This week’s reviews include the dystopian fantasy worlds of Emily Lloyd-Jones’s “The Bone House” and Donna Barba Higuera’s “The Last Cuentista.” Finally, a book for the fisher in your life.
For Younger Readers
By Nathan Sekinger
BOOK REVIEWER
April is the perfect time to celebrate libraries. School Library week is April 7 – 13, and the entire month of April is dedicated to National Library Week. A great way to celebrate your library is to introduce – or reintroduce – yourself to its resources.
The Central Rappahannock Regional Library has fantastic options. From digital collections, a law library, meeting rooms, makerspace, and a seed library to online research, the options are nearly endless.
At my school, staff and students enjoy is “Book Group in a Bag.” You can reserve a book from hundreds of popular titles in a set of ten and check them out for six weeks. The groupings are perfect starting a book club. Here are two winning titles that I’ve been reading with teachers and students lately, both available as a “Book Group in Bag”.
BONE HOUSES
By Emily Lloyd-Jones
Published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers (September 29, 2020)
Paperback $8.79
Audiobook $14.99
Aderyn (Ryn) is a gravedigger. It’s a job that she learned from her father, but the trouble lately is that the dead don’t stay buried. Instead, Ryn has begun to use her skills with a shovel to defend her village from a growing army of bone houses, or skeletal remains that have the power to rise and attack.
In this historical fantasy world, Ryn is versed in the ancient legends of curses so is unsurprised by this magical threat. But when a stranger shows up, inept and about to be killed by a skeleton, Ryn saves him and learns that he is a mapmaker who is unfortunately lost.
Along with a mysterious background, Ellis, the mapmaker, does have money, which Ryn needs to care for her siblings now that her parents are gone. Ellis will pay for a guide to the other side of the mountain through a seemingly collapsed mine. Ryn is just the person for the job; all she needs to do is face down an army of skeletal undead, break an ancient curse, and keep an inexperienced city boy alive long enough so that he’ll part with his money.
Good thing she already has a shovel.
THE LAST CUENTISTA
By Donna Barba Higuera
Published by Levine Querido (October 12, 2021)
Paperback $10.99
Audiobook $14.99
Petra must say goodbye to her grandmother, Lita. As Petra hears her grandmother’s stories, she is resolved to carry on with her grandmother’s tradition as a storyteller, or “cuentista.”
Petra will carry that idea with her as she boards a massive spaceship that will transport hundreds to a new planet. This is not just for exploration, but for survival as Haley’s Comet will soon crash into the Earth. Petra is lucky that her two scientific parents are seen as crucial cargo for when they arrive at their new planet; because of that, she and her brother will survive too.
Because of the distance, all essential passengers will be placed in cryo-sleep for over 300 years while they travel. A caretaker crew of a few hundred others will live out their natural lives for generations caring for those sleepers.
One small comfort is that Petra can learn from special implanted knowledge while she naps; she especially requests all the stories of diverse mythology to help her become a storyteller.
This launch has a troubled start as mobs of people left behind try to storm the ship before it even leaves. On board, the crew of caretakers have other ideas too. Petra will wake hundreds of years in the future, in a world far different from the one she knows or expects. As one of the few left who remembers her past, her humanity and her family, Petra must act to save what is left of humanity from itself in this Newbery Award Winner book.
Nathan Sekinger is a middle school librarian who is always ready to share a new story with his students.
Casting Forward
by Steve Ramirez
Published by Lyons Press (April 1, 2023)
Paperback $15.43
Kindle $10.49
Reviewed by Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
On the Rappahannock River, the shad are running along the same stretch where Amoroleck first encountered John Smith in 1608.
Today, the shad no longer sustain those who live along the banks of our beloved river as they did in Amorlek’s day. But the river does sustain us in spirit. And that spirit is most closely felt by those who wade into the Rapp’s chilling waters to cast a fly toward a timeless fish in hopes of drawing it in – and the releasing it to the river again.
Fly-fishing is not sport, it is a balm for the human soul. And for Steve Ramirez – a United States Marine recovering from the wounds of war – the waters of the Hill Country of Texas are where he pursues his healing.
A doctor helped me to chase away the ghosts, but the feeling of emptiness remained. I guess sometimes surviving is your punishment. So, you stand in the river, facing upstream with the water rushing down upon you as if it could somehow fill the hollow emptiness–and somehow, it always does. So it was one morning, I stood there, without even casting, and with no trout rising, and as the water rushed past me, I knew it was washing my burdens behind me, swirling them downstream like the autumn leaves.
Steve Ramirez, Casting Forward
Over some 250 pages, Ramirez walks the reader through the rivers of the Texas Hill Country, explaining in romantic language the interaction between the fly-fisherman (Ramirez), the river, the fish therein, and the land through which it flows.
Along the way, we meet his daughter Megan, who is pursuing her own spiritual passage, his since deceased friend , and slowly, the ghosts who are at held at bay by the river, but nonetheless always near.
These characters and their struggles unfold slowly, requiring the reader to exercise patience, as Ramirez weaves fly-fishing, beauty, and human struggle cast by cast in the rivers that define the Hill Country – the Sabinal, the Guadalupe, Llano, Blanco, and finally, the headwaters.
Each chapter – defined by a river or section thereof – opens with a line from another writer, who feels the power of rivers as powerfully as Ramirez.
But it’s in the writings of Rainer Maria Rilke that Ramirez finds the ultimate truth:
Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final
Fly-fisher men and women know something of nature and the river that too many of us, drowning in a world of electronics and materialism, have lost the ability to see.
Ramirez brings us back to the headwaters of his life, and of ours.
