“Sound sorcerer” John Cage composed music, but he also made space—space to listen to what exists between the notes of a song. He delighted in and utilized ambient noise, the small sounds of everyday living, letting his audience find the sounds behind the silence. “Sounds within silence / silence in noise / music in both / life within all.”
Starred Review of the Week
Sherlock Roach and the Case of the Crunchy Crumb
Famous bug detective Sherlock Roach and his trusty sidekick, Dr. Wormston, are reading the newspaper in their dapper duds (bowtie and deerstalker hat for Sherlock, waistcoat and bowler for Wormston) when there’s a knock at the door. Lucille the Ladybug has been robbed!
A Scar Like a River
Thirteen-year-old Fallon (white) has three secrets. She’s shared one of them—about who gave her the scar across her face—with her best friend. But when Fallon’s uncle Geebie dies, the trauma from her past resurfaces.
Black Hands: Builders of Our Nation
Weatherford traces the impact of Black effort and achievement on U.S. history and culture in this powerful picture book utilizing the refrain “Black hands.”
Bad Badger: A Family Story
Beloved badger Septimus is back for another adventure. In this sequel to Bad Badger: A Love Story, Septimus is co-parenting three downy seagull hatchlings with Gully, who is often at the seashore fishing for meals for the ever-hungry chicks. Septimus’s curated and comfortable home life is barely a memory as he busily tends the needy babies.
The Blue House I Loved
“On a plot of grass off Maryland Avenue … on the east side of St. Paul, there was once a blue house that I loved.” The narrator, a Hmong refugee, recounts childhood memories big and small, describing in loving the detail the old house’s layout and the family members who lived there.
Puffins!
Follow the journey of a puffin family on Maine’s Eastern Egg Rock Island in this joyful, appealing nonfiction picture book. Puffin mates meet, and Mother Puffin lays a single egg while Father Puffin patrols the burrow.
Medicine Wheels
Bryce’s mom has struggled with alcohol and holding down a job since his dad’s death several years earlier. When things blow up with her latest boyfriend, she takes off, leaving Bryce and an unpaid motel bill behind. Bryce (Ojibwe) goes to his paternal grandparents’ trailer home on the Wolf Creek Reservation in Minnesota, where he stays for the summer.
The Future Book
“This book is from the future. Lots of things are different here in the future.” Forget technology—in Barnett and Harris’s latest collaboration, a futuristic narrator leads readers on a linguistic tour of the future.
Beth Is Dead
Louisa May Alcott’s March sisters are reimagined as their 21st-century doppelgangers in a contemporary mystery triggered by their father’s latest novel, titled Little Women. His readers are intrigued to learn that the characters are modeled on his real-life daughters and incensed that he chose to kill one off at the book’s end.