So of course I’d heard of Octavian Nothing. But it was just one of those books (two volumes, actually, but really one book, in my mind) that I’d never gotten around to reading. But I’ve been catching up on John Green’s archives after going crazy for his Looking for Alaska, and I took what he [...]

I bought Looking for Alaska at a recent book festival because it had a nice shiny round gold Printz Award sticker on the cover that gleamed up at me invitingly from the rows of books on the table. At the cash register, two college-aged cashiers, a boy and a girl, gasped in unison, “We love [...]

We make assumptions about our writers sometimes, don’t we? We imagine what they look like, how old they are, and how much of a story they’ve taken from their own life experiences. When I was in graduate school in the summer of 1997, studying secondary English education, I was assigned a book called Make Lemonade [...]

The first time I finished The Book Thief, I was on a plane riding home from a visit to see my sister for her law school graduation. I cried on page after page, my tears falling faster than I could wipe them away, sliding down my face then my chin then my neck to my [...]

I was vaguely aware of The Wednesday Wars by Gary Schmidt for a while. As in, I’d heard of it and seen its cover in stores and knew it was a 2008 Newbery Honor Book and was always mildly curious about it, but not curious enough to ever pick it up until recently, when I [...]

Readers of Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things, the Eisner Award-nominated first installment in Ted Naifeh’s Courtney Crumrin series, should definitely not skip the bitingly witty and insightful introduction penned by Kelly Crumrin (Naifeh’s real-life girlfriend). It speaks of childhood fears and the outgrowing thereof and sets the stage for the book’s dark and sardonic tone. 
This graphic [...]

The first book in the Amelia Rules! series hilariously and heartbreakingly depicts the coming of age theme. The characterizations of Amelia, her parents, her aunts, her teachers, and her friends bring to life the chaotic existence of life’s players through the eyes of a precocious and unforgettable 9-year-old girl.
The story is an episodic look at [...]

The world we knew is gone. The world of commerce and frivolous necessity has been replaced by a world of survival and responsibility. An epidemic of apocalyptic proportions has swept the globe causing the dead to rise and feed on the living.
So says the back cover of The Walking Dead, Volume One: Days Gone By, written [...]

One! Hundred! Demons! is a wonderful book by Lynda Barry, a cartoonist, novelist, and playwright whose work appears all over tarnation. The deserving recipient of both an Alex Award and the 2003 Eisner Award for Best New Graphic Album, this is the sort of book that makes a person want to sing from the mountaintops about the [...]

(This post is from Eliza. The posts are all tagged at the bottom with the author, but because I made this theme on the Wordpress Theme Generator, I have no idea how to make them always show easily the author besides adding a tag. Man, that was a bad sentence. In any event, if you’re [...]