And just in time, along comes Miss Lucy B. Parker.

Charming, flawed, sympathetic main character? Check. Lighthearted writing that nevertheless has some substance behind it? Check. Squeaky clean without feeling babyish? Check. Available in paperback? Check.

Lucy B. Parker sends emails to tv host Dr. Maude (presumably a Dr. Phil-esque advice giver) about the trials and travails of her sixth grade life, and the emails are scattered throughout the tale of same. As if it wasn’t hard enough starting sixth grade without her two BFFs, who friend-dumped her – on the phone – from the mall – right before school started! – her mother is now dating the father of the most famous young actress/singer on the planet (think Miley Cyrus early in the Hannah Montana years). Lucy’s been going through one embarrassing time after another and now she’s facing life as the far less attractive, appealing and talented stepsister of the most famous girl on the planet. How much worse can her life get?

This novel is charming as all get out and a complete no-brainer handsell. I’m predicting it will be a summer bestseller for me.  Over the last couple of years I have very much enjoyed selling Robin Palmer’s fairy-tale based contemporary YA novels, which I have happily been selling to tweens due to their lack of very older content. Now it’s lovely to see Ms. Palmer turning her hand to novels truly aimed at the tween market, which just seems to be exploding. I love having books that I can hand to anyone without a second thought – reader, mom, grandmother, aunt, birthday gift giver. I love having paperback original series. I love tweeniness.

I can’t wait for Lucy’s next adventure!

A week never goes by that I do not have a customer telling me that they are reading the HARRY POTTER books aloud to their 5 or 6 year old child, and the pride in their voice is always evident. Using HARRY POTTER as a sign that a child was ready for long read-alouds or that they are an advanced reader annoyed me when the books were still in publishing process, and now that the series is finished, I am even more over it than before. Eight times out of ten, when I ask a parent what kind of book their child enjoys or what they’ve read lately, the answer is “Well, they’ve read all the Harry Potter books.” (The other two times the answer is “Well, they’ve read all the WIMPY KID books,” but that is a rant for another post.) (And honestly, pretty much every kid reads the HARRY POTTER books – so that doesn’t tell me much about anyone’s reading preferences.)

If you are reading HP to your kids before you have read them the RAMONA books, LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE, the FUDGE books, most of Cynthia Rylant, A CRICKET IN TIMES SQUARE, STUART LITTLE, and most of Roald Dahl, just to name a fraction of the available books, then your kids are not ready for HP. Shorter books do not equal bad. It is okay to finish a read-aloud quickly. It is okay to tell your child that they are not old enough for HP yet. And at six years old, they’re just not old enough. Why the need to jump ahead? Why not start with books that are meant for kids their age or closer to their age?

Some reasons, not in order of importance, of why kids should wait for Harry:

1. The majority of these parents ultimately come back and tell me that they have had to stop reading the series (usually right around book 3) because their child got scared. Usually these parents did not listen to my careful, polite warnings that this would happen. There is no way around the fact that Voldemort starts picking off Harry’s friends and family one at a time, and that this gets worse, not better. The HP books are amazing, yes. I am and always will be a giant HP nerd. But the books run the gamut from scary to downright terrifying; the darkness gets darker and darker with less and less reprieve as the series winds to a close. Somehow while watching Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson grow up, a lot of us seem to have forgotten that these books are aimed at a middle-grade (and up) readership. This leads me to number

2. While children of that age are ripe for the worlds of make-believe (which is why so many parents want to read them HARRY POTTER), they are not ready to process the idea that all fantasy worlds are not created equal. While they are certainly ready for the happier things in HP – deep friendship, magic, humor, magical creatures, mystical objects, education, love, loyalty, etc – they are not ready to process HP’s darker themes of racism, classism, abuse, hatred, death, war, self-loathing, self-doubt, betrayal, and pure evil.

3. If they hear HP aloud at a young age (especially if it ultimately scares them), there is a decent-to-good chance they will not go back and read the books to themselves when old enough to process them in their entirety.

4. There are, at last count, about ninety billion trillion other books to read to them first. Books that satisfy that need for magic and make-believe without the darkness that HP wraps those things in. Books that a lot of kids are skipping, or having skipped for them.

