Courage, hope, devastation. All of this and more can be found as you follow the story of Lucas, our “Petite Eclair.” A daring story of rebellion that will appeal to fans of Alan Gratz and Ruta Sepetys. Sara Pennypacker made me yearn for the safety and happiness for every character and had my heart racing …
Gratz takes the reader right into the duality of Berlin during the 1936 Olympics — a city being purged of any ‘undesirable’ citizens to put on a good show for the world. Gratz does not shy away from the comparison between 1936 Germany and 2025 America. This is a timely book that every middle-grade reader, …
America in the years leading into WW2 went through astonishing twists and turns in the efforts of homegrown Nazis and Fascists, who worked with great coordination and sophistication to destroy Democracy and install authoritarian rule. Their primary tools were propaganda, misinformation, and overwhelming antisemitism, and their funding was largely from the Nazi regime. Among their …
Yours Cheerfully: the best possible antidote for the blahs, the doldrums, all slumps, but also effective against letdowns and general malaise. Loved. Every. Word. —Bonnie Garmus, author of Lessons in Chemistry This book, the sequel to Dear Mrs. Bird, can be read as a stand-alone or in sequence. It is also a staff pick of Karen …
It begins in Paris. A painter studiously works to cover a canvass with a portrait of his wife– Josette– to cover the painting that is already in place but must now be protected. For this is 1944 and art is being ruined, stolen and destroyed. From there, we move to the present and the search …
HE HADN’T PREPARED me for the house, for how wildly inappropriate a dwelling it was for a man who was in a wheel-chair. Stacked like a tea-tray of sandwiches on a sopping wet hill in Queen Anne, it climbed higgledy-piggledy into a thicket of conifers, and somewhere, up there, among the shaggy, dripping green, was …
I am a sucker for historical fiction based on fact, particularly if it involves World War II. Add to that mix, people who make their living dealing with books, such as booksellers and librarians and I will jump on the book. Alan Hlad has written just such a book. The title is The Book Spy. It …
No matter how you look at it, The Holocaust was, and remains, a stain on human existence. Many authors have tried, via fiction and nonfiction, to portray what Jews, and others considered as “non-human” by the Nazis, went through while that evil was in control of Germany. None more eloquently than Lucy Adlington in her …
When FDR declared war in 1941, a plot was set in motion that could rock the world. Unknown to many, German agents were in the U.S. One of them – Martin Browning – had a mission to go to D.C. and assassinate FDR during the lighting of the national Christmas tree. And as it turns …
It’s time for a Thursday Theme, where we shine a spotlight on some of the titles featured in this week’s Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association regional bestseller list. For this week’s theme, I picked “the best and the brightest” because I noticed titles with words that sounded like stellar report card comments and others that had …
