Reviews
A Dance of Birds
THE CHILDREN’S BOOK REVIEW
In this beautifully illustrated picture book for very young readers, stunning hand-crafted artwork invites little ones to fall in love with the sights, sounds, and behaviors of birds from around the globe.
Let’s go on a bird-by-bird tour and discover the sounds, habits, and quiet beauty of the different birds of the world. There are so many delightful things to notice when you start looking closely at birds: from the sounds they make and the places they land to the wonderful colors of their feathers and their gentle grace as they soar through the air. Some birds, like geese, can be seen close by, landing in fields to explore the crops. Others, like the eagle or parrot, live far away, making their homes in rainforests or at the tops of tall mountains. No matter where and how they live, however, observing birds is a meaningful way to connect with nature!
Each page features a close-up, loving depiction of a different bird species, rendered through expressive tissue-paper collage that evokes the ethereal beauty of feathers. A short line of text accompanies each illustration, calling readers’ attention to a single endearing characteristic, such as the bird’s call, habitat, or nesting behavior. With its pared-back text and bird-by-bird structure, the book celebrates sounds, rhythm, and repetition, encouraging very young readers to chirp along, point at pictures, and learn the names of new feathered friends.
Original, instructive, and visually engaging, A Dance of Birds is the perfect book for preschool and kindergarten beginner readers to discover the wonder of the natural world.
THE PRAIRIES BOOK REVIEW
A vibrant, handcrafted ode to the wonder of birds.
Blair celebrates the beauty and diversity of birdlife in this visually arresting picture book pairing spare, lyrical verse with richly textured tissue-paper collage. Beginning with an invitation to listen, Blair introduces a chorus of avian voices—chirps, quacks, hoots, caws, and coos—before turning to the graceful spectacle of flight. Birds soar, land, perch, build nests, raise young, travel, and gather in flocks, creating an accessible portrait of behaviors familiar and wondrous.
Blair’s lyrical text blends repetition, rhyme, and playful onomatopoeia, giving the book an inviting cadence that encourages young listeners to join in. Linnemeyer’s handcrafted illustrations are the standout, transforming layered tissue paper into remarkably expressive plumage, luminous skies, flowers, mountains, and waterways. Hummingbirds hover among blossoms, an owl surveys a vast landscape, and brilliant macaws seem to dance across the page. The changing habitats and compositions give this episodic book a pleasing visual momentum. An identifying guide encourages children to revisit the featured species. Warm and inviting, this artful introduction succeeds most as an invitation to observe the natural world with curiosity and delight.
A must-have for young naturalists, bird lovers, and families who delight in the wonders of the outdoors.
REEDSY
Written by American author Angela Blair, and illustrated by Sherri Kay Linnemeyer, A Dance of Birds is a children's picture book with a strong focus on the feathered friends of the skies. At just under 30 pages in length, A Dance of Birds is targeted towards parents and younger demographics of reader (from baby to age six, depending on reading ability).
A Dance of Birds is filled with bright and vibrant imagery of various birds from around the world, coupled with light use of poetry (e.g. "Birds travel as far as they wish, // and fly together like a school of fish"), and onomatopoeias to represent the different noises birds make (e.g. "Coo!", "Caw!" "Quack!" etc). It also showcases in image form the varied places which birds may call home. From Barn Owls to Yellow Warblers, the diversity showcased in this short book is huge! At the end there is included a section titled "meet the birds", which matches the bird illustrations to their breed name, providing an excellent springboard for any curious child (or parent) wanting to learn more.
As the publishing and literary worlds continues to battle a deluge of AI derived slop, this book is the perfect example of what happens when humans fight back against the machine. Linnemeyer's artistry is incredible. All of her illustrations in this book could so easily be framed and hung, pride of place, on any wall, the quality is that good. Maybe it is an idea for future diversification on part of the illustrator (if she has not done so already!) And Blair's written work is set at the right level, not too wordy and simple enough for young minds to grasp onto. It is the perfect bedtime read for parents wanting to support their children with drifting off to sleep.
