Do You Know Dino…and the Scientific Process?

Lynn: Do you think you’ve added enough dinosaur books to your collections and don’t really need another? Think again! This new National Geographic book by Sabrina Ricci and Garret Kruger is not only great for dinosaur enthusiasts, but it is also an outstanding book for STEM and classroom use to illustrate the process of scientific inquiry. I Know Dino!: Amazing Breakthroughs, Mega Mistakes, and Unsolved Mysteries in Dinosaur Science (National Geographic Kids, 2025) is a roaring success in many ways.

Organized into 6 chronological periods, each chapter introduces the history of that period, the discoveries made, and the evolution of theories about dinosaurs. Each chapter then features a series of 2-page spreads, each about a particular dinosaur. One page, First Impressions, discusses what scientists thought the dinosaur looked like, how it behaved, and even how the bones were positioned. The facing page, What We Know Now, shows what we understand now and how our knowledge has changed. And boy, have most of our first impressions changed!

The oversized book is beautifully designed and features illustrations by Franco Tempesta, period and contemporary photographs, and plenty of sidebars and charts with additional information. It is a dinosaur-lover’s treasure trove. And, importantly, readers will come away with a rock-solid grasp of how the nature of science is always changing as new information is discovered. The book ends with pages featuring “unsolved mysteries,” a Dino-Map, and a Glossary.

It is full of kid-appealing topics such as “Big Weapons Aren’t Just for Predators.” There is also “Majestic Crests” and “Dino Animation” that has a list of dinosaur animated movies. Young readers will delight in poring over the pages, but it would also be a terrific way to illustrate the scientific process in a classroom by featuring and discussing some of the pages.

Big Boy 4014 Roars Back to Life

Lynn: Train-lovers, big and small, will love Marsha Diane Arnold’s new picture book, Big Boy 4014 and the Steam Team: the World’s Largest Steam Engine Roars Back to Life (Sleeping Bear Press, 2025). The Big Boys, 25 huge locomotives, were built between 1941 and 1944. They were used to pull extremely heavy loads through the Wasatch Mountains in Utah and were critical in hauling soldiers and military supplies during WWII. So long at 132 feet, the Big Boys had to be articulated to manage curves on the tracks. After the war, diesel locomotives began to replace steam, and Big Boy 4014 pulled her last load in 1959. Eventually, all but 8 were scrapped. 4014 sat in a museum in Pomona, California, for over 50 years.

But in 2013, something amazing happened. The Union Pacific Railroad wanted to celebrate the 150th Anniversary of the Golden Spike – the completion of the 2 ends of the first transcontinental railroad. A Big Boy was needed, and the “Steam Team” had only 6 years to get 4014 operational once more!

Since she sat more than a mile from any track, the first huge task was to move her somehow to the tracks. New tracks and a huge loader got 4014 connected to tracks, where two diesel engines then pushed and pulled her all the way to Cheyenne, Wyoming, and the Union Pacific Steam shop. The Steam Team went to work!

The story chronicles their efforts and ultimate success in getting 4014 rolling once again. Not only did she make the Celebration, she also started on a series of cross-country tours. allowing people around the country a chance to see her roaring past.

Adam Gustavson’s glorious illustrations take full advantage of the extra-wide pages with dynamic scenes and nearly steal the book. He uses perspective wonderfully, providing extraordinary views from above, below, close up, and far away.

Arnold’s text is perfectly suited for young readers but provides ample information for train fanatics. The sound effects make the book a wonderful read-aloud, as does the large size. A lengthy and fascinating Author’s Note with much more historical information and photos is included.

Let your readers roll with this outstanding book, which will be loved by readers of ALL ages.

Can Composting be Fun?

Lynn: I would have thought composting would be one of the last subjects that could make an engaging picture book but Brianne Farley has done just that with Worm Makes a Sandwich (Putnam/Penguin Random, 2025). Farley comes at the subject somewhat sideways but this approach takes a potentially muddy subject and makes it funny and appealing to a young audience.

Pink and very polite, little worm asks readers if he can make them a sandwich.

“I know what you’re thinking…Worms don’t have hands. Worms cannot make sandwiches!”

