Trying to get a young sports-fan into reading? This has to be the coolest-looking sports biography ever. Catch the plastic-lined lenticular cover with three shifting views of Sandy Koufax pitching. Feast your eyes on the silver-gray graphite illustrations, bursting with movement, with red lines highlighting the blue and white Dodgers... Read More

Just when you think you’ve read about every possible subject, someone comes up with a biography about someone you never heard of who did something groundbreaking. Think Wilson “Willie” Bentley (who was the first person to photograph snowflakes, as described in Snowflake Bentley by Jacqueline Briggs Martin, which... Read More

Rick Riordan’s plunge into ancient Egyptian mythology, twenty-first century-style, begins with a warning: “The following is a transcript of a digital recording. . . It seems impossible that the two young narrators are telling the truth, but you, the reader, must decide for yourself.” Fourteen-year-old Carter Kane and his twelve-year-old... Read More

Things That Are Normal: Sixth grader, Miranda, lives on the Upper West Side with her single parent mom, a paralegal. She and Mom's boyfriend, Richard, AKA Mr. Perfect, are helping Mom practice for her appearance in three weeks (on April 27, 1979) on the TV game show "The $20,000 Pyramid,"... Read More

When you delve into David Macaulay’s extraordinary and encyclopedic ode to engineering, The New Way Things Work (1998), you are awed by the way he zeroes in on an object and explains, in words and pictures, how it is put together. Macaulay’s full-page pen and ink and watercolor illustrations makes... Read More