Books

Hacienda Style
By Karen Witynski and Joe P. Carr, Gibbs Smith, 2008.

Experience hacienda living.

Hacienda Style by Karen Witynski and Joe P. Carr offers readers a closer look at the details of the hacienda lifestyle.

The eighth volume in a series, the book offers a visual tour accompanied by educational text on key architectural elements, such as elegant arches and stone-carved columns; kitchens featuring long arcaded countertops with colorful patterned tiles; furnishings that blend colonial antiques and contemporary pieces; decorative accents, such as paintings and large-scale mirrors; and paint color.

Feathers
By Jacqueline Woodson, Penguin Group, 2007, 208 pp.

Eleven-year-old Frannie is struck by the beauty of the Emily Dickinson poem she's studying in school — how the words just seem "to float," even if Frannie is not exactly sure what they mean. Her mom says maybe it's a poem about looking forward, about being hopeful about the future.

For now, though, Frannie is caught up in the present, which in this story is the winter of 1971. She worries about the health of her mom, who is pregnant again after several miscarriages; about her brother Sean, who is deaf and longs to be accepted in the hearing world; and about the new boy at her all-black school who is taunted for his pale skin and who Frannie's best friend thinks is Jesus returning to restore hope in the world.