(or not so occasional…I’ll probably have several posts like this in the coming days to get some books out of my head, and then it’ll likely taper off a bit.)
It never fails to surprise me when people have never even heard of a book I love. Even though I know that there are bajillions of [...]

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 [...]

When Laurie Halse Anderson is at her very best, there may be no one better, and she’s at her very best in her upcoming teen novel Wintergirls. We’re back in Speak territory here – haunting, powerful, vital. I finished this book over two weeks ago and still can’t stop thinking about it. It’s killed me [...]

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, [...]

Savannah’s finally met the guy of her dreams, but it seems like the world is conspiring against them. Savannah’s asthma has her in and out of the hospital, and her mother’s refusal to tell her bosses about it has their family in and out of poverty. Jackson’s father died, and his mother expects him to [...]

There’s going to end up being a bit of a rant in this review, so I want to preface it by saying: I enjoy Buckingham’s writing very much. I loved DEMONKEEPER, his first book, and sold a lot of it when I was a bookseller. I was very much looking forward to reading GOBLINS! and [...]

Dear Authors:
I do not like baseball.
Please stop writing good baseball books. I do not want to like baseball.
Love, Me
As you may have suspected, THE BROOKLYN NINE is both A. about baseball and B. really good. I’d blame it on the awesomely cool concept, but no, Alan Gratz is a good writer too (darn him) [...]

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 [...]

Almost-fifteen-year-old Alis has never been out of her sheltered religious community, and despite the many rules she must live under (which caused her brother to flee years before), has lived a fairly contented life. However, everything changes when her parents tell her that she must marry the village’s 40 year old minister. Alis decides that [...]

This book is a lot of fun; great for fans of Ally Carter’s I’D TELL YOU I LOVE YOU BUT THEN I’D HAVE TO KILL YOU. I don’t think that zombies are going to be the next big thing like all the publishers are seeming to, but I do think that this zombie book might [...]