Catherine recommends "Firefighter Flo!"

“Hey, yo! Firefighter Flo!” This picture book, by Andrea Zimmerman, starts with an exuberant call to Firefighter Flo, and the jaunty pace keeps going till the last page. The story is a classic – the fire station gets a call, there’s a building on fire and a dog in danger. The fire rescue team saves the day. There are many books with similar plots; as a parent of a boy who was once obsessed with fire trucks, I’ve read a lot of books about fire fighters, fire engines, fire dogs… This one easily ranks in the top! The rhyming text flows smoothly, and on almost every page there are great sounds: Rings, Stomps, Clangs, and Screeches; Bangs, Whooshes, Smashes, and Crashes! Pictures by Dan Yaccarino complete the fun. This book would be a pure delight to read aloud to any child.

Recommended for Children

 

Taryn Recommends "Goth Girl, Queen of the Universe"

 

 

Jess has bounced between different foster homes for most of her life so she knows better than to set down roots, so it’s fitting that none of the kids at her new high school don’t give her the time of day. Mostly because they think she’s a witch because she’s goth. There is one kid however that seems to want to spend some time with Jess. Oscar wants Jess to use her style and fashion skills to help his cosplay team compete and hopefully win their competitions. Jess blows him off, until she gets a message from her estranged biological mother through Instagram to see if they can meet. Jess wants nothing more than to meet her mom in New York City, but there is one problem, a bunch of paperwork that would never be approved by her social worker. Once Jess learns that there is a cosplay competition in New York City, she agrees to join Oscar’s team so that she can make it to see her mom. As Jess works with her team to make these cosplay costumes work, she begins to realize that it’s actually fun and so is having friends. As the big competition nears, Jess has to decide just how far she’ll go to achieve the “family” that she’s looking for.

I absolutely fell head over heels for this book! It has everything that I could have asked for: nerdy references, found family, and it didn’t sugarcoat the real issues that Jess goes through as a foster child. Not only is this book set in Detroit, but the author is from Michigan, is a former foster teen herself, and even has a Master’s degree in library science. I found that the author’s personal experience made the book that much better and found that I could not put it down.

This is a Young Adult novel, but I think that adults can appreciate the themes that are touched on in this book.

 

Kara recommends "Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow"

Gabrielle Zevin is one of my favorite authors, and her latest novel does not disappoint! 

From Amazon:

On a bitter-cold day, in the December of his junior year at Harvard, Sam Masur exits a subway car and sees, amid the hordes of people waiting on the platform, Sadie Green. He calls her name. For a moment, she pretends she hasn’t heard him, but then, she turns, and a game begins: a legendary collaboration that will launch them to stardom. These friends, intimates since childhood, borrow money, beg favors, and, before even graduating college, they have created their first blockbuster, Ichigo. Overnight, the world is theirs. Not even twenty-five years old, Sam and Sadie are brilliant, successful, and rich, but these qualities won’t protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of their hearts.
 
Spanning thirty years, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Venice Beach, California, and lands in between and far beyond, Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow is a dazzling and intricately imagined novel that examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love. Yes, it is a love story, but it is not one you have read before.

This book is best for adult readers.