Can we please stop using HARRY POTTER as a reading benchmark?
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 [...]

Several years back, a certain bookseller named Melissa grabbed my arm and said, “Sarah!  You’ve got to read this!  Now!”  She handed me the galley for THE WARRIOR HEIR, and I put it on my to-be-read pile.  As usual, Melissa was dead-on.  From the moment I started WARRIOR HEIR, I knew this was an author [...]

There are days I go to collect the mail, and rather than the usual stack of bills, it’s all requests from charities.  Children’s charities, health-related charities, feminist charities, religious charities.  Each one is deserving, and each one shows real kindness to real people that I will never be able to help with my own two [...]

note from Melissa: it’s not so obvious who’s writing each review here, because I’m using this crappy template that I can’t adjust and haven’t had a chance to meddle with a better one.  Each post is tagged at the bottom with the author’s name. The majority are by me, but they’re not all by me, [...]

Let’s do some simple math, shall we? Take two brothers. Subtract one father. Add a troubled past and old wounds. Multiply the oldest brother’s brains by ten, and then multiply the youngest brother’s hotness by twenty. The answer: THE DEMON’S LEXICON by Sarah Rees Brennan.
There is a deluge [...]

Bloodhound is the much-awaited second volume in the Beka Cooper series by Tamora Pierce. It’s set in Pierce’s fictional fantasy world of Tortall, home of her previous heroines found in the Song of the Lioness Quartet (the Alanna books), the Immortals Quartet (the Daine books), the Protector of the Small Quartet (the Kel books), and [...]

Impossible is the story of Lucy Scarborough, a 17-year-old whose unconventional life has been spent with foster parents due to her unusual and unstable birth mother.  At first, this sounds like it’s just going to be yet another of the many YA books with kids in foster care who manage to overcome challenging histories to [...]

(no cover art yet)
Jessica Day George’s website says that the upcoming DRAGON SPEAR is the last of the books she will write about Creel and her dragon friends, and now I am VERY VERY MAD at Jessica Day George. Stop writing if the books seem in danger of starting to suck, yes, but THAT IS [...]

Some confessions:
1. When I heard that Cassie Clare, OMGFAMOUS fanfic writer, had gotten a book deal, the first thing I did was roll my eyes and think “well, THAT’LL be great.”
2. When the galley of CITY OF BONES arrived at the shop, I rolled my eyes again and thought, “okay, you’re in for a sucky [...]