Like Susie Salmon, the dead protagonist in Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, Mia is the reader’s guide to what is happening in the real world — and the world beyond. But unlike Susie, Mia is not quite dead, but very nearly so, since the...
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Eleven-year-old Ellie and her mom live a calm, quiet, life in a tiny house in San Francisco. All that dramatically changes when her new babysitter turns out to be Melvin, her own grandfather, who actually discovers a way to turn back time through...
Read moreWho knew that there is something called fanfiction? In Fangirl, by Eleanor & Park author Rainbow Rowell, Cath and her twin sister Wren have been writing an alternative narrative based on a fantasy wizard series called Simon Snow. Now both...
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Are you and your kids looking for something fun to read on a cold winter’s day? Check out Comics Plus Library Edition, an online resource which features comics for all ages and of all types, from Alternative Comics to Peanuts. To check it...
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In Angel Island: Gateway to Gold Mountain (juvenile non-fiction), Russell Freedman illuminates the troubled history of Chinese emigration to America. Between 1910 and 1940, more than half a million people from eighty different countries, but...
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Arcady’s Goal (juvenile fiction), by Russian born artist and writer Eugene Yelchin, follows Yelchin’s 2012 Newbery Honor book, Breaking Stalin’s Nose. Arcady lives in a run-down barrack with other boys as wards of the Soviet Union. Their parents...
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To Cassie, in Cassie and Jasper to the Rescue by Bryn Fleming, school felt like a “giant rock crushing the breath out of her.” She knew that school wouldn’t do anything to prepare her for her future life as a rancher. Cassie loved...
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I Lived on Butterfly Hill by Marjorie Agosin is seen through the eyes of sixth-grader Celeste Marconi who lived an idyllic life in Chile before the devastating onslaught of the Pinochet regime. Her family lives in the Valparaiso Hills near the...
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You don’t need to be a scientist to appreciate the astonishing futuristic devices scientist Nikolo Tesla invented more than 100 years ago and that are now gathering cobwebs in a crumbling attic. In the book Tesla’s Attic, by Neal Shusterman...
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Turn Left at the Cow, by Lisa Bullard, is an unfortunate title for a whacking good mystery. Equally uninspiring is the cover art. However, if a reader opens this book he/she is in for an exciting well-paced mystery. Thirteen-year-old Travis slips...
Read moreIn Signal, by Cynthia DeFelice, twelve-year-old Owen faces a long, lonely summer in his new home in the Finger Lakes region in rural New York State. He just moved at the end of June and his only companion so far is his lively dog, Josie. The two...
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