrator Jonathan D. Voss, but his art has an appropriately mid-century feel, jovial, dynamic, and detailed. (He's also got a great online portfolio--I'm hoping we see more of him soon.)

Finding Winnie: The True Story of the World's Most Famous Bear has just come out this month. This one is written by Lindsay Mattick and illustrated by the prolific and beloved Sophie Blackall (of Ivy+Bean, Caldecott hopeful A Fine Dessert, and many more). Their version of Winnie's history is told as a bedtime story told to a little boy named Cole--fittingly enough, since Lindsay Mattick is Coleburn's real life great-granddaughter.

The third installation of Pooh nonfiction is a little different.

Kathryn Aalto's The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh is a lively exploration of the real model for Milne's Hundred Acre Wood, an English preserve called Ashdown Forest. Full color photos trade off with Milne's illustrations, building a bridge between Milne's ramblings and his creation. Although it's a book about children's books, the primary audience for Natural World is adults who still revel in their imaginary and familiar childhood hideaways, as well those who enjoy the natural beauties of the English countryside. Aalto is a first time book writer, but her chops as a landscape designer and historian serve her well. She's an excellent tour guide, and rather than stealing the wonder out of the Pooh books, she gives them new color and life. You can find Natural World in our Nature section.

Of course, there's nothing like the original. When you'd like to revisit Pooh and his friends in the Hundred Acre Wood (or visit them for the first time), come find them in the children's section. Whatever the facts of the matter may be, the stories are pretty great.

Every Scary Story

Kidsmith is celebrating Halloween in style this month. In addition to our decked-out displays of Halloween-themed picture books and activity books, we've also got a couple things happening for older kids and teens.

FIRST: Readers who like to take a chance can grab one of our bookseller-selected mystery reads from our TRICK OR TREAT YOURSELF display. (If any of you enjoyed our Blind Date With A Book display this February, come in for a second round!) These are some of our favorite wickedly creepy books for middle grade and young adult readers. Don't you trust us?


SECOND: K-12 readers, let us know the name of your favorite scary book, and be entered to win free advance copies of this year's best and scariest MG/YA books! We'll be drawing our winners on Halloween. (Check out the great and various books people have picked so far on the pumpkins all over our display.)

Head back to the tree in the kids' section to find our display!

Even with all this going on, the kids' booksellers still haven't been able to talk enough about some of our favorite recent Halloween-y books. Here are a few more titles that you might want to check out.

Intermediate

OUR FAVORITE: The Nest by Kenneth Oppel. The best horror stories have something true right at the center of them, and this book does that exquisitely. It's about an anxious boy with a sick little brother, being asked in his dreams by sentient wasps to just...maybe...let them...replace...his brother with a better one, a healthier one. Despite the fear factor and the big themes, this one is good for grade-schoolers and parents alike.

MORE RECOMMENDATIONS:
A Curious Tale of the In-Between by Lauren DeStefano

Took by Mary Downing Hahn
Hoodoo by Ronald L. Smith
The Hollow Boy by Jonathan Stroud

Young Adult

OUR FAVORITE: The Accident Season by Moira Fowley-Doyle is the story of a family that, each October, suffers an unusual storm of accidents, from the minor to the fatal. Hiding beneath the cuts, burns, and bruises, the bubble-wrapped tables and the plaster casts, are the bitter secrets of a family--one that has failed to keep itself safe so badly that now, once a year, everything is dangerous. This book gets dark, but its ghostly atmosphere and fiercely devoted characters will draw you through to the end.

MORE RECOMMENDATIONS:
Nightfall by Jake Halpern and Peter Kujawinski
The Fall by Bethany Griffin
Witch's Boy by Kelly Barnhill


Lastly, for those younger princesses, goatherds, and mighty warriors among you, don't forget to join us on Sunday, October 18th at 2 PM for our PRINCESS IN BLACK party, celebrating the second book in our favorite chapter book series! Feel free to dress up, and look forward to crafts and fun!

BANNED!

For the last week, Brookline Booksmith has joined the American Library Association in celebrating Banned Book Week--a yearly recognition of books that have been challenged and banned in American libraries and schools. As much as it's a celebration of books and their freedom to express, it's also a vocal reminder that censorship occurs in our country on a regular basis.

This year, to demonstrate our belief as a bookstore that readers should be allowed access to the books they want and need, we've put our favorite banned and challenged books on display.

A lot of the titles (and the reasons they've been banned for) have come as a surprise to staff and customers alike. You'll notice a lot of classics up there--as well as a lot of children's books. Books for young people are the most frequently banned and challenged literature in the U.S.; classics that appear on school curricula are also targeted.

Censorship is all about ending conversations. We wanted to start one. All week, as we've been sharing our favorite banned books with our community of readers, we've been adding your favorites to the bulletin board outside our front door. We have to say, we love the results.

We are always thankful for a community that would rather be challenged by books than challenge a book's right to exist. Thank you for stopping to look and think about what Banned Books Week means. Thank you for talking to us about the books we love. Thank you for taking part in the conversation. We hope you'll keep supporting books of all kinds. Where a challenge arises, let's keep the conversation going.

