Katherine Applegate, author of the Newbery Medal-winning The One and Only Ivan and the widely hailed The One and Only Bob, has returned with the story of Odder. Like Applegate’s other works, Odder is a fictional book intended to introduce young readers to the world of wildlife conservation, interspecies friendships, and the plight of captive …
Alice Elliott Dark’s beautiful, sprawling novel Fellowship Point is about land and stewardship, about nature and conservation, but more than that, it is a book of friendship across the decades and about the complexities of women’s lives, told in part by two extraordinary narrators who experienced nearly a century of life in the world. Agnes …
Audrey Schulman’s The Dolphin House, inspired by a true story about dolphin research in St. Thomas in the 1960s, is a beautiful, thought-provoking read, at times as heartbreaking as it is fascinating. The novel reveals much about the vast intelligence of dolphins—and, at times, the lack thereof in humans—and offers a look at animals in …
While Jessie Greengrass’s remarkable novel The High House is set primarily in a grim future, this is not purely dystopian fiction—in fact, it feels far more contemporary, like a novel of our imminent reality. The High House doesn’t depict a world completely transformed by climate change as much as it reveals our world—a world slowly and inevitably ravaged as …
In 2016, we began compiling lists of the best books we read that year (new or old, it didn’t matter). And now here we are in 2021, and we’ve got another wonderful list of the best environmental books we’ve read this year. These may not be the books you’ll find in the top lists of …
Living in Southern Oregon, not far north of where Ash Davidson’s Damnation Spring is set, I’ve grown used to passing trucks that are overloaded with timber, and mountainsides bare from clear-cuts. Knowing that this novel is about logging redwoods in the late 1970s, I wasn’t sure how biased I might be, as an reader who is decidedly …
Katherine Applegate’s Willodeen, out today from Feiwel and Friends, aptly begins with an epigraph quoting Greta Thunberg: “I have learned you are never too small to make a difference.” This middle-grade novel geared towards tweens, but also appropriate for younger readers, explores surprisingly mature topics in a way that is still accessible and engaging for …
Kaitlyn Greenidge’s stunning and unique novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman, begins as the story of a family that moves into the The Toneybee Institute for Ape Research to teach an abandoned young chimpanzee sign language—yet while the novel is very much about language, its focus veers from chimpanzees and delves into the institute’s dark …
The Elephant of Belfast, S. Kirk Walsh’s debut novel, reimagines the extraordinary relationship between an Irish zookeeper and a young Asian elephant during the Second World War. Twenty-year-old Hettie Quin works part-time at Bellevue Zoo and Gardens and is angling hard for a promotion. She wants to become a full-time zookeeper—a position traditionally held by …