REVIEW: THE LIE TREE by Frances Hardinge

Faith is the daughter of a preeminent naturalist and reverend. Suddenly, she and her family are uprooted and move to a remote island off the coast of England. The Reverend Sunderly is supposedly there to assist in an excavation near some sea caves that might uncover new fossils. Faith begins to suspect there is something…

ACCENT: GARDEN OF MARVELS by Ruth Kassinger

  This is a delightful compendium of botanical discoveries — and how they’ve shaped human history.  Kassinger opens with a brief overview of how the sciences had tackled more out-of-reach topics, like constellations and orbits.  Ancient Greek attempted to understand atomic structure.  But plants had been left out of much of the study. She writes:…