Maine Humanities Council

In Gentlemen, a dark young adult novel by Michael Northrop, Bones, Tommy, Mixer, and Mike are kids caught between the cracks, or beneath them, depending on how you look at it. They’re the kind of kids who are invisible or avoided when met on a street. Yet their feelings, personal strengths, and minds match just about anyone’s in this chilling story of a disappearance, suspicion, and blame.

One day, after a blow-up in class, Tommy disappears. The same day, Mr. Haberman, the English teacher of this remedial group, has a curious presentation involving a barrel. He encourages the students to guess what is inside, and Mike, the narrator guesses meat. When Mr. Haberman has Bones, Mixer, and Mike—“gentlemen,” he calls them—haul the barrel out to his car that afternoon and dump its blanket-wrapped contents in his trunk, Mike thoughts develop farther: it feels like a body. As Tommy’s disappearance lengthens, more clues arise, all pointing at Mr. Haberman and what seems like open mockery in class. It seems a warped coincidence that the text for that class is Crime and Punishment.

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Kate Kennedy speaks on writing in Biddeford

Writers of all stamps and kinds—young adult fiction, historical nonfiction, personal essay, fantasy, poetry, and more—are visiting New Books, New Readers groups this winter in a program partially funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. The Visiting Writer program is showing adults who struggle to read what it means to be a writer, and inspiring them in the process.

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Winter in Maine fuels a hunger for gardening that becomes nearly all-consuming by March. This can affect children, too, and A Seed is Sleepy—by Diana Hutts Aston, illustrated by Sylvia Long—can do much to alleviate it. Long’s pictures of familiar and unusual plants, from the bean to the date palm (an extinct plant brought back to life by a scientist who planted a few seeds found in an excavation) are stunning botanical illustrations and typical of Long’s ability to engage children while delighting the adults doing the reading. The narrative describes how seeds of all different kinds begin their lives: in the safety of fruit, as gynosperms (naked seeds from non-flowering plants), floating on ocean currents, and scattered by wind, animals, and even shoelaces.

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Just from its title one can deduce how complicated J. Robert Oppenheimer’s legacy is.  We all know him as the “Father of the Atomic Bomb”, but that oversimplifies this complex genius and the work he produced. Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin tackled a huge subject in Oppenheimer, and produced an engaging, comprehensive biography, one that won the Pulitzer Prize.

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Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane was a heart-racing, breath-taking psychological thriller, that I could not put down (truly). Forego the new movie, of the same name, and read this thriller about an asylum for the the criminally insane. It’s 1954, and U.S. Marshals Teddy Daniels and Chuck Aule have arrived on Shutter Island where a patient has gone missing. Teddy and Chuck must navigate the terrain of the island and the maddening tone of the asylum community to identify sanity and make it out alive. This book kept me guessing to the very end.

(Recommended by Annie Medeiros)