Dress Codes for Small Towns by Courtney Stevens. 340 p. HarperTeen/ HarperCollins Publishers, August, 2017. 9780062398512. (Review from finished copy courtesy of publisher (AASL17).
Our Teen Tuesday book is Dress Codes for Small Towns by Courtney Stevens and features a winning narrator with a circle of friends she calls the hexagon. Elizabeth McCaffrey prefers to be called Billie. She's a creative, free spirit who definitely does not fit the preacher kid mode in her small Kentucky town. Still, she loves her small town and her religion and, unlike her best friend, Janie Lee, who is counting the days until she can legally flee, Billie wants to stay. But she wants to be her true self and wishes her father and the townsfolk would understand and accept her. At turns hilarious and poignant, Dress Codes for Small Towns is an engaging story of identity.
Drones by Martin J. Dougherty. 80 p. Scholastic Inc., July, 2014. 9780545664769. (Finished copy provided by publisher for review.)
This well-designed book is chockfull of full-color photographs and peppered with descriptions and fact boxes about a variety of drones designed for both civilian and military usage. Each drone also has a box featuring its scale as compared to the average human. The majority are used by the military but civilian uses of the technology include Amazon delivery, farming and oceanography.
While use of this technology has its positives, there's a scary side as well, including loss of privacy. Excepting for a brief mention of the possibility of an Amazon delivery droid falling out of the sky and hurting someone, and the necessity to change some laws to allow the use of droids, there was no further discussion. An index concludes the volume but no source notes were included.
Accessible and appealing, make sure to get it into the hands of your fans of military informational books but don't be surprised if the casual browser picks it up.
