Annette Bay Pimentel

Review

20Jun

Grandma Gatewood Hikes the Appalachian Trail

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Grandma Gatewood Hikes the Appalachian Trail is a wonderful summer book. It’s about a gutsy grandma who in 1955 decided she’d like to be the first woman to hike the Appalachian Trail. So she did! The back matter explains that the 1955 hike was actually her second attempt–the first time she tried she got lost […]

Tags: Abrams nature women women athletes

13Jun

The Brilliant Deep

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

The Brilliant Deep: Rebuilding the World’s Coral Reefs by Kate Messner is a beautiful book about one man’s commitment to restoring imperiled coral reefs. It follows Ken Nedimyer through his growing passion for the ocean and his commitment to improving its ecology. It’s a hopeful book about the ways humans can work to reverse damage wrought […]

6Jun

Who Says Women Can’t be Computer Programmers?

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

The library is suddenly full of Ada Lovelace books: Ada Lovelace, Poet of Science; Ada Byron Lovelace and the Thinking Machine; and Ada’s Ideas. So I was surprised at how much I liked the new one, Who Says Women Can’t Be Computer Programmers? The Story of Ada Lovelace, by Tanya Lee Stone. Successful nonfiction picture books have a tight focus […]

Tags: 18th century women Christy Ottaviano Books women in science

30May

Memorial Day Picture Books

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Memorial Day marks the end of the school year and the beginning of summer for me. I’ve been trying to think of Memorial Day picture books, though, that actually commemorate Memorial Day as Memorial Day. Rolling Thunder by Kate Messner explains in the Author’s Note: Every year on Memorial Day weekend, veterns and their supporters gather […]

Tags: Candlewick family history Scholastic

16May

Bloom

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

If a biography is written in first person, I guess it’s not technically a biography. But Bloom, a picture book about the life of Elsa Schiaparelli, manages to tell the story beautifully with that first person frame. On the opening pages we learn that Schiaparelli was not the baby boy her parents had been hoping for: […]

Tags: fashion Harper Collins

9May

All That Trash

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

I love Meghan McCarthy’s new book, All That Trash. It’s about the 1987 New York garbage barge scandal. That year, a barge full of garbage floated around the Atlantic Ocean, looking for a place to dump it. Eventually, it ended up back where it started, but in the process it illuminated for the entire nation both […]

Tags: environmentalism Paula Wiseman Books

2May

Joan Procter, Dragon Doctor

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Joan Procter, Dragon Doctor tells the story of a self-taught herpetologist who transformed the ways reptiles are displayed in zoos and helped introduce the Komodo Dragon to the Western world. The book starts and ends with proper British tea parties, but since these are parties that Procter participates in, they are also reptile tea parties. […]

Tags: Alfred A. Knopf animals female scientists women

25Apr

Anybody’s Game

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

When you read Anybody’s Game, I think you should start with its back matter. There, waiting patiently at the end of the book, is a wonderful essay that contextualizes the story. In 1950, Kathryn Johnston loved playing baseball, but no girls played on Little League teams. She sneaked her way onto a team. But the next […]

Tags: sports Whitman women

11Apr

Alabama Spitfire

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Alabama Spitfire tells the story of Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird. Roughly the first third of the story tells about her childhood. It does a good job of contextualizing the segregated town she lived in and devotes a lot of time to her friendship with–and spirited defense of!–Truman Capote. The next third […]

Tags: Balzer & Bray writers

4Apr

Miguel’s Brave Knight

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Miguel’s Brave Knight is picture book biography in verse by the National Young People’s Poet Laureate, Margarita Engle. It tells the story of Miguel Cervantes, the sixteenth century writer, famous for Don Quixote. Any picture book biography, but especially one in verse, has to be particular about what story it tells. A picture book doesn’t give […]

Tags: 16th Century Peachtree poetry writers

21Mar

One Fun Day with Lewis Carroll

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Words slide into the English language without our really thinking about where they come from. One Fun Day with Lewis Carroll points out, while telling the story of the author’s life, that sometimes those words are invented by individuals. The book starts in Carroll’s childhood and shows him playing with and amusing his younger siblings. When he […]

Tags: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt writers

14Mar

Nonfiction Picture Books about Three Women

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Nonfiction picture books about three women for Women’s History Month! Ordinary, Extraordinary Jane Austen surprised me. Why would an elementary student be interested in Jane Austen? But Deborah Hopkinson convinced me with her sweet biography that focuses on how very ordinary Jane was, and yet able to develop her talent in an extraordinary way by […]

Tags: 19th century women Balzer & Bray Calkins Creek musicians women writers

7Mar

Who Wants to Be a Princess?

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

I had the great pleasure of writing the dinosaur part of Amicus Publishing’s Do You Really Want to Meet… series. One of the tricky things about writing within an existing series is making your voice fit with other books in the series. At first I really struggled with the narrative voice for the dinosaur books–I was supposed […]

Tags: Henry Holt medieval

28Feb

Three American Stories

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Still working through my pile of 2017 books. Today I have three American stories. They’re from differen time periods, about different characters, and written in widely differing styles. Independence Cake by Deborah Hopkinson is another of her books inspired by fact but fueled by fiction. I love how she lays out the fictional aspect of […]

Tags: biography Capstone Press North South Books Schwartz & Wade

21Feb

STEM picture books

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Today I’m reading four STEM picture books published in 2017. They vary widely, but I enjoyed all of them. The Hidden Life of a Toad is a straightforward account of the life cycle of a toad, from egg to tadpole to toadlet to adult toad capable of reproduction. Every spread is headed by a date stamp: […]

