Welcome to Nonfiction Monday

Welcome to Nonfiction Monday! This week, I'm starting a new series featuring nonfiction about artists, including lots of picture book biographies. First up, a review of The Fantastic Jungles of Henri Rousseau by Michelle Markel (illustrated by Amanda Hall; Eerdmans, 2012). Sneak preview: I loved it. That's Hall's illustration of the self-taught Rousseau at the top of this post.

Please leave a comment with a link to your Nonfiction Monday post (and a brief description if you'd like). I'll round up the posts here throughout the day. Thanks for participating in this edition of Nonfiction Monday!

Early birds
Tara at A Teaching Life has a review of A Strange Place to Call Home--all about some animals who call dangerous habitats home.

Laura Salas has a review of Jeanette Winter's The Watcher.

A handful of reviews of The Giant Who Humbugged America by Jim Murphy (Scholastic, 2012), at Ms. Yingling Reads, Shelf-employed, and The Nonfiction Detectives.

Mid-morning
Jennifer at the Jean Little Library reviews a classic Jim Arnosky guide, The Brook Book.

Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect is sharing a review of Planting the Wild Garden.

Sue at Archimedes Notebook is interrupting her compost-turning to review Yucky Worms by Vivian French--with lots of hands-on explorations for young naturalists.

Margo at The Fourth Musketeer has a review of the new biography The Bronte Sisters: The Brief Lives of Charlotte, Emily, and Anne by Catherine Reef. It will be released next month.

Jeanne at True Tales & a Cherry on Top features Play Ball, Jackie by Stephen Krensky.

Noontime
Shirley of SimplyScience reviews Animals: A Visual Encyclopedia from DK.

Abby the Librarian has a review of Superman Versus the Ku Klux Klan by Rick Bowers.

Roberta's cat reviewed Minette's Feast by Susanna Reich and gave it four paws at Wrapped in Foil.

Holly has a fun book called Poopendous! by Artie Bennett at Bookscoops this week.

Tammy of Apples with Many Seeds is looking at Popville today.

Evening edition
Bookends is reviewing Jim Murphy's Invincible Microbe: Tuberculosis and the Never-Ending Search for a Cure.

All About the Books with Janet Squires features Space, Stars, and the Beginning of Time: What the Hubble Telescope Saw by Elaine Scott.

Self-identified science geek Wendie Old features a newspaper article about the people who drive the Mars Rover, Curiosity, at Wendie's Wanderings today.

At Booktalking, Anastasia Suen is reading The Everything Guide to Study Skills: Strategies, tips, and tools you need to succeed in school! by Cynthia C. Muchnick.

Fairies and changelings

I'm currently reading (among other things) Some Kind of Fairy Tale, a grownup fantasy by British author Graham Joyce (Doubleday, 2012). It's not a changeling story, at least not so far, but a kidnapped-by-the-fairies one, in which teenaged Tara Martin disappears into a dense forest known as the Outwoods, only to return twenty years--or is it six months?--later.

Forests are my favorite magical places (castles or old houses are a close second), and Tara's description of the forest on the day she disappeared is especially evocative:

After a while I found a rock covered in brilliant green moss and orange lichen. I sat among the bluebells and put my head back on the mossy pillow of the rock.

The bluebells made such a pool that the earth had become like water, and all the trees and bushes seemed to have grown out of the water. And the sky above seemed to have fallen down on to the earth floor, and I didn't know if the sky was earth or the earth was water. [42]

Then a man on a pretty white horse appears, and you know that boundaries are going to be crossed. As it turns out (I'm on page 132), they are crossed in ways I'm not so interested in reading about. Instead I'm rereading my favorite Zilpha Keatley Snyder book, The Changeling (Atheneum, 1970): "I am a princess from the Land of the Green Sky," Ivy said. "I have discovered the Doorway to Space."

The Changeling isn't a fantasy book, although Snyder did eventually write the Green-Sky Trilogy (beginning with Below the Root; Atheneum, 1978) based on the Tree People game that Martha and Ivy play in Bent Oaks Grove. But Ivy herself is such a magical character, I almost believed that she was a changeling. And that I was, too.

[Why, why is The Changeling out-of-print? I'm adding it to my list of books to reprint when I start my own small press.]

Martin de Porres, the rose in the desert

I wish I knew what drew Gary D. Schmidt, better known for realistic middle grade fiction such as The Wednesday Wars (a 2008 Newbery Honor book) and Okay for Now (2011), to the story of Martin de Porres, the first black saint in the Americas (actually, Schmidt tells us, Martin was the son of an African mother and a Spanish nobleman, born in Lima and educated by his father in Ecuador). The author's note at the back of Martin de Porres: The Rose in the Desert (illustrated by David Diaz; Clarion, 2012) is no help.

Schmidt's text, however, emphasizes Martin's humility and service to the poor as well as his love of animals (the note does tell us that Martin is patron saint of, among other things, social justice, public education, and animal shelters). And David Diaz illuminates Martin's story with his distinctive mixed-media illustrations, in what the Horn Book calls "Latin American hues [?] of red, turquoise, gold, and brown."

My favorite image is more subdued: It's night. Martin, in his black-and white Dominican habit, carries a basket of bread. He has a brown dog at his heels. Two silvery angels guide his way.

Listen to Origami Yoda, you should

Not the finger puppet that counsels students at McQuarrie Middle School (although you could do worse than follow his advice), but the audio of Tom Angleberger's The Strange Case of Origami Yoda (Recorded Books, 2011; Amulet, 2010). We listened to Origami Yoda (and its sequel, Darth Paper Strikes Back, which is even better) while on vacation last week and highly recommend it to everyone who loves Star Wars and has ever been (or will ever be) in middle school.

Origami Yoda has some of our favorite audio features--namely multiple narrators, only one of which we didn't like, and an episodic plot (we were mostly making short trips in the car). Bonus: it's funny. And for a couple of hours, the kids only argued over who got to read The Secret of the Fortune Wookiee first when we got home (I won).