Worm starts making the sandwich with delectable garbage, Sorry – NOT for your sandwich, the garbage is for me he tells us. And over the next pages, worm narrates while a little girl goes through the processes of adding garbage to a compost pile, then insect poop and the resulting dirt to the garden. Seed planting is next, and a lot of waiting for the plants to grow.

At one dark moment, worm has deep self-doubts about the success of this sandwich, but a red ripe tomato on the vine saves the day. And, indeed, the child makes a delicious sandwich with the tomato, allowing the worm to preen. A comic little touch at the end is a perfect dessert to follow.

Kids will love the story and the illustrations, which are created in watercolors, gouache, and colored pencils, and have wonderfully varied perspectives. Along the way with all the giggles, kids will learn a LOT about composting and how to do it.

Helpful back matter includes more information on composting, how to do it, what to use, the equipment needed, and why we should all be doing this.

The story is a fun read-aloud for classrooms, story hours, and laptime reading, and is an ideal STEM book. If you had no hands, could you make a sandwich?

Readers Will Agree – Everything is Tuberculosis

Lynn: John Green is angry and by the time readers finish this new venture into adult non-fiction, Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection (Crash Course/Penguin Random, 2025), they will be angry too! Green, a true star of YA literature, has moved lately into adult books and this non-fiction examination of tuberculosis, its history, impact, and on-going global dominance, is eye-opening and disturbing. It is also a very personal story about Green’s meeting with Henry, a young TB patient in Sierra Leone. Green becomes friends with Henry and the progression of his disease is a centerpiece for the book.

TB has been part of the human story for as long as humans have been around. Signs of it were found in Egyptian mummies and it was present in ancient China and the pre-Columbian Americas. It affected culture, fashion, politics, and literature and it was not clearly understood until the late 1880’s when its cause was identified as a bacteria. It took until the 1950’s before it was curable with antibiotics and the number of cases dropped sharply.

And yet, TB is still present and over one million people will die of tuberculosis this year alone! The disease, its evolution to an antibiotic-resistant strain, and its ongoing stigma are horribly impacting large populations of the world – especially places with war, poverty, racism, and scarce medical facilities. People are dying who shouldn’t, and by and large, the Western world doesn’t care enough to send help. That situation has intensified with the Trump cuts, and Green’s frustration is sure to be shared by every reader.

This is a fascinating story and a horrifying one. It is packed with historical and medical details that demand to be shared. It is a “listen-to-this” book and anyone reading it will start to see how tuberculosis is indeed everything in our past and current history.

While published adult, this is a great choice for teen collections.

Pack Your Bags! Border Crossings Will Have You Booking a Trip!

Lynn: I have never wished to be 20 years younger any more intensely than while reading Border Crossing: A Journey on the Trans-Siberian Railroad (Harper Design, 2022) by Emma Fick! Every page made me yearn to rush out, buy railroad tickets and set out on this Trans-Siberian journey. Fick ‘s unique and entrancing tale of the train journey she and her husband Helvio took from Beijing to Moscow made me yearn to pack my backpack and replicate this trip. Travel books are hard to write! Too often they turn into a dull list of places seen, food eaten and history learned. Emma turns the genre on its head and this journal-style story is crammed with vividly evocative watercolor illustrations and hand-written observations. I learned an amazing amount while falling in love with the intrepid Emma and Helvio who saw, explored, tasted and enjoyed everything they encountered. Somehow there is a wealth of information, history, geology, and culture shared but it is never boring! I loved the descriptions of the opulent interiors of the Mongolian Gers, etiquette for sharing train couchettes, visits to markets, the views from the train windows, Russian subway stations and the food – especially the food! I’m not sure I’d be as delighted as Emma with “Herring Under a Fur Hat” dish as Emma was but I loved her enthusiasm for sampling so much. I had no idea that the largest fresh water lake in the world is in Siberia or that Russia has ELEVEN time zones! The friendliness of the people was encouraging but there were also real challenges and bureaucratic roadblocks. The charm of the story underplays a bit the actual demanding nature of the conditions but it is also guaranteed to amplify any traveler’s itch residing in readers everywhere. This is a not-to-be missed book and I sincerely hope that Emma will undertake and chronicle another exotic journey! I am ready to travel with her and I think teens will be too,

The Enigma Girls: Teens, Ciphers and War

Lynn: Decades after the secret work at Bletchley Park, its long-hidden stories finally started to be revealed. I’ve read several accounts of pivotal people involved in cryptography but here, wonderfully, in The Enigma Girls: How Ten Teenagers Broke Ciphers, Kept Secrets, and Helped Win WWII (Scholastic, March 2024) veteran author Candace Fleming focuses on the ordinary young women who made it all happen.

