75 Books Like I Am Sequoia - A Pinecone's Adventure

This is a lovely book with beautiful illustrations. Kids will learn that nothing is impossible as long as their parents are there to encourage them. It really hit home as I am a father and have 3 kids, my son has a dream of becoming a professional soccer player, my firstborn daughter has a dream of becoming a renowned fashion designer and my 2nd born daughter wants to be a world-famous make-up artist. I encourage them all the way and this book just drives that point further.

A lovely, imaginative, and brilliant book all round.

This is a lovely rhyming book with cute illustrations. I love the author’s imagination about a winter world. It is a unique and inventive book that will open up a child’s mind. The activities at the end will be a hit with kids.

Fun poems for the little ones with lovely illustrations. I love the variety of animals she used and the different people as well. Animals are always good for children’s books because kids normally love animals and more often than not one of the animals will be a child’s favourite. I also loved the way she formulated her poems.

This is a charming book with beautiful and vivid illustrations. It is quite an adventure for the main character, Oscar the cat as he gets lost and ends up on a ferry. The different and strange characters that he meets along the way make for a wonderful and interesting ride!

And speaking of, who better than Le Guin to inspire sci-fi and fantasy stories that are truly unexpected? Dispatches from Anarres, edited by Susan DeFreitas, is an anthology of stories by Northwest authors, all inspired by and in tribute to Le Guin, and the offerings are rich and unique. Like Michelle Ruiz Keil’s poetic war cry of ghost cats in “The Kingdom of the Belly,” Jason LaPier’s fascinating tale of the life of a bee colony—with some of the coolest names I’ve encountered in fantasy—in “Bee, Keeper,” and Stevan Allred’s clever Ib and Nib folk-story interludes. I read much of this book in an ER waiting room as my husband was being examined and then treated for a scary collapsed lung, and the uniqueness of these stories kept me beautifully distracted.

As a fiction writer trying to depict 1920s Portland, Oregon, I found limitless inspiration from this book. Chandler and Kennedy give the background leading up to Prohibition, chronicling the women’s temperance and suffrage movements; the establishment opposition to the International Workers of the World, the Wobblies; the organized crime in the city and police corruption; and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. When George Baker became mayor in 1917, he took advantage of all these elements to control a system of corruption that kept him in power. While the book does not focus on the KKK, it offers important details about its powerful influence on this particular city at this time in history.

One of the joys of the Internet is meeting people – writers – who give the reader a kick in the ass, an unexpected journey down an alley or a dirt path where we spend time with a character who changes our opinion, our outlook on society. Meeting writer Theresa Griffin Kennedy was that kick for me. Kennedy writes non-fiction, reportage, poetry, opinion, and fiction. Burnside Field Lizard took me down back roads and introduced me to larger-than-life characters that stung me with truths and observations that felt more like a documentary. I love realism and Kennedy knows and writes about her town Portland, Oregon, like no other writer. These short stories smack of a reporter in the trenches of a foreign war zone. The characters are in battle with themselves. Kennedy is also an observant translator of sexual behavior that can, at times, be another kind of war, internal… show more.

The word “abortionist” usually conjures up images of dangerous back alleys where untrained men take advantage of women.

In the case of Rickie Solinger’s book, instead, we meet Ruth Barnett, who performed approximately 40,000 abortions in the mid-twentieth century (1918-1968) in Portland, Oregon, without losing a single patient.

What I loved about this book is how Solinger takes us behind the scenes of a thoroughly illegal abortion clinic that still managed to provide expert care to all its patients, even as it sought to evade the law and its enforcers at every turn. 

I don’t know if most librarians would understand or shelve this as YA, but Lowrey’s cast of eighteen-year-old trans punks and squatters have more in common with most trans kids, in 2006 or the present day, than many YA-marketed idyllic stories about teens with accepting families and limited substance use issues.

From nonprofits where suburban children pick fights with homeless teens to squats where young punks pressure each other into conforming to their own specific dysfunctional microculture in Portland, Oregon, this book resonates for me as tracking a moment in history—the youth of all the trans people who were in their twenties when I came out in my early teens, and were trying to devote themselves to the same community projects they had benefited from when they were runaways and train-hoppers.

This book details the life of Ada Bell, a young woman who traveled all by herself to the tiny community of Bakeoven, Oregon to teach school. The “town” consisted of a hotel, a blacksmith’s shop, a store, a post office, a stage stop - and not much more. Ada got off the stage with no idea where to go or how to start her life as a teacher. Ada encapsulates the pioneer spirit as she forges a life and impacts the lives of her students over the years.