As children's picture books go, A Dance of Birds is an absolutely delightful read from start to finish, made possible by the talents of this dynamic writer and illustrator duo. Charm oozes from every page and will keep children coming back to it, time and time again.
BOOKWORM FOR KIDS
A burst of colorful, feathered friends awaits to shine on every page.
This is an ode to birds, and it does so with poetic style and illustrative grace. One by one, a bird takes the spotlight and is showcased in a natural setting. Just a few words or even a few short phrases of rhyme make each one come across with a sense of pride and beauty.
The illustrations are lovely and use a bit of texture here and there to give a special touch to each setting. The birds are recognizable and presented bright and bold. A variety of birds are presented, including everything from exotic parrots to more familiar seen roosters. The text flows along the side in a white strip to make this easy to use as a read-aloud. While carrying a smooth, rhyming flow, the tact changes a bit from page to page, steering a little away from a sing-songy direction while maintaining the lyrical atmosphere. I found this made it easier to catch the attention on each page.
At the end of the book, there's a list of the name of the birds, so that each one can be revisited. There's also a coloring page, where young readers can color their own feather friend. It awakens awareness of the huge variety of birds, while also keeping a sense of respect, awe, and emphasis on the beauty each one holds.
Sun Kissed & Salted
Listen in:
READERS’ FAVORITE
Reviewed by Divine Zape
Sun Kissed & Salted by Angela Blair follows Alika Jones’s decadeslong freefall through acts of self-destruction and survival. In 1988, she had a near-death bike accident in Los Angeles when she experienced an out-of-body episode. She abandons the stability of her life for a volatile romance with Dario Moretti, an Italian musician whom she impulsively marries. Her choices from then on are disastrous, spiraling downward, including funding travels with forged traveler’s checks, smoking heroin in New York squats, barely surviving a drugged sexual assault, stripping in Tokyo burlesque clubs, and joining a manipulative cult in San Diego. Her undiagnosed bipolar disorder feeds her compulsion toward chaos, leading to an abortion, homelessness, and decades of alcoholism. The twist is her journey to healing and hard-won freedom.
Angela Blair’s book is a harrowing portrait of a woman who repeatedly chooses flight over safety, only to find herself trapped in ever-deeper ruin. When she talks about her alcoholism, she says: “I couldn’t remember ever having just one drink.” The raw storytelling captures Alika’s psyche with unalloyed clarity. The descriptions are detailed, and the author exposes emotions with forensic accuracy, allowing readers to feel as though they walked by or sat beside Alika. The same quality of descriptive prose renders the international settings immediate and compelling, from the warmth of the Senegalese drum circles to the squalor of Battersea squats. Sun Kissed & Salted is the story of many people who are trapped in cycles of addiction, manipulated and used. While the episodic adventures of Dario and Alika around the world signify rootlessness, the path to healing offers the inspiration and hope that we can always start again, no matter how broken we have been.
READERS’ FAVORITE
Reviewed by Ruffina Oserio
Angela Blair’s Sun Kissed & Salted follows Alika Jones’s survival across four decades of trauma. After a bike accident in 1988 results in an out-of-body experience, Alika sets out on a reckless global odyssey. She elopes with Dario Moretti, a charismatic and vicious Italian musician. Her life spirals out of control as she travels the world with him, indulging in heroin addiction, busking in post-Berlin Wall Europe, fleeing a murderous rage in Mexico, stripping in Tokyo, and engaging in other risky adventures to places like Thailand and Africa. She becomes a target of a cult, has a stint in the army that is cut short by assault, and gets pregnant. What will it take for her to leave her abusive husband, take full agency over her life, and heal?
Angela Blair’s storytelling is superb, and the first-person narrative voice feels intimate and urgent, irresistibly pulling you into Alika’s perspective. The author grounds the chaos of Alika’s life in memory, with motifs such as the “zero” that miraculously multiplies a wire transfer, changing $800 to $8,000, the suitcase that follows Alika in every failed escape, and a cracked drum in Senegal. The pacing is breathless, and it follows the nomadic rhythm of life the heroine embraces as she leaps across continents and calamities with reckless momentum. The suspense and twists in this book arrive through shocks the characters experience. Sun Kissed & Salted takes you through the neon Roppongi nights to the squalid heroin squats of London to birthing homes, following the heroine's struggle to save herself and a spiritual awakening that comes to her through the Twelve Steps.
