#dutton books

Book 441

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll / photography by Abelardo Morell

Dutton Children’s Books 1998

Survive the Night- 2 stars

By- Riley Sager

College student Charlie Jordan needs to get away fast.  Her roommate, Maddy, was murdered months ago and the guilt of leaving her alone at a bar on her last night alive is eating away at her.  She puts up a request on a ride board so she can get home to Ohio.  Handsome stranger Josh Baxter answers the call.  What unfolds is a game of cat and mouse that spans the course of one night.

#Friday Reads: Turtle in the Title!

This week the long wait ended for John Green fans as Dutton Books for Young Readers published his new novel, TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN, whose protagonist is a 16-year old girl with anxiety and obsessive thought “spirals.” The book is Green’s most personal to date, reflecting his own anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorders. As to the meaning behind the title: “Turtles all the way down” is an expression of circular thinking, a philosophical joke of unclear origin but cited by Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. The anecdote goes like this: A famous scientist, after a lecture, was told by an elderly lady that his cosmology was all wrong. The world, she said, is a flat plate which rests on the back of a giant tortoise. When the scientist asked what the tortoise stands on, she replied: ‘You’re very clever, young man, very clever. But it’s turtles all the way down.’  

Turtles also serve as metaphors for being withdrawn or needing to come out of one’s shell. And turtles, it turns out, appeal to a number of our authors. Take a look… all the way down!

 TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN by John Green; Ages 14 And Up

Turtles All the Way Down is about lifelong friendship, the intimacy of an unexpected reunion, Star Wars fan fiction, and tuatara. But at its heart is Aza Holmes, a young woman navigating daily existence within the ever-tightening spiral of her own thoughts.

 TURTLE DIARY by Russell Hoban

Life in a city can be atomizing, isolating. And it certainly is for William G. and Neaera H., the strangers at the center of Russell Hoban’s surprisingly heartwarming novel Turtle Diary. William, a clerk at a used-book store, lives in a rooming house after a divorce that has left him without home or family. Neaera is a successful writer of children’s books, who, in her own estimation, “looks like the sort of spinster who doesn’t keep cats and is not a vegetarian. Looks…like a man’s woman who hasn’t got a man.”

 TURTLE MOON by Alice Hoffman

When Keith Rosen runs away from his Florida home—inexplicably taking along a motherless baby—his mother is perplexed, terrified, and ultimately takes off on her own journey to find him. The story of a divorced woman, her disillusioned teenage son, and the events that change their lives in ways both simple and extraordinary, Turtle Moon follows their path, in a suspenseful, beautifully written story that confirms once again the exquisite talent of Alice Hoffman.

 TURTLE FEET: THE MAKING AND UNMAKING OF A BUDDHIST MONK by Nikolai Grozni

A brilliantly colorful memoir of becoming a monk and a young man’s spiritual journey in India. Nikolai Grozni, a Boston jazz piano prodigy struck by spiritual ennui, suddenly abandoned 15 years of music studies to seek out the Dalai Lama’s university in India, where he began his quest for the ultimate truth. Instead of finding answers, Grozni fell in with an unusual cast of characters, and struggled with Buddhist logic and with the many small challenges to life as a monk in a community of Tibetan refugees.

 THE TURTLE WARRIOR by Mary Relindes Ellis

The Turtle Warrior is the story of the Lucas family, who live in a beautiful and remote part of Wisconsin inhabited by working-class European immigrants and the Ojibwe. By 1967 the Lucas farm has fallen into disrepair, thanks to the hard drinking of John Lucas, who brutalizes his wife and two sons. When the eldest, James, escapes by enlisting to fight in Vietnam, he leaves young Bill alone to protect his mother with only his own will and the spirit of his brother to guide him.

 THE SLOW WALTZ OF TURTLES: A NOVEL by Katherine Pancol

“Bonjour, book lovers. Get ready for best-selling French author Katherine Pancol’s American debut. It’s a charmer about fortysomething sisters Iris and Josephine, who have taken very different paths in life but come together when each finds herself in need of a little reinvention. Read it and ouip.” —Daily Candy

                    TURTLE IN PARADISE by Jennifer L. Holm; Ages 8 to 12

In Jennifer L. Holm’s New York Times bestselling, Newbery Honor winning middle grade historical fiction novel, life isn’t like the movies. But then again, 11-year-old Turtle is no Shirley Temple. She’s smart and tough and has seen enough of the world not to expect a Hollywood ending. After all, it’s 1935 and jobs and money and sometimes even dreams are scarce. So when Turtle’s mama gets a job housekeeping for a lady who doesn’t like kids, Turtle says goodbye without a tear and heads off to Key West, Florida to live with relatives she’s never met.