Stressing the extreme youth of the girls, most of whom were still teenagers, Fleming weaves together the stories of 10 young women in particular. They were listeners, translators, Colossus operators, cryptographers, and more. They did the everyday grinding work in terrible conditions with long hours and enormous stress. Sworn to secrecy, they shared the story of their work with no one—not even each other.

Going into fascinating detail, Fleming describes the numerous small parts of the work that required many steps, many people, and meticulous attention to detail. A mistake could kill and they all knew how crucial, if often mind-numbing, their work was. Interspersed with the girls’ stories are the steps to codes, ciphers, and the art and science of breaking them. Using short chapters and clear straight-forward text, Fleming creates an accessible and vivid portrait of an amazing effort by so many.

Careful research and documentation are provided along with archival photographs. Read in galley, so some of the back matter was not finished. This is a must-purchase for middle school collections. Also recommended for high school collections to offer an excellent WWII nonfiction for readers needing simpler text.

Become a Spider with Jumper and Jessica Lanan

Lynn: Can you imagine ever being a spider? Many of our young readers would shout yes to that Jumper question. Author/Illustrator Jessica Lanan is right here to help with her new book, Jumper: A Day in the Life of a Jumping Spider (Roaring Brook, 2023) where readers can spend the day with Jumper, an impossibly cute Regal Jumper as she hunts in a backyard garden. A human child and her family work in the garden while Jumper also goes about her life, hunting and avoiding being hunted.

Jumper is a completely engaging little creature only the size of a bean but with some extraordinary abilities that Lanan demonstrates in brilliant and beautiful illustrations, giving young readers context and comparisons that make the little spider’s talents fully understandable. Jumper is shown, for example, making a leap after prey while in the background, the little girl also jumps. A double-page spread dramatically reveals what it is like to see with Jumper’s 8-eyed vision. Some scenes are spider-size perspectives and some are from the child’s perspective. Lanan has used ink, watercolor, and gouache and the illustrations are truly beautiful as well as being accurate, and extremely effective, helping children to comprehend a spider’s world.

Extensive back matter provides a plethora of additional information, including a 6-part guide for locating and observing spiders. Science has never been so fun! This is an ideal choice for a STEM classroom or to use as a writing prompt.

Sy Montgomery Introduces Kids to Turtles

Lynn: The publisher blurb for Sy Montgomery’s new book describes her as “part Emily Dickinson, part Indiana Jones” and I think that is not wrong. I am a huge fan of Montgomery’s many books and look forward to each new one. Often her books are filled with stunning photographs but this time, she teams up with wildlife painter Matt Patterson to bring one of my favorite creatures to kids with The Book of Turtles (Clarion, 2023).

Montgomery and Patterson take the basic concept of a nonfiction information book to a new level with this wonderful book. Excellent writing provides fascinating facts on turtles in a captivating way. Did you know that by 220 million years ago, turtles looked the way they look today—flourishing alongside dinosaurs? Different types of turtles are introduced along with many did-you-know additional facts. Did you know that Eastern Box Turtles can climb fences or that turtles are as smart as laboratory rats?

The Celebrity Turtle Profiles were my favorite part of the book. Here you meet some famous turtles such as Lonesome George, Myrtle the green sea turtle in the New England Aquarium who loves to photobomb film shoots, and the couple at the Austrian zoo, Poldi and Bibi, who after 115 happy years together, finally couldn’t stand each other. An excellent section on how to help turtles provides practical advice.

Matt Patterson’s beautiful and carefully accurate paintings illustrate the book. Turtles come to life with his skillful brush and the book is so visually enticing that it won’t stay long on the shelves.

All the stars for this must-purchase! Kids will love this one!

