Can we talk about the cover first? Briefly? Because I hate it. My galley has the same cover, essentially, but with the colors inverted, and the title under the tree and Brashares’ name over it rather than the other way around, but whichever they ended up with it’s essentially the same. And it’s boring. It [...]

In January, HarperCollins is publishing Ransom My Heart, a new novel “by Princess of Genovia Mia Thermopolis, with help from Meg Cabot.” I obtained an advance copy of this book from Harper to evaluate for their First Look program. I was also reading it for my old bookstore, because they sell a lot of Princess [...]

Oh, aimed-at-tweens books featuring tween characters doing tweeny-age-appropriate things, how I do love you.
Sixth-grader Molly is really not happy about things. Her dad is going to get married again (her mother passed away years ago) to a woman Molly and her best friend Tanna call The Claw. The Claw has changed her basketball-loving, Chinese food-ordering, [...]

If I were still handselling (sigh), I would sell this to teens, and then when they came back wanting “something else like it,” I’d sell them Carrie Ryan’s The Forest of Hands and Teeth (when it came out two months later). These are sister books, in a way. Perhaps there are other books out there [...]

I think this is one of the best novels on the spring list.
Ida Mae Jones needs something more than what she’s got. Her daddy died in a farming accident, but before he did, he taught her to fly his crop duster. Ida Mae dreams of going to Chicago where a special flight school won’t turn [...]

Angela’s parents have shipped her off to Hidden Oaks as a last resort. After an incident with her boyfriend at home that ended in the death of her grandfather, they were no longer willing to deal with her themselves. Hidden Oaks is a boarding school for dangerous girls – girls who have been delinquent, committed [...]

(Man, am I behind. Vacation really messes with galley review! I have about 12 books to write up.)
I have to confess that in my former life as a bookseller I would not have picked up this galley. In my shop we all had our reading niches and our reading loves and more often than not [...]

Here’s my husband Greg with a review of SCAT by Carl Hiaasen. He’s a professor, so his writing makes mine look like that of a one-handed blind monkey. Or a fork. Or something else that can’t write. Don’t get used to it, though, because he doesn’t read much kidlit – he just loves Carl Hiaasen. [...]

Wendy Mass hits it out of the park again with this middle-grade tale of a friendship and birthday gone horribly wrong. Amanda and Leo have been best friends almost since birth and have celebrated their birthdays together every year. However, at their tenth birthday party, Amanda overhears something Leo hoped she wouldn’t, and all at [...]