New Books

Hello and Happy New Year!

Today I have four new books and I do mean new. They all have a copyright date of 2019. They are all books for older students. I have found that sometimes it is a bit more difficult to find books for older students that they might like.

There is a nice variety of genres represented here. I really don’t like to assign gender to books, but these are great ‘boy’ books.


Secret Soldiers by Kelly Hutton. 2019. 306 pp.
I love the tag line on this book. “Four Boys. One Deadly Mission.” Just that line got my attention. This book is about the young British boys who served in the first World War as tunnellers underground. These underage boys wanted to fight and help the war effort and lied about their ages in order to do so. Secret Soldiers follows the story of Thomas, a thirteen-year-old coal miner who enlists in order to find his older brother who is missing in action. He and three other boys are assigned to help dig tunnels beneath the battlefield. The author’s note at the end tells more about the Tunnellers’ Memorial and books that she used for some of her information.

Fighting for the Forest by P. O’Connell Pearson. 2019. 171 pp.
I admit it. I am a visual learner and the covers of books attracts me first. This cover did not. But I have learned to try to look past the cover and when I saw the center medallion and saw “Civilian Conservation Corp”, I knew that this might be a keeper. This is the story of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps or CCC program. The Civilian Conservation Corps was established during the Great Depression. This government agency helped save the United States from economic collapse and environmental disaster by building parks, reclaiming forests, planting around three billion trees, and restoring millions of acres of land between 1933 and 1942.
This book is like reading a documentary. Photographs and sidebar information help us to understand the time period and what people endured during the Great Depression.

The Poison Eaters by Gail Jarrow. 2019. 134 pp.
Come on! Eating poison?! What a pull to check out a book! In looking closer, we see this is about danger and fraud in our food and drugs. Still interesting. The cover illustration is perfect to grab attention, too. A human skull and the crossbones are a fork and knife.
I was unaware that until about a hundred years ago, chemicals used in embalming corpses were routinely added to foods by unregulated and unethical companies. One example tells of borax and boric acid sprinkled on meet and broken eggs to stop bacteria growth and covered up the smell of decay. Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley campaigned to protect consumers from harmful foods and drugs. The title of the book comes from the volunteers who helped test food additives and were dubbed ‘poison eaters’. Thanks to Dr. Wiley, we have much safer foods, drugs, and cosmetics.

Disaster Strikes! By Jeffrey Kluger. 2019. 208 pp.
Another interesting tag line here. “The most dangerous space missions of all time.” Over Christmas break, my husband and I watched a 13 part documentary of the space missions. We both grew up in Florida during the beginning of the space program and my husband’s father did some work at Cape Canaveral, so it is really interesting to us.
Since the title has the word “disaster” in it, you can guess that this tells about the perils of the space race. We learn of minor problems and the tragedies of the men and women who have participated in the space program from the author of Apollo 13.


I hope you have a great week.

Audrey