Dragon Sword and Wind Child is the first book in the Tales of the Magatama trilogy by Noriko Ogiwara, who won the New Writer’s Award from the Japanese Association of Children’s Writers for this book. This novel and the middle volume, Mirror Sword and Shadow Prince, both have English translations by Cathy Hirano, but the third volume is only available in Chinese and Japanese right now. Having not yet read it, I can’t speak for the second book, but the […]

Badass: The Birth of a Legend is by Ben Thompson, who has been running the website Badass of the Week since 2004.  He has also written numerous articles on badasses, and this is his second book on the subject.  The first book published on this topic, Badass, is about various figures from history (and is perhaps the most awesome use of a degree in history ever).  The newest book, which just came out last week, is about various tough men, […]

An Illustrated Guide to Mythical Creatureswritten by Anita Ganeri and illustrated by David West48pp (Hardcover)My Rating: 8/10Amazon Rating: 4.5/5LibraryThing Rating: N/AGoodreads Rating: 4/5 An Illustrated Guide to Mythical Creatures is written by Anita Ganeri and illustrated by David West. It’s a rather attractive hardcover book for children ages 9 to 12 that is exactly what is described by the title – a reference to various figures and types of creatures from mythology containing many 3D computer generated graphics. This is […]