PLACES TO START (I’m listing fantastical stories only, since this is a “please wait for HP” post):

WINNIE THE POOH. Disney has caused practically an entire generation to forget that the books are about forty-five trillion times better than the animated cartoons.

TOYS GO OUT by Emily Jenkins, which joined the ranks of classic read-alouds immediately upon publication. This story of three toys who live in a little girl’s bedroom and have adventures has never failed me. No, it is not just like TOY STORY, I promise. It is actually nothing like TOY STORY. It is the number-one bestselling children’s book in our shop.

A BEAR CALLED PADDINGTON and sequels by Michael Bond. A great many of you adults missed this charming British series about a sweet bear from Peru who gets found in Paddington Station with a tag on his coat reading “Please look after this bear. Thank you.” The family that finds him does indeed look after him, and gets a handful of fun and trouble in the process.

THE CRICKET IN TIMES SQUARE by George Selden, in which a hungry country cricket jumps into a New Yorker’s picnic basket and winds up in Times Square. His adventures with Tucker Mouse, Harry Cat, and Mario, the boy who discovers him in the subway newsstand owned by his parents, have stuck with me my whole life.

THE MOUSE AND THE MOTORCYCLE and sequels by Beverly Cleary. (I will gently remind those who might argue that this is not a fantasy that the main character is a talking mouse.)

PIPPI LONGSTOCKING by Astrid Lindgren. The Lauren Child-illustrated read-aloud edition that came out a few years ago is fantastic.

TIME AT THE TOP by Edward Ormondroyd – no one has ever heard of this book, but it’s so good. Purple House Press reissued it, bless them. Susan discovers that the elevator in the building where she lives can actually take her back into the past.

THE LIGHTHOUSE FAMILY books by Cynthia Rylant, beginning with THE STORM. Utterly charming series about a cat who’s a lighthouse keeper and the shipwrecked dog and mice who become her family.

NO FLYING IN THE HOUSE by Betty Brock. Annabel Tippens is cared for not by parents, but by a talking dog named Gloria. When a wicked cat named Belinda tells Annabel that she’s actually half-fairy, Annabel must choose between her old life with Gloria and a new life filled with magic.

THE TALE OF DESPERAUX by Kate DiCamillo. Please, please read the book before you show your children the movie. The story of a large-eared mouse, the princess he loves, a light-loving rat and a dim servant girl is one of the most magical stories ever written.

THE DOLL PEOPLE and sequels by Ann M. Martin and Laura Godwin with fabulous illustrations by Caldecott Medal winner Brian Selznick. It is, I would venture to say, impossible not to love these talking dolls and their adventures.

anything by Edward Eager; I like to start with HALF MAGIC. Children discover a coin that is magic – well, half magic, anyway. This makes its wish-granting powers a…little hard to predict. Charming, charming, charming.

Laurel Snyder’s Edward Eager-inspired ANY WHICH WALL. Four children discover a wall that can take them to any place, in any time. Also super charming, and a worthy homage to the above.

MY FATHER’S DRAGON by Ruth Stiles Gannett, in which the narrator’s father runs away to rescue a baby dragon on a faraway island.

Kids get rushed through so many things nowadays. Don’t rush them past some of the greatest read-alouds ever written. And if you have a young, high-level reading child (6, 7, 8), I would offer the same advice that I offer for read-alouds. It’s okay for your child to go through books very quickly. It doesn’t matter how quickly they read – there are plenty of books that are more appropriate for their emotional maturity than HP and other upper middle-grade books. If you have more suggestions, please put them in the comments!

(Not only would I wait on HP, I would wait on the Narnia books, Susan Cooper’s THE DARK IS RISING series, Lloyd Alexander’s PRYDAIN CHRONICLES, Rick Riordan’s PERCY JACKSON AND THE OLYMPIANS, Angie Sage’s SEPTIMUS HEAP series, Madeleine L’Engle’s TIME QUARTET, Trenton Lee Stewart’s MYSTERIOUS BENEDICT SOCIETY series and just about every middle-grade fantasy series or standalone novel that you can think of.)

