I’m back with some new books to explore fun STEM concepts. I really miss having a Discovery Club at my library… maybe I’ll use these as a way to gauge some interest again.

Tree Spirits (2nd Ed., Revised), by Louise Wannier/Illustrated by April Tatiana Jackson, (Sept. 2023, True Roses Books), $24.95, ISBN: 9780990997658

Ages 3-8

This book was published in September of last year, but I’ve just seen a copy and wanted to include it here. Incorporating nature and art, Wannier creates fun rhymes that encourage readers to think and wonder at different photos of trees. The repeated questions invite readers to look at each photo, considering the swirls and bumps, shapes and bends of the featured trees. The author offers her point of view, and Jackson, with a turn of the page, offers an overlaid illustration of an animal in the tree. Color photos are crisp, with texture and detail. The rhyming text incorporates different emotions, making this a helpful inclusion in social-emotional collections as well as nature science and STEM/STEAM collections. A nice additional purchase.

Benedict revisits the terrain of her nonfiction account Map of Hope and Sorrow (with Eyad Awwadawnan) for a complex and heartbreaking story of Syrians living at a refugee camp on the Greek island of Samos. The plot involves a search for a refugee named Farah and her five-year-old daughter, Dunia, who were separated from fellow refugees Amina, Leila, and Nafisa when the boat carrying mother and child capsized at sea.

“Full of eerie atmospheric writing and many unanswered questions, poet Johnson’s fiction debut both disturbs and absorbs. Annika Rose is 17 and living in the middle of nowhere in northern Minnesota with her widower father. Through short vignettes, readers experience Annika’s work on the farm and her awkward relationship with her father. When a new couple, Tina and Jesse move in nearby, Annika’s and her father’s worlds are turned upside down…

Fluid states of being

Essays on and by David Mason

by Geoff Page

American/Australian poet, David Mason, is also a verse novelist, librettist, and essayist. His latest collection of essays, Incarnation and Metamorphosis: Can literature change us?, is clearly the work of a man who enjoys literature as he finds it rather than as he is told to see it. He is not afraid to declare in his introduction that ‘[s]ome literary works are better than others’. It is the works themselves, rather than the author’s origins or identity, with which he is concerned. In the first half of Incarnation and Metamorphosis, Mason concentrates on the issues that the phrase ‘better than others’ implies. The second half is devoted mainly to a number of writers whose work currently risks being undervalued or misunderstood to their disadvantage.

A good example of the latter actually appears in the first half of the book in the essay, ‘Beloved Immoralist’, on the novelist Joyce Cary (1888–1957), who is much less well known now than he once was. Mason reintroduces us to Cary by way of his late father, Jim Mason, an Iwo Jima veteran, who, though not particularly literary, was devoted to Gulley Jimson, the memorable hero of Cary’s novel, The Horse’s Mouth.

‘Beloved Immoralist’ is the sort of criticism that Mason does very well, managing somehow to run the lives of his own father, and those of Joyce Cary and Gulley Jimson, together in ways that illuminate all three. While not the sort of article that would appear in a scholarly journal, it is a powerful reminder of the role certain key books can play in our lives. A nice evocation of this is Mason’s description of his father’s original copy: ‘One of the few possessions I retain of my life in America is my father’s copy of The Horse’s Mouth. Published in paperback in 1957 by Grosset’s Universal Library, it cost $1.45.’ This kind of particularity is a feature of Mason’s own writing as well of that of the authors he admires throughout the book.

Set in 2018, Benedict’s latest follows a group of women who have sought refuge on the Greek island of Samos.

The book begins with the frantic rescue of an infant found at sea by Hilma, an American tourist recuperating from a mysterious trauma suffered at her home in New York. Switching among Hilma’s perspective and the voices of four refugees living in a sprawling, squalid refugee camp, the novel depicts the crises of each woman. Amina is a 19-year-old who has been recently released from one of Bashar al-Assad’s torturous prisons in Syria, haunted by the past and longing for her mother. Leila, a Syrian widow with two young sons, is desperately trying to locate her daughter, Farah, and infant granddaughter, captured by smugglers in Turkey. Nafisa, a Sudanese woman who has endured civil war, gang rape, and the murder of her family, is suffering from increasingly poor health. Reversing Homer’s Odyssey, Benedict illustrates the obstacles each refugee faces in her quest to leave home, capturing the myriad tragedies that have befallen them in frank but empathetic prose.

The book’s title, What Small Sound, refers to the sounds her ears can no longer hear. The title poem takes place in an audiologist’s booth, where clutching for sounds, she thinks about the distant moons of Jupiter, which she is “afraid to look at through the telescope, the stillness out there strong / enough to suck me in.” Between those distant moons and her body lies the rest of the world, the shared universe of humanity clinging together in the vastness of space. What makes it difficult to see such sharedness is the fact that we each inhabit our own version of the world. As one celebrates, another suffers, each blind to the reality inhabited by the other.

SPRING IN SIBERIA: A Novel

by Artem Mozgovoy
Red Hen Press. 256 pages, $18.95

Alexey put on layers of clothes, readying himself for the long winter walk in deep Siberia to his elementary school, the Palace of Knowledge. Called “alien” there due to his large head, he spent time alone with thoughts of escaping the swirling antagonisms. Physical Culture courses were the bane of his existence. Instead, he buried himself in the school library, where poetry books and an English language program caught his interest. He was hooked, and he found his way to the Pioneers’ House of Culture, where he recited a poem by Pushkin, winning a spot at a summer camp for gifted children. That led to his acceptance into a prestigious gymnasium for elite students.

Alexey met Andrey there, an older and wiser student who became his constant companion. After spending time together, Andrey whispered: “I’m afraid I love you.” Nothing had prepared Alexey for this declaration, though in his heart he knew he felt the same toward Andrey. Through long walks, tram rides, and discussions, Andrey’s ideas about literature, music, and culture flooded Alexey’s mind. At graduation, they joined a summer tour of Moscow, Berlin, Paris, and Amsterdam. Encouraged by Andrey to run off and remain in the West, seeking asylum as members of a sexual minority, Alexey balked at the idea: he could not do it.

Returning to Siberia alone, Alexey wondered what happened to his friend Andrey: did his dream come true? Meanwhile, he intently studied English. A national contest to write a best essay in English offered the prize of a year’s study in New York City. Alexey met the challenge and won a place. He was confident now on his own pathway out of Russia. He would immerse himself in writing, finding a way to stay in the West, never to return to Siberia. —Joe Ryan