The Mona Lisa Vanishes – the REAL Story for Kids about the Theft of the Lady with the Mysterious Smile

Lynn: Did you know that the Mona Lisa is painted on wood and that it weighs over 200 pounds and that the thief could barely carry it down the stairs? Or that a locked and jammed door knob nearly stymied the thief—until a helpful Louvre plumber came along and opened it? Or that Da Vinci carried the Mona Lisa with him on the back of a mule on his journey over the Alps into France?

All this and much much more await readers of The Mona Lisa Vanishes: A Legendary Painter, a Shocking Heist, and the Birth of a Global Celebrity (Random Studio/Sept. 2023) by Nicholas Day. This nonfiction book for middle graders is as fascinating as its enticing cover suggests. Readers will love the flip and breezy style while inhaling a vast amount of history, science, biography and art information along the way. Day does an outstanding job of working so much important historical background into what may seem on the surface to be simply a caper/art theft plot.

The culture of Renaissance Italy, the history of policing, painting techniques, biographies of Da Vinci, Lisa Gherardini (as much as possible), Paris detectives, and even Pablo Picasso are woven into this fascinating tale. Told in thoroughly engaging text, the story is utterly compelling and kids will absorb information on every page. This is a “listen to this!” book, packed with facts to be shared.

Brett Helquist illustrates the book with black and white, slightly comedic drawings that perfectly match the tone of the text and they are as irresistible as the story.

Conspiracy theories and the ongoing belief in the most sensational theories (despite any facts to the contrary) and the issue of celebrity are serious and important threads that run through the entire book. These are timely themes in our world of social media gullibility and instant fame and hopefully ones that will have young readers thinking.

All the stars and more for this must-purchase!

Cindy: This is my first encounter with author Nicholas Day, but any author recommended by Mary Roach is going to get an audience with me. Roach is right, this book is “perfect” for its audience and funny to boot. I learned so much about Leonardo da Vinci, including the fact that he and I are kindred spirits—we much prefer learning something new and starting the adventure of a new project rather than finishing said projects! I don’t have his talent, but I resemble his method. Day handles the switches between the heist’s time period and Leonardo’s with aplomb and teens will be able to follow along easily. Who doesn’t love a heist caper and learning about the development of criminal ID from body measurements to fingerprints was fascinating. Lynn is so right about the “listen to this” moments in the book. I was reading it on a car trip and my husband heard half of the book! If I were an art teacher. Or a history teacher. Or a science teacher….I’d be reading this aloud to my students.

Tales of Motherhood – Leopard Variety in Photographs

Lynn: Most of us think of gathering information for a book as a pretty safe activity. But not if you are nature photographer and author Suzi Eszterhas! In her recent book for young readers, A Leopard Diary: My Journey into the Hidden World of a Mother and her Cubs, (Owlkids, 2022), Eszterhas shares some really hair-raising adventures! Imagine sitting frozen in an open-sided vehicle with a snarling mother leopard just inches away after her playful cubs run under the vehicle. This was a leopard comfortable around humans but who became ferocious at a potential threat to her babies. Gulp! Or walking into the camp bathroom to discover a tiny leopard cub who had been hidden there by his mom—and who could appear any moment! These are just a few of the fascinating moments in this outstanding nonfiction book by acclaimed photographer Suzi Eszterhas (who is also a personal favorite of mine).

Eszterhas has always loved leopards so when she heard that a female leopard in the Jao Reserve in Botswana’s vast Okavango Delta had given birth to two cubs, she hurried there to photograph the family. Aided by a skilled guide she located the mother and cubs and over the next 15 months took pictures and wrote about the events.

This female dubbed Mom was quite relaxed around humans and allowed them to get close although they always remained vigilant and in the jeep. Leopards move their dens frequently to protect the babies from lions, baboons and other predators so Eszterhas and Kam often had to relocate the family, which sometimes took many hours in the hot sun. But the result is a wonderful chronicle of a leopard family illustrated by rare and breathtaking photographs.

The text is clear and packed with interesting facts and the entire effort was a true adventure and makes an extremely compelling story. The photographs alone make this a worthy read as they are a beautiful look at a rarely-seen event. The entire package is a must purchase and the cover alone will attract readers. Backmatter includes an interview with the guide, Kampongo, a glossary and additional information.