The authors let you know from the very beginning just how different these identical twins are. A taste of that, first from Payton:

I was seriously excited. I’d spent the last six years in a small girls’ school. And by small I mean there was only class in each grade. It was the same people over and over every year. But not this year…because I was switching to public school! Heck yeah, I was psyched. Switching classes! Different teachers! After-school activities! My own locker! New people! CUTE GUYS!
And the flip side, from Emma:

I wish it were last year. I loved our small school: I knew everybody, and I knew what to expect. Everything was under control. In elementary school I knew who I was. Emma the Brain. Emma the Achiever. Emma with the near-photographic memory. But in middle school there would be kids from all over. Smart, talented students. More competition. The pressure would be ON. This middle school was huge. It had three stories and four wings. I’d looked at the website and found out there were 655 seventh graders and 710 eighth graders.

655
+
710
____
1365
- (me + Payton) = 1363

1363 total strangers in this school!

I shuddered.

Unfortunately, Emma’s fears (rather than Payton’s hopes) come true. School is an unequivocal disaster for both of them. Instead of impressing the teachers and her fellow students with her smarts, Emma makes a series of unfortunate mistakes that send exactly the opposite message. Payton had hoped to impress the popular girls with her fashionable clothes, which she obtained at summer camp by basically serving as a slave to a girl who had awesome clothes and agreed to give them to Payton in exchange for services. It’s going fairly well until she accidentally dumps a giant burrito on the shirt of one of the popular boys.

Payton flees the lunchroom and sends a desperate text to Emma, who comes up with a surprising solution: she will switch clothes with Payton and pretend to be her for the afternoon. Hanging out with your friends is all about faking confidence? I can do confident, Emma says. She’d been very confident in herself before making an idiot out of herself at this new school; surely she could pull out her confidence again to fake it as Payton. So the girls switch clothes, and off they go for the afternoon.

Suddenly everything is different. As each pretends to be the other, they find themselves standing up for their twin. Emma decides to give Payton a slightly more academic reputation than she’d had at their old school. She gives the burrito incident a brushoff in the gym locker room, and her savvy memory earn her some unexpected fashion points with the very girls Payton wants to impress.

Payton gets off to a slower start, as she spent the afternoon in the nurse’s office. However, once she talks to Emma at home, she begins to see what Emma has already realized: switching places is fun.

And now we’re off to the races.

This is a fun book. It is absolutely a fun book. The language explodes off the page (especially when the voice is Payton’s). The switching, as you can imagine, brings much hilarity; it evokes THE PARENT TRAP without duplicating it. It’s hard to get anyone to step out of their comfort zone, so having twins do it for one another (at least at first) is a clever plot device that is executed well here.

However, DeVillers and Roy also give their readers a lot to think about. Payton and Emma learn some very valuable stuff about themselves and each other during (and after) their little experiment. What I appreciated is that they don’t learn these lessons in a sort of hammer-to-the-head kind of way that a lot of “message” stuff can be dropped into books that are supposed to be more on the fun side. The lessons kind of sneak up on you. Good lessons, lessons that tweens can never hear too often – lessons about popularity, and being true to yourself, and standing up for the people you love, and what kinds of things to value.

Also, the things they learn don’t fix everything. They don’t end the book as perfect people, having learned everything they need to know to live successful lives from that point on. The lessons occur, and some take effect and some don’t. Some will probably need to be learned over and over again.

But those lessons are wrapped in a giant pile of fun, which is apparently to be continued in at least one sequel. I can’t wait to see what Payton and Emma get up to next.

I don’t know if Roy and DeVillers each wrote one character (the book is told in alternating chapters), but the voices are distinct enough that I’m thinking they did.

Junebug is almost thirteen, and she spends every summer at the Blue Moon Playhouse, a summer stock theatre that her parents own. Her dad is the director (and sometimes the star), her mother designs costumes, and her sister is stepping into her first major role. And Junebug? She’s been just about every sort of backstage worker there is, and is longing to tread the boards herself.

Even more than that, however, she’s longing for her family to return to normal. Her mother’s moved out of their house and back in her mother’s house, three miles away on the other side of the farm where Blue Moon sits. Her parents let them choose where they would spend the summer. Stella and Junebug, both theatre-mad, chose to stay at the Playhouse, while their brother, Beck, always more interested in farming than acting, went with their mother. Junebug’s father has cast himself in the leading role in every play and seems to be eyeing up one of the leading ladies. Stella’s moved into her role as a teenager fully and no longer seems interested in spending any time with her younger sister or doing her share of the chores they are supposed to split.

