My Garden
by Kevin Henkes; illus. by the author
Preschool, Primary    Greenwillow    32 pp.
3/10 978-0-06-171517-4    $17.99
Library ed. 978-0-06-171518-1    $18.89
A little girl helps her mother in the garden, watering, weeding, chasing away the rabbits: “It’s hard work, and my mother’s garden is very nice, but if I had a garden . . .” What follows is a fine description of a garden any child would love. Many aspects would appeal to adults, too: there are no weeds, the flowers grow back as soon as they’re picked, and the air hums with bird and butterfly wings. But other details display the author’s keen understanding of what’s really on kids’ minds come spring: the bunnies in this garden are chocolate, there for the eating; planting jellybeans yields a jellybean bush — in the illustration, the girl busily harvests the beans, her candy-filled straw hat like an Easter basket of tiny colorful eggs. Henkes goes beyond kids’ love of sweets, though, perceptively conveying the strange appeal and mystery that ordinary objects can hold: “Sometimes in my garden, good, unusual things would just pop up — buttons and umbrellas and rusty old keys.” The black-outlined pastel-colored art is as playful as the text; one picture calls to mind both early Sendak (the girl’s mouth round with song, her eyes closed) and Crockett Johnson (Carrot Seed-like, a huge vegetable fills a wheelbarrow; here the vegetable is a tomato, though, “because I don’t like carrots”). With its adroit look at a child’s colorful imagination, My Garden is as fresh and inviting as spring after winter. JENNIFER M. BRABANDER

Pepi Sings a New Song
by Laura Ljungkvist; illus. by the author
Preschool, Primary    Beach Lane/Simon     40 pp.
4/10 978-1-4169-9138-0    $16.99
As in Ljungkvist’s whimsical Follow the Line books, readers are led on a journey through different venues, but here the leader has feathers. Pepi the parrot croons his own version of “Twinkle, Twinkle” to his astronomy-loving owner, Peter, each night. But he senses that Peter would like him to expand his repertoire. So he visits a bakery, a music studio, a food market, and other happily cluttered locales to find ideas for new lyrics. Zippy, digitally rendered illustrations in eye-popping colors place Pepi all over the page, investigating and naming items. For instance, at the bakery, he’s a one-bird pastry crew, balancing on a rolling pin, scattering sprinkles, plunging his feet into dough, and more. The nonsensical new “Twinkle, Twinkle” he pieces together in the end encapsulates his playfulness and just might inspire other young songwriters to mine their surroundings for material. CHRISTINE M. HEPPERMAN

Cosmic
by Frank Cottrell Boyce
Intermediate, Middle School    Walden Pond/HarperCollins     313 pp.
1/10 978-0-06-183683-1    $16.99
Library ed. 978-0-06-183686-2    $17.89
The popular author of Millions and Framed (rev. 11/06) returns for yet another zany adventure. Twelve-year-old Liam, tall for his age, is often mistaken for an adult, a fact that he uses to his advantage when he finds that he’s won a vacation package to what he thinks is an amusement park. He brings his friend, Florida, as his “daughter.” Once Liam and Florida, along with the other prize-winning children and their fathers, get off the plane, they find themselves in China, and the amusement park turns out to be a training ground for a rocket launch. The children — and one dad — are to go aboard the first manned spacecraft to leave Earth’s orbit since Apollo 17. Liam ultimately wins the right to be the accompanying parent, but things go wrong in space, and only some quick thinking by the kids averts a disaster. The book opens with Liam in space (leaving an extended message for his parents on a cell phone) and then flashes back to the beginning of the story. The flashback immediately grabs the reader’s attention, and the likable characters, the gentle sense of humor, and the far-fetched adventure will keep it. JONATHAN HUNT