LITERARY TITAN
Self-love and a Spiritual Awakening
Sun Kissed & Salted follows Alika Jones through trauma, reckless love, addiction, spiritual searching, and survival as she slowly learns that coming home to herself may be the hardest journey of all. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
Much of the story is drawn from my personal experience, told through the lens of a fictional character who represents anyone so lost that searching for the essence of self in all the wrong places leads down a path of self-destruction. Alika finds that, with complete honesty and accountability for her actions, she attains the freedom and peace she had always wanted by traveling with reckless abandon within herself through self-love and a spiritual awakening.
The novel explores how Alika sometimes mistakes danger, intensity, or escape for love. What did you most want readers to understand about that pattern?
Life can be a messy road when a person has suffered childhood trauma and is wounded over and over again by the choices they make and the toxic relationships they think they deserve, yet with a tenacious spirit, this cycle can be transformed into an upward climb to peace and freedom from self-inflicted suffering.
Memory plays a big role in the book, often moving in circles rather than in a straight line. How did you approach shaping the novel’s structure?
I started in chronological order but found it quite boring. I dug deeper into the writing process and discovered that the story’s circular motion mirrored the downward spiral Alika was sliding into. I felt it was a more honest portrayal of the phases of a life’s journey, which is rarely a straight line
By the end of the novel, what do you hope readers take away about survival, self-worth, and the process of coming back to oneself?
I hope readers absorb the importance of never giving up on someone they may know, or perhaps themselves, who is living in cycles of self-destruction. I think miracles do happen more often than we think. The quiet extraordinary events that inspire wonder and astonishment, defying normal standards, are what I call miracles and are characterized by the transformative stories of people who seem too far gone to help. I say, “Hold on to the hope that miracles do happen and can occur in your life or in the lives of those you love. It takes total honesty, humility, willingness to change, forgiveness, accountability, and acceptance, but it is possible to find the true freedom we search for, with peace of mind followed by self-love and ultimately love of all there is.”
LITERARY TITAN
Sun Kissed & Salted
Sun Kissed & Salted by Angela Blair is a work of autobiographical literary fiction that follows Alika Jones through a life shaped by trauma, longing, escape, addiction, abuse, spiritual searching, and the slow, hard work of coming home to herself. The novel opens with a near-death experience after a bicycle accident in Venice Beach, then moves through Alika’s childhood wounds, her reckless marriage to the magnetic and dangerous Dario, her travels through America and Europe, and the many ways she mistakes intensity for love before learning what survival really asks of her.
What struck me first was how intimate the writing feels. Blair writes candidly. There’s a rawness here that works because the story itself is raw. The beach air, the music, the cheap rooms, the hunger, the cigarettes, the family memories, the strange flashes of grace, all of it gives the book a lived-in texture. I could feel Alika’s hunger for beauty and escape, even when I wanted to reach into the page and stop her from walking straight toward danger. That tension made the novel hard to put down. It’s painful, but it’s also alive.
I also appreciated the author’s choices around memory and spirituality. The book does not move like a neat recovery story where every lesson arrives on schedule. It wanders, circles back, gets lost, and then finds meaning in odd places. That felt honest to me. Alika’s near-death experience becomes more than a dramatic opening. It becomes a quiet thread running through the novel, a reminder that some part of her has always been reaching toward light, even when her choices pull her into darkness. The writing can be intense and emotionally crowded, but I think that suits the story. This isn’t a distant, cool novel. It wants you close enough to see the bruises.
By the end, I saw Sun Kissed & Salted as a reflective and emotionally charged piece of literary fiction for readers who like stories about damaged people trying to understand how they became who they are. I would recommend it most to readers drawn to coming-of-age stories, women’s fiction, addiction and recovery narratives, and novels with a strong spiritual undercurrent. It’s sincere, searching, and full of hard-won insight. Readers who appreciate candid, first-person storytelling about survival, self-worth, and the long road back to love will find a lot to sit with here.