And to top it all off, Junebug’s father agreed to take on an intern – a weird boy named Trace with a stutter – and has given Junebug the task of “showing him the ropes.” He seems to be an endless resource of theatrical knowledge, which Junebug considers mostly useless and annoying, and privately nicknames him Thespis. Her father makes things even worse when he suggests giving Junebug’s properties job to Trace for one of the plays, leaving Junebug with…nothing. Her mother’s left, her father hardly talks to her, her sister ignores her, her brother’s elsewhere, the Playhouse has smaller audiences than ever, and the new intern takes over the last part of her summer that was going well. Junebug’s familiar, comfortable world seems to be collapsing, and she doesn’t like it one bit.

It will take a lot of changes for Junebug to begin to recognize her world again.

Henson navigates those changes, Junebug’s varying moods, and the dynamics of a family in trouble deftly. The book is written partially in a clever manner that never feels contrived. Several times in each chapter, passages like this appear:

HERE’S HOW I SEE IT:

The curtain falls for the night on my huge Broadway hit. Flowers rain down on my head. Friends gather in my dressing room after the show to congratulate me. Fans wait for me outside the stage door.

“Ms. Cantrell, you were magnificent tonight!”

“Ms. Cantrell, you are an inspiration!”

I try to sign as many autographs as possible before my agent hurries me to my waiting car.

“Ms. Cantrell must rest now,” she says to the crowd. “You must understand. The play is so very demanding.”

My driver takes me home to my hip downtown loft. There are flowers everywhere, from my countless admirers. There are close friends everywhere – actors, directors, artists – and we sit up all night long, talking about life and art and theater.

HERE’S HOW IT IS:

The house is dark and empty. And so I go through every room.

“Lights up!” I command in a Coleman voice, flipping switches, illuminating every dark space.

I hate the dark.

In the kitchen I search the fridge and cabinets, hungry as any MARINER alone on a storm-tossed sea, but (alas, alack) the shelves are bare, except for some old milk and moldy cheese and an inch of peanut butter.

When I began reading, I feared that this stylistic choice might quickly get on my nerves. I was relieved to find out it was just the opposite. Junebug is unhappy for a lot of this book, and also does a decent job of making some of the people around her unhappy. The book could have been pretty depressing. However, she has a real flair for the dramatic (a combination of her background, of course, and of being almost thirteen) so her literary histrionics often lighten the mood considerably.

Henson also has Junebug introduce each new character in a fun, theatrical way:

RAY MONDELLO, character actor; round and jolly; a “hail-fellow-well-met” (that’s Shakespeare for “cool dude”).

COLEMAN, one name only; a light in the dark, Dad calls her, because she was named for a lamp, but also because she’s like a lighthouse on a stormy sea; as Stage Manager, she is the one who keeps everything running smoothly during the show.

I’m a big fan of books set in the theatre. I was in the majority of the school shows from 5th grade on, and during the summer between my junior and senior years, a new summer theatre for young people started up. I attended for two years before becoming first an assistant director and then a director, and when the theatre became year-round, I performed many, many roles there, both onstage and off. Henson gets the theatre stuff dead-on right, which is no surprise – she spent a great many of her childhood summers at a summer stock theatre. You definitely get a full picture of what the experience is like, in a very accessible way.

Highly recommended.

Order the book from an independent bookstore!

This book is going to appeal to kids who like THE WESTING GAME, THE MYSTERIOUS BENEDICT SOCIETY, THE NAME OF THIS BOOK IS SECRET, SHAKESPEARE’S SECRET, THE VIEW FROM SATURDAY…in other words, this book has some pretty wide-ranging appeal.

The basic plot is this: the owner of a local potato-chip company sets up a puzzle hunt for area school kids, and Winston’s school gets an invite. His principal asks him to head up the school’s team, and he picks his two best friends to be the other participants (a move unappreciated by the math teacher who ultimately becomes the chaperone, as he’d hoped the participants would all be Mathletes). Winston and his team head off to the factory to meet the other teams and set out on the puzzling quest that will end with one school winning fifty thousand dollars. Along the way they’ll have to deal with cheaters, math experts, bad tempers, and a teacher who doesn’t seem to believe that they can win.

