The Linden Tree
By Ellie Mathews
Milkweed, $16.95
Ages 11-14 years
On this family’s farm, a linden tree marks the grave of their mother, who died swiftly from meningitis in 1948. What occupies readers is the family’s next year, seen by Katy Sue, the youngest. “I was mad at the chickens for being how they always were, as if everything was okay.” Their mother’s sister comes to help, as well as their father’s friend, Jake, who collects natural-history specimens. Katy Sue receives most help from a teacher she’d previously considered mean, who suggests Katy Sue draw pictures of her remembered mother. The blending of Aunt Katherine (and her own kitchen gadgets) with the household is carefully observed. Ellie Mathews moves slowly and goes deep.
Wildly Romantic: The English Romantic Poets — the Mad, the Bad, and the Dangerous
By Catherine M. Andronik
Holt, $16.95
Ages 13-16 years
In many ways this book is a teaser for studying the works, or more detailed biographies, of these early 19th Century English writers. Catherine Andronik might profitably have shown readers more about how she worked with varying sources, but she achieves her goal, stripping away any mossy ideas in young reader’s minds about Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, Keats and a few others. These folk were rebellious, excessive, often not well-behaved, didn’t get good parenting or often give it. (Andronik’s tracking of various generations is interesting.) The world of writing and reading poetry, however, was changed dramatically after them.
Dogs and Cats
By Steve Jenkins
Houghton Mifflin, $16
Ages 8-12 years
This is really two books when you turn it around. Steve Jenkins’ tactile paper collages are striking, but he’s also making a sustained contrast between cats as lone hunters and dogs as social and territorial ones.
Violet Bing and the Grand House
By Jennifer Paros
Viking, $14.99
Ages 7-10 years
When Violet, “seven, almost eight,” renounces a family vacation, she’s dropped off with a mysterious Great-Aunt Astrid in the Grand House. Violet has met her match, as Astrid subtly moves her away from a consistently negative position.
From Dawn to Dreams: Poems for Busy Babies
By Peggy Archer, illustrated by Hanako Wakiyama
Candlewick, $15.99
Ages 3-6 years
Babies won’t read them, but older siblings and parents will enjoy poems like “Messy Baby” and “Crib Critters.”
