The Blackbird Girls

From Kirkus Reviews: The Blackbird Girls by Anne Blankman

The citizens of the town of Pripyat, Ukraine, have always been assured that “an accident at a nuclear power station was a statistical impossibility.”

So when the morning of April 26, 1986, dawns red, with “unearthly blue” smoke billowing into the air, life proceeds as normal. Fifth grade classmates and rivals Valentina Kaplan and Oksana Savchenko, however, are worried. Their fathers, night-shift plant workers at the Chernobyl power station, have not yet come home. Soon word gets out that reactor No. 4 has exploded, killing several workers and sending the rest en masse to the hospital, poisoned by the very air they breathe. Forced together by the sudden evacuation, the girls must overcome both their hatred of each other and the grief heaped upon them by the accident as they forge a new life in Leningrad with Valentina’s estranged grandmother, who harbors a dangerous secret.

Author Anne Blankman wrote this story after she heard about the experiences of a classmate who had lived near Chernobyl when the disaster occurred. 

Want to know more about Chernobyl?

National Geographic: Chernobyl Disaster Facts

Agatha Christie

Our Library has recently seen a small run on books by best-selling novelist, Agatha Christie so I thought this would be a good time to showcase one of my own favourite authors.

I started reading Agatha Christie when I was 9 years old, have read all 66 detective novels and short stories and re-read many of them every year. 

Her books are classics and are true representatives of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, which features books written in the 1920s and 1930s. 

Other popular authors of that time include Dorothy Sayers (Lord Peter Wimsey) Margery Allingham (Albert Campion) Ngaio Marsh (Roderick Alleyn) G.K Chesterton (Father Brown) Josephine Tey, Georgette Heyer and more.

My own favourite Christie books include: 

Agatha Christie was born in 1890 in England. She is the best-selling novelist of all time, with more than 2 billion copies of her novels sold world-wide. The longest running play of all time - The Mousetrap - is one of her creations.

Christie also wrote 6 novels under the pseudonym, Mary Westmacott.

Christie's most famous detective is Hercule Poirot but other popular detective characters include Miss Jane Marple, Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, Mr. Parker Pyne, Colonel Race and Ariadne Oliver.

Her books have been made into movies, with the latest release, Death on the Nile, scheduled for some time in 2021.

Recently, author Sophie Hannah has begun to write what is known as the Poirot Continuation series and has had four books published, starring Poirot and new detective, Inspector Catchpool.

They're great fun and very true to the style of Dame Agatha!

Try these titles if you like Poirot and have read all of the Christie originals!