The puzzles are sprinkled throughout the book for the reader to solve (answers are in the back). I’m terrible at math and terrible at most puzzles, so I skipped 95% of them. They’re an enhancement to the reading experience, but not central to the plot – I didn’t miss anything by skipping them, as far as I can tell. But for a math or puzzle obsessed kid, the puzzles will only make reading the book that much more awesome.

Winston and his pals are smart and funny, but not dwelling-in-the-basement-geeky in that stereotypical way a lot of smart kids can be portrayed in. In fact, this book does a remarkably good job of not painting any of the math…enthusiasts? as mouthguard-wearing pocket-protector-having nerds. This book actually makes math and puzzles seem…fun. (Just writing that made me feel a little faint – math hasn’t been my friend since 7th grade Algebra I.) I would have loved this book in middle school. I think it’ll be a big hit in its target age range, whether a kid likes math and puzzles or not.

Anyway! Thumbs up to book two. Sasha’s adjusted to life at the school, but she comes back from break not knowing whether the romantic connection she made at the end of her first semester is actually a connection, or all in her head (I don’t want to spoil the story, so  no specifics here). To make matters worse, Heather, her archnemesis of sorts from book one, has decided to make a play for the same guy. To make matters even still worse, there’s a new guy at school (Eric), and he’s a rider, and seems to have a thing for Sasha. Plus there’s the added stress of her riding, and dealing with Heather and her minions on a daily basis. So she’s got her hands full!

Burkhart continues her character development nicely, never letting her villians become cartoonish, and giving Sasha some real and understandable flaws. I’m hoping for a little more story for Paige in the future (Sasha’s non-riding roommate) simply because I really like her, but the other characters are growing and changing in truly believable ways. Perhaps this is because Burkhart is very young, so remembers clearly how it meant to be  a tween; perhaps it’s because Burkhart is a very good writer; perhaps it’s a combination of the two. Whatever the reason, I’m enjoying watching these girls grow.

One thing I don’t like are the girls on the cover. They look so bitchy. It’d be okay if just one of them looked bitchy, because then I’d assume that was Heather, but they both look bitchy. And the girl on the cover of book one, who I assumed was Sasha, looked bitchy. They just look too CLIQUE-y to match the story in my head. Sasha’s not bitchy, she’s a nice girl. It’d be pretty easy to have her looking fresh and young and pretty and trendy AND nice. So how about a smile or two on some upcoming covers?

Lisa Greenwald! Hi! Hihihihi! Come on in. Welcome to the Club For Awesome Female Writers Writing For Tweens. Please stay in the club. Or if you leave for a little while to join Awesome Female Writers Writing For Teens, promise me that you’ll come back, okay? Because tweens need more books like this book.

We’ve already handsold our way through our initial stock of this book at Pudd’nHead, and are eagerly anticipating our next shipment. Actually, by “we” I mean Nikki, the owner, because I hadn’t read this book until last night so I haven’t sold any yet. Hopefully when I go in next we will have more so I can handsell it because now I need to share. Especially now that I know that it features a struggling independent business.

I hug you, MY LIFE IN PINK AND GREEN.

12 year old Lucy isn’t going to wait around for her family’s pharmacy to go out of business. So what if people seem more interested in shopping at all-in-one big box stores? So what if her grandma thinks her improvement ideas are “cute,” and her mom is more interested in saving the world than in saving their livelihood? With the urging of her best friend and the support of her sister (away at college), Lucy decides to take matters into her own hands and make the pharmacy a viable, modernized business.

She gets a lucky break when the high school homecoming queen comes into the pharmacy with hair gone tragically wrong on the day of the big game and dance, and the products that Lucy tells her to use actually fix her hair. The queen blabs all over town about how great Lucy is, and all of a sudden she is the go-to person for special occasion makeup and makeup lessons. And, of course, every person who gets their makeup done buys the products she uses! Can a complete turnaround of the pharmacy business be far behind?

Apparently, if her apathetic mother and stubborn grandma have anything to say about it. So Lucy pushes her ideas even further, seeking for a way to combine her mother’s love of saving the Earth with her grandma’s love of having a room over their heads to produce a solution they can all live with. What she discovers along the way: her own love of the Earth; a surprising amount of business savvy; how to make her voice heard within the confines of her own family; and a crush on a boy that’s been around practically her whole life. Lucy’s confidence and creativity just may save the day after all.