Tags: argument Atheneum Charlesbridge Kids Can Press scaffolding STEM

14Feb

2017 Nonfiction Picture Books I’m Just Now Reading

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

I’m still scrambling to catch up with 2017 books (though maybe that will give my library time to get a few 2018 titles in…). Here are three 2017 nonfiction picture books I’m just now reading. All three titles have beautiful art depicting nighttime scenes: Nile Crossing is a surprising first-day-of-school book. The main character, Khepri, is […]

Tags: ancient civilizations artists back matter Eerdmans Holiday House Knopf slavery structure

31Jan

Robins: How They Grow Up

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Did you know that baby robins’ feathers are covered by a sheath when they first emerge and that the birds have to remove the sheath? Or that robin parents remove the baby’s feces from the nest with their mouths? Robins: How They Grow Up is full of fascinating natural history details like these. The book is […]

Tags: animals Clarion

24Jan

One Proud Penny

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

First person nonfiction picture books are hard to find. There was I, Fly. And now there’s One Proud Penny. This charming book, with the narration in the voice of a 1973 penny, imaginatively tells all about the life of a coin. We learn that coins are made in Philadelphia. We see how they are saved and spent […]

Tags: first person narration funny picture books Neal Porter Books

10Jan

Books about Birds of Prey

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

In my library stack this week were two picture books about birds of prey. Both books were written by the women who helped rescue them, and use the story of their experiences in helping create a life in captivity for their charges to show something about the basic biology of the animals. Hawk Mother tells […]

Tags: conservation female scientists Persnickety Web of Life wildlife

3Jan

Chef Roy Choi

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review Uncategorized

Chef Roy Choi and the Street Food Remix is another title about contemporary food producers by the Seattle publishing house Readers to Eaters. They’ve published nonfiction picture books about urban gardener Will Allen and celebrity chef Alice. This title is a biography of a Korean-American, Roy Choi, who cooked in haute cuisine restaurants until he […]

Tags: chefs Readers to Eaters

13Dec

Creature books

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

I love Jess Keating’s series “The World of Weird Animals.” I’m not the only one. Recently I checked out Pink is for Blobfish to use in a presentation; many of the pages were stuck together from all the sticky fingers that had loved that book to death. The books are brilliantly designed with compelling photos, deftly-written facts, […]

Tags: Alfred A. Knopf animals Holiday House

29Nov

Trail-blazing Female Artists

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Today I’m reading picture book biographies of two trail-blazing female artists: Zaha Hadid, an architect; and Amalia Hernandez, a dancer The World Is Not a Rectangle introduced me to Zaha Hadid. I loved learning about this architect I’d never heard of, and found myself falling down an Internet rabbit hole of looking at her designs! The […]

Tags: Abrams architect Beach Lane dancer women

22Nov

Immigrants, Refugees, and Kids’ Books

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

My all-time favorite Thanksgiving book is How Many Days to America? by Eve Bunting. It tells the story of refugees who come ashore in the US on Thanksgiving day. It’s a book about all the things I’m most proud of about my country–the way we have in the past welcomed refugees; the way our culture makes […]

Tags: Annick Press Chronicle immigration Kids Can Press refugees

15Nov

Strong Women and Men

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

I’ve been having fun gearing up for the release in February of my book about a remarkable female athlete, so it was fun this week to find other books about strong women and men. Long-Armed Ludy is about the 1922 women’s shot-put world record holder, Lucile (Ludy) Godbold. I loved the folksy, fun-to-read-aloud voice in […]

Tags: athletes Charlesbridge women athletes

8Nov

Frida Kahlo and her Animalitos

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Frida Kahlo and her Animalitos gives young readers an introduction to the artist’s life and work through the lens of her pets. This is an especially great choice since Kahlo’s animals so often appear in her art. The book opens in a way that will sway any animal lover: “This is the story of a little […]

Tags: animals artist North South Books

1Nov

Grand Canyon

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

(I’m jumping with joy that my Feb 2018 book, Girl Running, got a Kirkus star! Details here.) One of our great American resources is our national parks: Yosemite, Yellowstone, Grand Canyon…Of course those national parks have ended up in books for kids. Grand Canyon is an information-packed, elegantly structured picture book that uses text features to […]

Tags: national parks neal porte

25Oct

The Quest for Z

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

When I’m on the hunt for a nonfiction picture book topic, I’m drawn to the transcendent, to the tranformative…to the hero. I think most picture book writers are! But Greg Pizzoli seems to be making his mark in the nonfiction picture book world by writing about anti-heroes. In Tricky Vic, he profiled a con-man. In The Quest […]

Tags: explorer Viking

18Oct

Martí’s Song for Freedom

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

José Martí was an activist for Cuban independence in the late nineteenth century, but because of his political activities in Cuba, he was exiled. He ended up spending many years in the United States. Martí’s Song for Freedom tells the story of his life but also captures that duality of his movement between Cuba and the United […]

Tags: Central America Lee & Low poetry

11Oct

Margaret and the Moon

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Lot of recent books about female scientists! An eighteenth century astronomer. a marine biologist, a computer programmer. And today, a female member of the moon launch team is profiled in Margaret and the Moon. I loved the voice of the book, and its quick pace. The book starts, “Margaret Hamilton loved to solve problems. She came […]

Tags: Alfred A. Knopf scientists women

4Oct

Grace Hopper Queen of Computer Code

Posted by: annettepimentel@gmail.com Categories: Review

Grace Hopper Queen of Computer Code celebrates the life of one of the pioneers of computer programming. The book is structured like a pearl necklace–it’s made up of a series of discrete anecdotes, strung together in roughly chronological order. Each anecdote tells us a bit about Grace Hopper’s character, but each basically also stands on […]

Tags: computers science Sterling women

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