The Carbon Diaries 2017
by Saci Lloyd
High School    Holiday    326 pp.
3/10 978-0-8234-2260-9    $17.95    g
Two years after Britain momentously instituted a carbon rationing system and a series of natural disasters tested the already strained new social order (The Carbon Diaries 2015, rev. 5/09), punk teen Laura heads back to London and university. Almost immediately she is sucked into the political mayhem that rules the streets: an ecoterrorist group attracts boyfriend Adi; the terrifying rise of far-right white extremism in mainstream discourse has close-to-home effects. Laura’s band becomes the voice of a progressive grassroots movement protesting human rights abuses, appalling refugee situations, inequitable distribution of vital resources — and government culpability in all three. The unrest is no longer confined to Britain, and as the band tours Europe, Laura and Adi end up stranded far from home, in danger, facing a moral dilemma that seems to be sending them down divergent paths. Lloyd’s second novel is more diffuse and less personal than her first, using Laura’s political awakening rather than family drama to provide entry into the story. Lloyd’s point, though, is to explore the sociopolitical currents (and the dangers young activists might be forced to confront) in a speculative future that feels all too plausible. Readers expecting the same tone and themes of the first novel will be disappointed, but those looking for thought-provoking questions, challenging new themes, and a gripping tale of global peril will find much to appreciate. A glossary defines Briticisms and futuristic slang. CLAIRE E. GROSS

A Conspiracy of Kings
by Megan Whalen Turner
Middle School, High School     Greenwillow    312 pp.
4/10 978-0-06-187093-4     $16.99
Library ed. 978-0-06-187094-1    $17.89    g
In this eagerly awaited fourth novel set in a semi-classical world, Turner focuses on Sophos, prince of Sounis, who has been kidnapped by rebel barons in cahoots with the Persian-like Medes. First encountered in The Thief as blushing and inept, Sophos here gives his account of a momentous period of maturing: he becomes a slave, rescues his father from murderers, becomes king, falls in love, fights a war, and negotiates the difficult territory of state and personal relationships in order to establish his kingship. Peerless Eugenides plays a pivotal role, as do the Queen of Attolia and, most markedly, the Queen of Eddis. Turner’s knotting of plots and counterplots, battle tactics, diplomatic skullduggery, and the tensions of state business and personal desire is masterful. Once again she displays an extraordinary ability to engage both brain and feeling at full force; to provide equally intellectual complexity, action, and inner psychological realms of intimacy and vulnerability — whether in romantic love or in friendship. She does this here brilliantly, ringing the changes on events, characters, and narrative strategies in the earlier novels with such success that having finished the book, one just wants to open it up and read it again. DEIRDRE F. BAKER

One Crazy Summer
by Rita Williams-Garcia
Intermediate, Middle School    Amistad/HarperCollins    218 pp.
1/10 978-0-06-076088-5    $15.99
Library ed. 978-0-06-076089-2    $16.89
It’s the summer of 1968, and eleven-year-old Delphine reluctantly shepherds her two younger sisters on their trip from Brooklyn to Oakland, where the mother who deserted them now lives. Thoroughly coached by her grandmother about how little Negro girls should behave to avoid scenes, Delphine maintains her own sensibility about what is appropriate and makes sure her sisters toe the line. Their mother Cecile is far from welcoming, sending them each day to the People’s Center run by the Black Panthers to keep them out of her way while she writes her poetry. At the center, the girls get free food and an education in revolution. Williams-Garcia writes about that turbulent summer through the intelligent, funny, blunt voice of Delphine, who observes outsiders and her own family with shrewdness and a keen perception of why they each behave the way they do. Never afraid to stand up to anyone or anything, Delphine copes with her equally strong-willed mother calmly, “because that’s how you treat crazy people.” She takes over when she has to, and during the course of their month-long visit she refines her understanding of her mother and herself. The setting and time period are as vividly realized as the characters, and readers will want to know more about Delphine and her sisters after they return to Brooklyn with their radical new ideas about the world. SUSAN DOVE LEMPKE