Lucy is awesome. She is a take-charge, hands-on girl who starts the book annoyed at having to “work” in the pharmacy but quickly turns around as she sees how important the business is to their family. The book shows how valuable local, independent businesses are without becoming preachy about it; Lucy truly does begin to offer services that you just don’t get in chain stores, and the community ends up getting involved in the store in some very valuable ways. I think this is a great lesson for tweens to get in any way, shape or form; having it wrapped up in a totally charming novel is possibly the best way of all.  I highly, highly recommend this book.

But…

Did you know I was going to say it? That I’m not in love with the cover? I’m not. I’m sorry, MY LIFE IN PINK AND GREEN, but I’d like you to have a bit of a different cover. That font has got to go. Please make that font go. Especially the part where it’s yellow and hard to read. Also, there’s just a lot going on here, with the face and the hands and the cucumbers with the recycle signs on them and the pink and the green and the yellow font. This cover makes sense, but it’s…not right, somehow. It might be trying to say too much. I like the spine (although same font problem here…please ditch this font for the paperback) but the cover’s just too busy or something. It’s not terrible – except for the font, did I mention that? – but something about it doesn’t speak to me.

Buy MY LIFE IN PINK AND GREEN from an independent bookstore!

Scarlett has a major, MAJOR secret. (I’m not going to reveal it here; you find it out at the beginning of chapter two, so you don’t have long to wait.) It’s so secret and so life-altering that her mom ships Scarlett off to a fancypants all-girls boarding school to shield her from any gossip having to do with said secret. But Scarlett lives in fear of someone finding out anyway, so she begins her eighth-grade year at the new school in a constant state of paranoia.

It only gets worse when the girls are assigned anonymous pen pals from a neighboring all-boys school. The letters from Scarlett’s pen pal start off innocently enough, but soon she receives this:

Number Seventeen: 

Welcome to FOUR TRUTHS AND A LIE. Over the next few weeks, I will be sending you five declarative statements. Four of these statements are true, and one is a lie. It will be your job to figure out which is which. You have until Monday to figure it out. If you choose not to participate in this game, you are destined for darkness.

Good luck.

Scarlett is intrigued, and agrees to participate in the game. It all starts out seeming like fun, but by the third letter it becomes clear that is she does not answer everything correctly, her pen pal will reveal her secret to the school.

Her pen pal knows her secret.

How important to Scarlett is hiding the truth from everyone? Would her life really be over if it came out? Is she smart enough for this fancypants boarding school, or can she at least catch up – because flunking out would be almost as embarrassing as having her secret revealed. Why is her roommate such a snotty pain in the you know what? And how on earth is she supposed to solve this mystery, study, and figure out who the cute boy she met is?

Barnholdt spins a pitch-perfect story with enough fun and intrigue to please any tween. I definitely recommend this, especially at the price point ($5.99!). There’s a lot of story in here for a great value, with realistic characters that girls will identify with and a bit of a mystery to solve along the way. (The book, however, is NOT a mystery.) There’s a bit too much product name-dropping for my taste, but it does serve to establish part of who Scarlett is so I can see why it was thought necessary. In the end, though, that’s a fairly minor complaint about a book I am going to enjoy selling quite a lot.

(And whoever’s in charge of buying the books for the MIX imprint? I am a big fan.)

Buy FOUR TRUTHS AND A LIE from an independent bookstore!

No need to be afraid! Young author Jessica Burkhart (she’s 22; start hating her now) has written a charming book with fleshed-out, compelling characters, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. I will probably pick up the sequel in March, something I don’t often do for series of this type. (Open-ended rather than self-contained.)  When I was ten or eleven I would have devoured this book.

7th grader Sasha Silver is transferring from her public middle school to the “elite Canterwood Crest Academy,” a boarding school featuring, among other things, excellent riding opportunities including an advanced riding team that she hopes to join. Despite the warm welcome of her non-riding roommate, Sasha gets off to a bit of a bad start when a popular group of riders figures out just how good she is. Soon enough their welcoming “jokes” start to seem more like sabotage, and Sasha worries that she may not make the team through no fault of her own. Will she rise above the trouble and be judged on her own merit?

