Potatoes can't do anything a pet should. They can't learn tricks, or go for walks, or snuggle up with Albert. But to Albert's surprise, his potato begins to grow on him, and soon he can't imagine having any other pet. When the potato begins to rot, Albert is devastated. He buries it in his garden, and with a lot of care and a bit of patience, he discovers that his potato can do a great trick after all . . . Josh Lacey and Momoko Abe have created a delightful, offbeat picture book about finding companionship in unlikely places.
From the author of Nowhere Boy—called “a resistance novel for our times” by The New York Times—comes a brilliant middle-grade survival story that traces a harrowing family secret back to the Holodomor, a terrible famine that devastated Soviet Ukraine in the 1930s.Thirteen-year-old Matthew is miserable. His journalist dad is stuck overseas indefinitely, and his mom has moved in his one-hundred-year-old great-grandmother to ride out the pandemic, adding to his stress and isolation.But when Matthew finds a tattered black-and-white photo in his great-grandmother’s belongings, he discovers a clue to a hidden chapter of her past, one that will lead to a life-shattering family secret. Set in alternating timelines that connect the present-day to the 1930s and the US to the USSR, Katherine Marsh’s latest novel sheds fresh light on the Holodomor—the horrific famine that killed millions of Ukrainians, and which the Soviet government covered up for decades.An incredibly timely, page-turning story
