by Jessica J. Lee
"Plants illuminate facets of life and our world," writes Jessica J. Lee in the introduction to her exquisite, haunting third book, Dispersals, a collection of essays examining the movement of people and plants. In 14 linked essays, Lee (Two Trees Make a Forest) explores the notion of "native" and "invasive" species; turns a zoom lens onto mosses and other tiny but powerful plants; and considers terms like rooted and migration in light of her own Welsh-Taiwanese-Canadian ancestry
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by Lyn Slater
In How to Be Old: Lessons in Living Boldly from the Accidental Icon, Lyn Slater genially chronicles not just one reinvention but two: her third-act transition from academic to fashion influencer, followed by her shift to becoming something else entirely.
Slater, a working-class child of New York, was a professor of social work when, on the cusp of age 60, she decided to study fashion. In 2014, at 61, she launched a fashion blog that caught fire. Slater appeared in an ad for Valentino eyewear, signed with a
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by Thao Lam
Plenty of picture books encourage young readers to go outside and have an adventure, but Thao Lam's wordless and wondrous One Giant Leap raises the bar by presenting an out-of-doors setting that's also out of this world--at least in the mind of one imaginative child.
The book begins with a kid suiting up to go out in the cold: snowsuit, boots, gloves, hat. With a tweak of the child's imagination, the ensemble becomes a space suit. Once outside, the kid weightlessly bounces across an uninhabited planet (that
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by Peter Wohlleben, trans. by Jane Billinghurst
A 9,550-year-old spruce in Sweden, the dwarf trees of Lapland in Finland, and so much more: Wisdom from the Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, translated from the German by Jane Billinghurst, revels in the everyday drama unfolding in forests as trees go about their business of enticing bees with scented blossoms, pumping water into land-locked areas, and sharing news with each other through a dense underground network referred to as the "wood wide web."
Wisdom from the Hidden Life of Trees is an enchanting,
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by Helen Humphreys
Henry David Thoreau lurks in English lit syllabi like a formidable giant, one to be emulated, revered, or perhaps even ridiculed. In Followed by the Lark, Helen Humphreys (And a Dog Called Fig) humanizes this great man through a series of vignettes starting when Thoreau is five years old and first sees Walden, which was "the first pond he'd ever known, so it might as well have been the wild ocean."
Humphreys, drawing upon Thoreau's extensive journals, crafts a novel of his life, showing the hurts, isolations,
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by Samantha Mabry
Samantha Mabry (Tigers, Not Daughters) deftly blends psychological horror and magical realism in this engrossing, deeply unsettling YA novel about how a teen girl's efforts to find her friend are stymied by the missing girl's disconcerting young housemates.
High school graduate Case has returned to the Texas county where she grew up to visit her best friend, Drea. When Case arrives at the ancient, ivy-covered house, tucked deep in the forest, where Drea has been living with a group of young people, however,
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