Fauna

Indie Corner – Claire Datnow

Back to the Indie Corner series I’m delighted to present Claire Datnow as this month’s Indie Corner author. Claire was born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa, which ignited her love for the natural world and diverse cultures. Claire taught creative writing to gifted and talented students in the Birmingham, […]

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Indie Corner – Ryan Mizzen

Back to the Indie Corner series February’s Indie Corner looks at the amazing Ryan Mizzen and his children’s fiction Hedgey-A and the Honey Bees! Mary: Tell us about yourself–your life so far and how you got started in writing. What else have you written or published? Ryan: My childhood was […]

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Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann

LATTICING one cherry pie after another, an Ohio housewife tries to bridge the gaps between reality and the torrent of meaningless info that is the United States of America. She worries about her children, her dead parents, African elephants, the bedroom rituals of “happy couples”, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and […]

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Rabbit Island, Elvira Navarro

Combining the gritty surrealism of David Lynch with the explosive interior meditations of Clarice Lispector, the stories in Elvira Navarro’s Rabbit Island traverse the fickle, often terrifying terrain between madness and freedom. In the title story, a so-called “non-inventor” conducts an experiment on an island inhabited exclusively by birds and […]

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Strange Birds, Celia C. Perez

Strange Birds: A Field Guide to Ruffling Feathers, Celia C. Perez Middle Grade Fiction Reviewed by Kimberly Christensen In Sabal Palms, Florida, many girls join the Floras, a service organization begun in the early 1900s by some of the founders of the city. Even though her grandmother was a proud […]

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Forest World, Margarita Engle

Middle Grade Fiction Reviewed by Kimberly Christensen Edver and his mother left Cuba when he was just a baby. His father stayed behind and Edver hasn’t seen him since. But when relations between the United States and Cuba finally permit unrestricted travel between the two countries, Edver’s mom sends him […]

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Indie Corner – Ian Boyd and Gary Luck

Back to the Indie Corner series I was happy to meet Ian Boyd and Gary Luck by way of their new children’s novel Melody Finch, a story about the hardships of drought in Australia’s Murray Darling Basin river system, as seen through the eyes of its native wildlife. Ian Boyd’s […]

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Sky Dance, John D. Burns

Full title: Sky Dance: Fighting for the Wild in the Scottish Highlands In his first two bestselling books, The Last Hillwalker and Bothy Tales, John D. Burns invited readers to join him in the hills and wild places of Scotland. In Sky Dance, he returns to that world to ask […]

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Talking Animals, Joni Murphy

In this novel, at last, nature kvetches and grieves, while talking animals offer us a kind of solace in the guise of dumb jokes. This is mass extinction as told by BoJack Horseman. This is The Fantastic Mr. Fox journeying through Kafka’s Amerika. This is dogs and cats, living together. […]

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Where the Oceans Hide their Dead, John Yunker

Click here to return to the series The global novel exists, not as a genre separated from and opposed to other kinds of fiction, but as a perspective that governs the interpretation of experience. In this way, it is faithful to the way the global is actually lived–not through the […]

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A Peculiar Peril, Jeff VanderMeer

Jonathan Lambshead stands to inherit his deceased grandfather’s overstuffed mansion—a veritable cabinet of curiosities–once he and two schoolmates catalog its contents. But the three soon discover that the house is filled with far more than just oddities: It holds clues linking to an alt-Earth called Aurora, where the notorious English […]

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The Suicide Season, Jeremy Gadd

Click here to return to the series The global novel exists, not as a genre separated from and opposed to other kinds of fiction, but as a perspective that governs the interpretation of experience. In this way, it is faithful to the way the global is actually lived–not through the […]

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Song for a Whale, Lynne Kelly

Reviewed by Kimberly Christensen Song for a Whale by Lynne Kelly Middle Grade Fiction Sometimes a book just stops you in your tracks and demands that you sit with it, pushing aside as many demands of “real life” as you can in order to lose yourself in the book’s world. […]

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Split Tooth, Tanya Taqaq

This book is being read and discussed at the Cambridge Ecofiction Bookclub in January 2020. According to Goodreads, Veering back and forth between the grittiest features of a small arctic town, the electrifying proximity of the world of animals, and ravishing world of myth, Tanya Tagaq explores a world where […]

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Ned Hayes’ The Eagle Tree

The Eagle Tree by Ned Hayes (Little A, 2016) Young adult contemporary fiction Review by Kimberly Christensen To say that fourteen-year-old March Wong loves trees is an understatement. He climbs multiple trees per day and can cite endless amount of information about trees, from information about their species to how […]

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