One hot summer day Luke and his friends decide to play their favorite game of war, using sticks for guns and pine cones for grenades.  Sameer, who hasn't lived in the neighborhood for very long, hesitates to join in. When he tells Luke and Jen and Jeff and Danny that he has been in a real war, they don't believe him.  Then, as Sameer explains what happened to his family, the other children start to see their game in a new light. While Playing War is a book about understanding what war can be like for families, and that war is not a game, this is also a sensitive story about the power of friendship and how children can learn from one another. Playing War is an excellent book for starting discussions about international affairs, but also for talking about violence in video games and movies.

Celebrate Women's History Month with some of Tilbury House's leading ladies.

Fly Rod Crosby by Julia Hunter and Earle Shettleworth, Jr. is about Cornelia Thurza Crosby's remarkable life (1854-1946) gave rise to a certain amount of legend: she was the first woman to legally shoot a caribou in Maine, held the first Maine Guide license issued, caught  200 trout in one day (she was an early advocate of catch-and-release), and was rumored to have shot against Annie Oakley in a sharpshooting competition.

Maine in the World by Neil Rolde highlights the stories of some amazing women from Maine.  Dorthea Dix was an activist who advocated for the humane treatment of the mentally ill. Madame Nordica was one of the most well-known opera singers of the 19th century, and Edna St. Vincent Millay was an American poet and the third woman ever to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

In Eminent Mainers by Arthur Douglas Stover you'll meet Princess Salm-Salm, born Agnes Elizabeth Winona Leclerque Joy in 1840, who first achieved notoriety as a circus performer on a galloping horse (while playing an accordion), served as a nurse in Washington, D.C., during the Civil War, attracted the attentions of Felix Constantin Alexander Johann Nepomuk, Prince Salm-Salm, a Prussian calvary officer, married him and accompanied him to Mexico when he entered the service of Emperor Maximilian, pled for his release when he was captured by Mexican forces at the battle of Queretare, followed him to Germany where he served in the Prussian Army in the Franco-Prussian War (and was killed), was the first female to be awarded the Prussian Medal of Honor, and then journeyed to Rome, where the pope advised her that the contemplative life of a nunnery was probably not the best place for her. You'll be introduced to Louise Bogan, who was born in Livermore Falls in 1897, moved to Greenwich village as a young woman, took up the bohemian life, occasionally drove the get-away car for a fur thief, and ended up the poetry critic for the New Yorker magazine. The first female cabinet member was from Maine (Francis Perkins), as were the first female graduate of MIT (Ellen Henriette Swallow Richards) and the first woman to serve in both houses of Congress (Margaret Chase Smith). (So was the author of the first lesbian love story, and the inventor of the modern sanitary napkin.) Women's history is certainly not dull!

 

Last Month Keep Your Ear on the Ball by Genevieve Petrillo; illustrated by Lea Lyon was named Outstanding Book for Young People with Disabilities by IBBY. This month the book and the award will be on display at the Bolognia Book Fair in Italy.  Tilbury House goes international!  

 

Moon Watchers  author Reza Jalali will be speaking at the Scarborough Library Wednesday March 9, 16, and 23 at 6:30pm.

 

Not only is March Women's History Month, it is Reading Month. Celebrate by picking up one of the titles mentioned in this newsletter at your local independent bookstore or at the library.