Me and Marvin Gardens by A.S. King Middle Grade Fiction Published by Scholastic Trades Review by Kimberly Christensen Everything around twelve-year-old Obe Devlin is changing. New subdivisions keep springing up behind his house on the acres of land that once belonged to the Devlin family. Obe’s former best friend, Tommy, […]
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This review may contain spoilers. Wilder Girls (Penguin Random House, July 9, 2019) helps to usher in a type of wild fiction that deals with ecological collapse. In the story, teenagers at the Raxter School for Girls are quarantined on an island off the coast of Maine. They’ve been sequestered […]
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Same Sun Here By Silas House and Neela Vaswani Middle Grade Fiction Review by Kimberly Christensen When middle schoolers River and Meena become penpals, the two students form a fast friendship. Meena recently immigrated to New York City from India, and lives in a small flat with her mother and […]
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The Thing About Jellyfish By Ali Benjamin Published September 22, 2015 by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers Middle Grade Fiction Review by Kimberly Christensen The summer before seventh grade, Suzanne’s former best friend, Frannie, drowns while on vacation. Frannie and Suzy’s friendship had derailed in that most painful of […]
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Saving Wonder by Mary Knight Hardcover, 288 pages Published February 23rd, 2016, by Scholastic Review by Kimberly Christensen Curley Hines and his grandpa love their mountains and their way of life, even though mining accidents that happened on the mountains claimed the lives of their family members. Still, most everyone […]
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Midnight at the Electric by Jodi Lynn Anderson Hardcover, 259 pages Published June 13, 2017 by HarperCollins Reviewed by Kimberly Christensen Midnight at the Electric interweaves three different generations of protagonists to tell the heartbreaking and simultaneously hopeful stories of young women living through times of societal upheaval. The stories […]
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The Final Six by Alexandra Monir Hardcover, 352 pages Published March 6, 2018 by HarperTeen Reviewed by Kimberly Christensen The Final Six is a young adult science fiction novel that leapfrogs the reader into a dystopian future in which space colonization is humanity’s best hope for survival. With megastorms, rising […]
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Novel by Ohio University emeritus prof asks hard questions. Plot set in familiar-seeming college town. © Jim Phillips, Athens News, Athens, Ohio, USA (June 6, 2018), p. 15 Ted Bernard’s novel Late-K Lunacy opens in a small college town in the foothills of Appalachian Ohio, on the banks of the […]
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Review of A Rain of Night Birds, by Deena Metzger Author: Mary Fillmore To read Deena Metzger’s compelling novel A Rain of Night Birds is to enter the consciousness of two people who take climate chaos and its consequences in deadly earnest. Both are professional climatologists who know the numbers, […]
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ECO-FICTION THE INVISIBLE PARADISE: BACK TO THE GARDEN BY CLARA HUME “There is no immobile absolute, no spiritual ‘beyond’.” -Henri Lefebvre by poet Tom Hibbard, May 3, 2017 The term “eco-fiction” is, like other terms that describe types and categories, one for which a group of people are attempting to […]
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In a world that’s quickly heating up and drying up, you can’t go home again—even if you never leave—Clive Thompson Barbara Kingsolver’s 2012 novel Flight Behavior was, according to The Globe and Mail, the first novel that dealt “specifically, determinedly and overtly with climate change. [And] only Kingsolver could pull […]
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Globalism, micro and macro: Carolyn Welch’s California Poems and Felix Guattari’s The Three Ecologies Genesis and Resingularization by Tom Hibbard (Author of The Sacred River of Consciousness) “With the nomad, on the contrary, it is deterritorialization that constitutes the relation to the earth, to such a degree that the nomad […]
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Interstellar is an epic science fiction film that, though reminiscent of classic earlier sci-fi such as 2001: A Space Odyssey, speculates on what happens after such modern crises as climate change, over-population, and food/crop failures have wrought foreseeable death to the human species on planet Earth. The focus is not […]
Read MoreReview by Nina Munteanu Margaret Atwood’s Booker Award nominee Oryx and Crake is a sharp-edged, dark contemplative essay on the premise of where the myopia of greed, power and obsession with “self-image” and its outstripping of ethics and morality may take us. Replete with sordid subject matter and unlikeable but […]
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In The Practice of the Wild, Gary Snyder mentions Grandmother wisdom, the kind of sagacity that our grandmothers pass on to us. This etiquette-knowledge that we grow up with is often in confluence with other systems that tell us how to get ahead in the world—not how to maintain integrity. […]
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