Articles by: Mary Woodbury

Flip the Bird, Kym Brunner

Gr 7 Up—Scoot over, Don Calame—Brunner is about to join you on your perch. This is not a book for the squeamish. It’s about falconry at its finest, but it is also about much more than that. On his way to capture his first hawk, Mercer Buddie meets the girl […]

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Hot Season, Susan DeFreitas

The three main characters in Hot Season, the debut novel by former Prescott resident, Susan DeFreitas, are idealistic students at a college known for its environmental programs. They struggle with their idealism, daily living, and how to make the country a better place. –DCourier In the high desert of Arizona, […]

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Take Wing and Fly Here, Priyanka Kumar

Take Wing and Fly Here follows two avid birders who have set out on their “Big Year,” which is a personal challenge to spot and identify as many bird species as possible in one year. She explores the reasons that people collect such sightings and the impacts it can have […]

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Climate Change Author Spotlight – Nathaniel Rich

Back to the series   In this ongoing series, we provide evidence that serious authors are tackling climate change in fiction. Essayist, editor, novelist, and critic Nathaniel Rich penned the novel Odds Against Tomorrow, which was published in 2013 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Rich describes his novel as a […]

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TreeVolution, Tara Campbell

Campbell is the recipient of the Washington, D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities’ 2016 Larry Neal Writers’ Award, Adult Fiction and 2016 Mayor’s Arts Award for Outstanding New Artist. …exciting, entertaining, thought-provoking, with an upside-down look at the current plague of people on our planet. A must-read for fans […]

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The Willows, Algernon Blackwood

Author: Algernon Blackwood (public domain copyright) Publication Date: 1907 as part of The Listener and Other Stories Back to the Dragonfly Library Note: the following excerpt takes place midway into the short novella and may contain spoilers. They first became properly visible, these huge figures, just within the tops of […]

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The Willows, Algernon Blackwood

Discover The Willows Back to the Dragonfly Library I asked the WeirdLit subreddit about their recommendations for ecological weird fiction and received a great number of suggestions. Many of the recs were more like short stories or novellas, rather than novels; to whit, one of them, The Willows, by Algernon […]

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Wondering, the Way Is Made – Luke F.D. Marsden

Goodreads Reviews Luke F. D. Marsden’s road novel, Wondering, the Way is Made, is a captivating literary journey through South America for wanderers and wonderers. A formative experience in Africa opens the eyes of Joss Douglas to the flaws in his meticulously scheduled way of life. Some years later, in […]

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Borne, Jeff VanderMeer

In Borne, the epic new novel from Jeff VanderMeer, author of the acclaimed, bestselling Southern Reach Trilogy, a young woman named Rachel survives as a scavenger in a ruined, dangerous city of the near future. The city is littered with discarded experiments from the Company—a bio-tech firm now seemingly derelict—and […]

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Snow Summer, Kit Peel

Two years ago writer Kit Peel returned home to his family farm on the hills above Pateley Bridge after years abroad to set up NiddFest, a literary festival in Nidderdale celebrating books on nature. He’s just published his written his first novel, Snow Summer, a classic children’s novel of old-fashioned […]

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Interview with Nina Munteanu, Ecologist and Author

Part XV. Women Working in Nature and the Arts Originally published on October 31, 2016, this article is updated with the news that Nina’s Water Is…The Meaning of Water, is recommended by Margaret Atwood in “The Year in Reading,” published by the New York Times. Nina Munteanu is a Canadian […]

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Beef, Mat Blackwell

Author: © Mat Blackwell Publication Date: May 23, 2016 Type: Novel Ordering: Amazon Kindle, Paperback Antisocial Media: Author Website Back to the Dragonfly Library Beef (excerpt) Despite Luka’s wonderful advice, the party had been exactly the awkward ordeal Royston had been expecting, for the one hour and ten minutes he’d […]

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Interview with Gary Robson, Who Pooped in the Park? Series

Gary D. Robson is an American author from Red Lodge, Montana. He is best known for his children’s picture book series Who Pooped in the Park?, which teaches children about animal scat and tracks. The books have fictional characters who learn from each other as well as guides. The series […]

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The Terranauts, T.C. Boyle

Ultimately, human emotions eclipse the project’s “noble experiment” premise and things begin to fall apart. What does that portend for the possible colonization of the moon or Mars, where pioneers would live in similar facilities? “It says that with global warming, the massive dislocation of peoples, tribal warfare and battles […]

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Climate Change Author Spotlight – Margaret Atwood

Back to the series Popular author Margaret Atwood called climate change the “everything change.” Atwood’s novels are generally about the human experience, at times notably the female’s, but she also writes about this everything change.  Her genre-busting books range from literary to speculative. Global warming occurs prominently in Atwood’s MaddAddam […]

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