The Fall Is Falling!

Whew! We have been bustling this week! School is closing in on our students, and there's still time for some last-minute vacation reading on top of those assigned books (which, by the way, you can still find at the back of the kids' department). Meanwhile, in the book world, FALL is closing in. Fall is book season in the same way that fall is apple season--you can get new and delicious books all year around, but when fall arrives, the books come out in bushels. I have definitely caught the first hints of autumn air on my walks to work this week--and in the store, it's getting harder to pick which amazing new release to talk about first.

Aside from Percy Jackson's Greek Heroes and The Day the Crayons Came Home, here are a few more (okay, more than a few) titles that have come out in the last month or so that we are delighted to share with you.

Clarissa's Picks:

Baba Yaga's Assistant is a witchy, folk lore-ish graphic novel by Marika McCoola, with art by Emily Carroll of Into the Woods. In this graphic novel a girl named Masha does the unlikely--instead of keeping out of notorious witch Baba Yaga's way, she figures out how to become her apprentice. It's a great new take on Russian folklore if you've heard the stories before, and a great introduction if you haven't.
 
Court of Fives is fantasy writer Kate Elliott's first young adult novel. High-stakes sports in an otherworldly setting mix with the complex and inescapable forces of class and race in a dense but pacy fantasy with a heroine you will love.

Amy's Picks:

Moira Fowley-Doyle's The Accident Season is a YA novel about secrets, family, and one family in particular that, each October, suffers violently bad luck. If you like Holly Black, or Diana Wynne Jones's Time of the Ghost (unforgivably out of print), this book should be very much up your alley.

Made You Up by Francesca Zappia is about Alex, a girl whose schizophrenia gives her delusions that she can't always separate from reality. It's manageable, until she meets a boy named Miles. Miles starts to change Alex's ideas about what kind of life she's allowed to live--the question is, did Alex make him up?


Alex's Picks:

I have been waiting MONTHS for Alex Gino's George. It's a middle grade novel, accessible, heartfelt, and with wonderfully real fourth-grade voices, about a transgender girl named George. She's still figuring herself out and hasn't come out to her family when the book begins, but George wants to live as the glorious girl that she is. It will just take a little planning. Great for fans of Wonder or Fish in a Tree.

The Sky Is Falling by Mark Teague is the story of Chicken Little, but with way more dancing. Can chickens outsmart a fox with their smooth moves? Well, if you have read James Marshall's wonderful Wings, you know a chicken can do anything she sets her mind to.

The last books up there are officially multi-bookseller picks: 

Amy has read Stephanie Tromly's Trouble Is a Friend of Mine THREE TIMES. I have read it once. (I haven't given Amy her book back. Yet. Yet!) Zoe has new girl problems--and then she has Digby, the obnoxious, obsessive, voracious food-thief who suddenly wants her to break all kinds of laws to solve one or two missing persons cases. It's a quick read that will happily blindside anyone who loves Sherlock Holmes, but also kind of wants to give him a punch in the nose.

Finally, a new and terrifying YA horror anthology: Slasher Girls and Monster Boys, edited by  April Genevieve Tucholke. We've all been passing around our staff advanced copy of this one, and I saw bookseller Kat taking her own copy home. If you're already preparing yourself emotionally for Halloween (and I assume you are), start here. Here is a very good place to start.

MORE YOUNG ADULT! MORE MORE MORE.

If you have come into the store recently, you might have noticed that things feel slightly different right around the young adult section. That is because, let me gleefully tell you, this year the YA section achieved the holy bookstore grail of MORE SHELF SPACE. We now have an entire extra bookcase for this awesome and beloved (and you know we love it--have you seen all the recs we have up over there?) section. And we are doing everything we can with it.

Point One--We have a nonfiction section! From biography to history to self-help, you can check out the top shelf for some truly excellent books. Model is Cheryl Diamond's memoir of entering the cutthroat world of high fashion in NYC. In The Pregnancy Project, teenager Gaby Rodriguez feigns pregnancy to find out firsthand the limits of people's acceptance. Award-winning children's author Jack Gantos relates his time in prison in Hole in My Life. And here you can also find National Book Award winner Brown Girl Dreaming.

Point Two--Below nonfiction you will also find YA poetry and short story anthologies! Pro tip: short stories are a great way to find new authors, get around an antsy brain, or read on public transit. The Great War is a new anthology of World War II stories by incredible authors, each based on a real relic from the war. Love and Profanity will bring you a more modern realistic angle, and Rags & Bones is a very cool collection of retold classics. For poetry, try Please Excuse This Poem: 100 New Poets For the Next Generation.

Point Three--All of your devoted kids' booksellers got to suggest some older books to bring in, books we desperately want to give you so that you can be as happy about them as we are. There are a bunch (and you should ask us when you see us what they are), but here are a few.

Kylie brought in The Looking Glass by Jessica Arnold, a quaint story about a girl who goes to a B&B with her family and then gets sucked into a Victorian version of the hotel by an angry ghost who probably wants to kill her. She also picked Kenneth Oppel's exuberant and exhilarating steampunk novel Airborn, which is one of her favorite books OF ALL TIME.

