Mindy Mejia 
Crimes against man and nature collide in Waiting for the Night Song, a vivid and compelling environmental thriller by Julie Carrick Dalton. Dalton is a journalist, writer, and frequent speaker on the topic of writing fiction in the age of climate crisis, an area of expertise that shines through in her debut novel. Cadie Kessler …
No one sees nature quite like a poet and Aimee Nezhukumatathil proves that in World of Wonders, her first book of prose. This collection of essays centers around Nezhukumatathil’s lifelong interactions with and observations of the natural world. Born to a Filipina mother and a father from South India, Nezhukumatathil grew up all over the United States due to the demands of her mother’s job as a psychiatrist, and was immersed in landscapes from New York to Arizona. She writes from both the poet’s perspective and as a person of color in a white-privileged world.
Eco-tourism has become increasingly popular in recent years, travel intended to help conserve and contribute to remote communities and delicate ecosystems, but…disaster tourism? We’re all familiar with rubbernecking drivers, and South Korean novelist Yun Ko-Eun escalates our morbid curiosity with catastrophe into a full-blown industry in The Disaster Tourist. This is Yun’s second novel to …
This imagined prehistory is undeniably the crowning achievement in Schrefer’s ape quartet, at once brimming with hope and loss, love and cruelty, constantly challenging the reader to question, in six hundred thousand years, how much and how little we’ve evolved.
Undergrads navigating a desert year during the Bush Administration frame this debut novel from Susan DeFreitas. Deep Canyon College is an environmentally-focused mecca in the historic Wild West town of Crest Top, Arizona where three roommates try to find their path. Jenna, the freshman soil science major, doesn’t know how to leave a stagnant high …
Rescued, Eliot Schrefer’s third entry in his anticipated quartet of ape novels published by Scholastic, represents a departure in many ways from the first two books in the series. Endangered and Threatened both took place in Africa and featured early teen narrators fighting to survive alongside bonobos and chimpanzees. In Rescued, Schrefer brings his series to …
I have to make a confession. In writing circles, there are certain types of books one is supposed to hold dearer than all others. Important books. Literary books. Books that bravely ponder the desperate squalor of the human condition. I hate these books. The truth is I’m a complete plot junkie. I want to read …
I began reading this short story collection during a stay at a tiny cabin on Minnesota’s Gull Lake and couldn’t have asked for a more perfect setting to enjoy Rebecca Lawton’s stories. Flipping pages to the soundtrack of the waves hitting the shore, I became effortlessly drawn in to the worlds of the Western whitewater …
Eliot Schrefer’s Threatened reads like a thematic sequel to his 2012 National Book Award finalist Endangered. Both books tell the story of a teenager who leaves human society in Africa for the jungle and the company of other hominines. Where Endangered focused on a Congolese girl’s life changing journey with bonobos, Threatened moves east to Gabonese AIDS orphan, Luc, …
I stumbled on Elliot Schrefer’s young adult novel Endangered while searching my library’s catalog for fiction about endangered species. Other than two genre novels, this was the only hit and it felt, well, a little too obvious. I probably should have noticed this title when it was released in 2012, or at the very least …
Let’s start with a friendly reviewer disclaimer. I usually read fiction because I enjoy stories about uncompromising people who do extraordinary things. Memoir, biography, and autobiography don’t typically interest me because I couldn’t care less about famous or political figures and, to be frank, most of my attention for someone’s struggles and triumphs through life …
In a quiet part of town where the houses stand close and evening stretches long the shade of the garden hose and the baby falls asleep clutching her teddy bear’s toes . . . it’s time to read my son The Lorax. We’ve read this book for almost a month to the day and our …