It would have been easy to fall into stereotypes with these characters, but Burkhart avoids it. Paige, the rich roommate, could have been a labels-obsessed snob and nothing more. Instead, she’s bubbly and welcoming and obsessed with…cooking. She and Sasha bond first over Sasha’s DVD sets of tv shows Paige isn’t allowed to watch at home. The unpleasant popular riders could be one-sided girls as well, but each has something deeper and more interesting about them.

Overall, this is an enjoyable read about typical seventh-grade girls who just happen to attend a boarding school (and most of whom are obsessed with riding). It’s spot-on with the age-appropriateness as well – Sasha is nuts for lip gloss, not wine coolers; she’s dealing with her first real crush, not her first sexual relationship; she’s making mistakes and putting her foot in her mouth and fumbling through friendships and trying to keep her grades up and missing her family. She’s a 7th grader, not a teenager in disguise, and you all know I love when an author nails the age range. Burkhart’s done it here, and I can recommend this book wholeheartedly.

I’m looking forward to watching Burkhart grow as an author, as well. If she’s this good at 22, in ten years she’s going to be a major contender.

Is this going to happen to a million little girls? Of course not. Is the display in the middle of the children’s department? Well, not at my local Barnes and Noble, anyway. Should parents be looking at what their kids are reading? Of course.

But this kind of response from an author  is disappointing and immature. I’ll quote the relevant part in its entirety:

Apparently one or two people dislike it because the characters in the book have sex (I know, shocking: It’s a romance). And the reason for their unhappiness with this is because the movies of my life (you remember those, right?) are geared toward children.

So, allegedly, children might pick up Ransom My Heart, which is by me, and LEARN ABOUT SEX! Apparently, I’m not ever supposed to mention sex or write books in which characters have sex, even if they are adult characters who live in medieval times WHO WERE NOT IN THE MOVIES OF MY LIFE, and the book is being sold in the ADULT SECTION OF THE BOOKSTORE.

I would just like to point out that people who worry about these things remind me SO MUCH of my grandmother (not the grandmother from the movies of my life, who was cool, but my real life grandmother, who is so not cool).

Also that people who worry about kids being psychologically scarred from reading love scenes in romance novels really need to get a grip on reality. I recommend they visit this site or this one and find out about some of our world’s real problems.

This might not be in response to my review at all, but I don’t care. You know what, Meg? You wrote a series that a heck of a lot of preteen girls read. And then you wrote AN ADULT BOOK (thanks for the caps, by the way) supposedly by the main character of those books, and apparently you think it’s just dandy if those girls read it. Just because reading about sex won’t psychologically scar them (I’d love to see who actually wrote that) doesn’t mean they need to read softcore pornography masquerading as historical fiction before their twelfth birthday.

I don’t know about other reviewers, but I wasn’t talking about how good the book was, or whether or not Cabot should have written an adult book, or whether or not there should have been sex in it. I was talking about the deliberate cross-promotion between Forever Princess and Ransom My Heart and how I believed (and still believe) it to be irresponsible. Because no, I don’t think 11 and 12 year olds (or, frankly, 13 and 14 year olds, and I’ve got my doubts about the 15 year olds too) need to be reading explicit sexual scenes – a lot of these girls reading PD are still reading Anne of Green Gables, for the love of God. Don’t girls grow up fast enough already? Is there something wrong with wanting to keep sex away from them as long as we can? Does the period of innocence have to keep getting cut shorter?

You know what would have been easy? To say something like “I understand some people are concerned that RANSOM MY HEART might find its way into the hands of readers who aren’t ready for its adult content. I encourage all parents and teachers to be careful about what they’re giving their children and students to read. I don’t think the cross-promotion will be harmful in any way to readers.” It’s easy to disagree without being obnoxious.

But apparently it was easier to be obnoxious and to write off concerns as censorship or hysteria or whatever “Mia” was trying to do with all of her capital letters. After seeing authors like Lauren Myracle engage intelligently and maturely with reviewers or readers who have complained about the age-appropriateness of their books, it is even more disappointing to see Cabot react in such a childish fashion – especially since she’s “hiding” behind “Mia” to do it.