Clarissa picked Lauren DeStefano's Wither, the first book in the Chemical Garden Trilogy--a dystopian romance of epic bioengineering proportions--and Rick Yancey's The Monstrumologist, a satisfyingly creepy blend of mystery, horror, and monster thriller.

Amy got us four-books-in-one Balefire, which includes secret twins, secret magic, and New Orleans witchcraft--basically everything good--and Amelia Atwater-Rhodes's Den of Shadows Quartet, which is absolutely delightful supernatural fantasy about tough girls, beautiful guys, and scary close-knit families with weapons and magic powers. Also, AA-R wrote them as a teenager. We should all be so awesome.

I, Alex asked for the Chronicles of Chrestomanci by Diana Wynne Jones, because they are brain-tickling, lively, funny, wonderful fantasies. And if you like Supernatural or The Raven Boys or witchy, demonic, delightful books with great plots, you need to read Sarah Rees Brennan's The Demon's Lexicon IMMEDIATELY.

There are other things happening in our department happening all the time, and we will tell you about more of them soon. For now, come browse our bigger, better, more ultimate YA section! You will find happiness there. It is full of good things.

Children's Author and Illustrator Week: Alex Is Reading Megan Whalen Turner

Okay.

So these books, up here in this fuzzy picture, are my copies of Megan Whalen Turner's Queen's Thief series: The Thief, The Queen of Attolia, The King of Attolia, and A Conspiracy of Kings. They're four books of a proposed six-book YA series that are less fantasy and more...alternate Greco-Roman past world with a slight chance of interfering gods. The central character is a deeply obnoxious, incredibly talented thief who lies to everyone--including you, the reader--CONSTANTLY, and his ideas WORK but always have AWFUL CONSEQUENCES. The other main characters include a) the best and scariest and b) the best and most relatable queens ever in books, ever ever ever. OH, THEY ARE GREAT.

The books are really subtle, and funny and UPSETTING and incredibly smart. And patient. Like, I don't think I've read hardly any other books that sit on their plot twists as comfortably as these do, only to throw them at you at the perfect moment and leave you going, WHAT WHAT WHAT WHAT WHY HOW DID YOU, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, YES!!!! YES!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOO BOOOOOOOOOK and so on until your mom comes and finds you and gives you funny looks.

So as books, the Queen's Thief series taught me a heck of a lot about how far you can push characters, how many lies your story can tell and still come together at the end, and how to balance stuff in a book that seems like it should never, ever work. But that's not the best thing about these books, for me. Even my deep, abiding, undying, fire-like love for the characters is not the best thing about these books--for me.

The best thing about these books is people.

See, everywhere I have gone, these books have brought me people. When I read The Thief in seventh grade, I passed it around to my friends. We talked about it at lunch, my pal got a juice stain on Queen of Attolia and I was REALLY mad, we got closer as friends, because of books. When I was in college and King of Attolia came out, I read them all out loud to my roommates--there was no escape for them, not even a small chance of escape--and we've had built-in in-jokes ever since.

And I found people online, people who loved these books as much as I do. I've met a bunch of them in person. (Ask Your Adult.) We've exchanged stuff through the mail: card, books, socks, art, candy.  We sent books like chain letters, leaving notes in the margins for the next reader. I met Megan a couple of times. Ten years later I'm still in contact with fans in Australia, England, and the U.S. I still have my friends, friends I have because these books brought us together. In fact, I'm reading Finnikin of the Rock by Melina Marchetta along with one of those friends right now, even though she's in Alabama. There are threads of these relationships running through my life all over the place in unexpected ways.

But there's one friend in particular that I'm grateful for. She died a couple of years ago. We were friends for eight years, and during that time, she went from a friendly name online to one of dearest people to me in the whole world. I could fill a book with just my memories of that friendship, filled with love, family, and books, and all the uncomfortable ups and downs of being alive. She made me a better writer and a happier person. Every time I read a book, I think of what she'd think about it, and every time I write, I try to write well enough for her. I try to write as well as the book she wrote and left behind.

So I got that from these books, family, friendship, excellent reading recs, pride in my writing, wild enjoyment of obnoxious protagonists, undisclosed shenanigans in the name of Queen's Thieves, and buckets and buckets of memories I would never want to let go of and people I would never want to un-know. You probably will not have this exact experience if you read these books (which you should, because they're great), but you will probably have experiences like this because of some book, some time, because that is what books can do for you. Books can give you life.

YOU CAN FIND KIDSMITH LITERALLY EVERYWHERE

Heads up, Booksmithies! Kidsmith has recently acquired a Twitter. Follow us @kidsmithbooks for:

• Book recs
• Upcoming kids' events
• New releases
• Tooooootally conversing with famous authorrrrrrsssss
• Thrilling photos of all four of us crammed in a glass coffin with Holly Black to celebrate her new book and general greatness
• MORE

 What are we featuring today? Our weekend reads, tomorrow's BEAR STORYTIME (10:30AM!), and our Blind Date with a Book display, bringing you our very favorite mystery reads.

TWEET WITH US! It will be so rad.