The Magic School Bus and the Climate Challenge [Magic School Bus]
by Joanna Cole; illus. by Bruce Degen
Primary, Intermediate     Scholastic    48 pp.
3/10 978-0-590-10826-3    $16.99     g
As in the previous books in this outstanding science series, the students in Ms. Frizzle’s class head out on an investigative field trip, this time to gather information for their play about “Earth and all the changes that are happening.” In the magic school bus (temporarily a plane), the students fly over the Arctic to witness for themselves receding glaciers and melting polar ice, high up into the atmosphere to see proliferating carbon dioxide molecules, and down again to view alternative energy sources at work. Ms. Frizzle is as enthusiastic and upbeat as ever, especially when riding sunbeams down to earth (“Isn’t it fun?”) and back up again, as the students experience for themselves the greenhouse effect. The author and illustrator are straightforward about the seriousness of global warming but eschew gloom-and-doom, focusing in the end on changes individuals can make in their daily lives to save energy. As always, Cole and Degen make use of prolific sidebars to provide basic background information (explanations of everything from climate and fossil fuels to solar cells), deepen the discussion (“Biofuels: Are They Better?”), and, especially in the “Kids Can...” sidebars, empower the book’s audience. Throughout, humor, a hallmark of the series, keeps readers engaged (Student #1: “I conserve paper by writing on the back.” Student #2: “I conserve paper, too — by not doing my homework!”). May Ms. Frizzle and her class return for many more field trips — in their now-hybrid magic school bus. MARTHA V. PARRAVANO

Henry Aaron’s Dream
by Matt Tavares; illus. by the author
Primary, Intermediate     Candlewick    40 pp.
1/10 978-0-7636-3224-3     $16.99
With understated, unfussy cadences, Tavares describes a young Hank Aaron who “didn’t have a bat, / so he’d swing a broom handle / or a stick / or whatever he could find” as he daydreamed of playing baseball in the majors. Despite his father’s warning (“Ain’t no colored ballplayers”), Aaron headed daily to play with a real bat in the new Carver Park, a baseball diamond in Mobile, Alabama, designated “Colored Only.” On April 15, 1947 — the only full date Tavares includes in the main text — Aaron’s world was rocked. That day, Jackie Robinson played his first game for the Brooklyn Dodgers. This was the confirmation thirteen-year-old Aaron needed: someday his own big-league dreams could become reality. After a brief stint in the Negro Leagues, Aaron signed a minor-league contract with the Braves; he was on his way up. But he, like Robinson, faced brutal racism while playing with his new white teammates “in southern cities / where black people and white people / weren’t even allowed to play checkers together.” As the picture-book biography draws to a close, a final full-spread illustration shows Aaron in his first major-league regular season game. Tavares’s skillful combination of watercolor, ink, and pencil shows the ballplayer in a confident pose, hands on his hips, in his Braves uniform, as in the background African American fans cheer wildly from jam-packed bleachers. An author’s note, Aaron’s career stats, and a bibliography are included in the backmatter. TANYA D. AUGER

Catching Fire
by Suzanne Collins; read by Carolyn McCormick
Middle School, High School    Scholastic Audiobooks     Rev. 9/09    
10 CDs    978-0-545-10141-7    $39.95
This second installment of the Hunger Games trilogy is as action-packed as the first, with Katniss and Peeta back in the Games (this time with the Arena configured as a giant clock, each hour’s wedge unleashing its own lethal danger) and uprisings against the despotic Capitol fomenting into out-and-out revolution. Narrator McCormick’s rounded, dulcet tones and careful enunciation may at first seem an odd fit for the Games-hardened Katniss. But strong emotions are always right below the surface here, with Katniss concentrating on survival in one moment and agonizing about her family’s safety or her conflicting feelings about Gale and Peeta in another. McCormick can turn, vocally, on a dime, instantly accessing those emotions and wringing from this inventive, fast-paced series all the drama, pathos, and tension possible. MARTHA V. PARRAVANO