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Eyes on the Sky by J. Kasper Kramer is a delightful book with multiple layers. As the reader pulls these back, we learn a good deal about the desert and about Roswell, New Mexico, during 1945-1947 when the USA was conducting experiments. We also learn a great amount about twelve-year-old Dorothy Duncan and her brother Dwight. A lover of science and comic books, Dorothy is a Junior Member of the American Rocket Society. She cares a great deal about jet propulsion systems and radio echoes from the moon, so she gets odd looks from others who invite her into conversation. As far as she isRead More →

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Set in New Mexico, The Storyteller by Brandon Hobson features Ziggy Echota whose mother is a missing indigenous woman. Both of Cherokee descent, sixth grade Ziggy and his older sister Moon long to know what happened to their mother, so they begin a search in the desert with “Weird Alice” as their guide. On their journey, the two learn especially valuable lessons while the reader gains details of the Cherokee culture and its lore. As he searches, Ziggy encounters several Nunnehi, who are protectors and shape shifters. Among them are a fiddle-playing buzzard named Gus, a horse named Lampwick, and an armadillo named Andrew Jackson.Read More →

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Eleven years old and living in Phoenix, Arizona, Nathan Todacheenie is bouncing from one parent to another after loud arguments fractured the family. Now his divorced dad is dating, and Nathan is not happy about having to share his dad’s time with Leandra. So, he concocts a plan to spend summer break with his grandmother, who summers in New Mexico at her ancestral home on the Navajo Reservation, forty-five minutes north of Church Rock. Under the pretense that he will conduct a science experiment to compare water consumption between Nali’s (his grandmother) heirloom kernels that have been passed down to her through many generations andRead More →