Tahmina Afshar

1 month ago | 49thshelf.com | Trevor Corkum |Gabrielle Drolet |Robert Wiersema |Tahmina Afshar

Our Children's Librarian columnist, Julie Booker, brings us a new view from the stacks every month. **** If You Give a Girl a Bike, by Hayley Diep, illustrated by Canadian Braden Hallett, is reminiscent of Laura Numeroff’s classic If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. It follows a daring female protagonist riding her bike, shredding down hills and mountains. When she falls, she doesn’t stay down for long. A skateboarder comes along and off she goes on four wheels, tackling tricks.

1 month ago | 49thshelf.com | Trevor Corkum |Julie Booker |Tahmina Afshar |Robert Wiersema

Like most authors, I’ve spent most of my life dreaming about my first book. It was going to be a novel; I was going to write it in my master’s program; it would be published by the time I was 25. Now, finally, my first book is out—and it’s far from the one I intended to write. At 23, as I was working on that novel I’d always planned, I developed a chronic and disabling nerve condition that spread pain throughout my upper body.