Book notes

Category: Young adult/children’s

  • The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum

    I hadn’t heard of L. Frank Baum’s Santa Claus origin story until it was chosen as this month’s pick for an online book club I’m in. I’m glad I got a copy of the Macmillan Collector’s Library edition from the library rather than just reading it on Project Gutenberg: I liked looking at the illustrations…

  • The Lost Library by Rebecca Stead and Wendy Mass

    This was absolutely the cozy middle-grade mystery I needed to read right now, and there are so many things I like about this book. It’s set in a small town called Martinville, where the library mysteriously burned down twenty years before the start of the novel. At the start of the book we meet some…

  • The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel) by Ellen Raskin

    I vividly remember the cover of the 1989 Puffin paperback edition of this book, which I suspect I checked out of the library multiple times. I’m not sure what made me think of it recently, but I decided it might be fun to re-read, and it was: I remembered parts of the story but had…

  • Anastasia, Absolutely by Lois Lowry

    I like the way that Lois Lowry’s middle-grade books about Anastasia Krupnik (who is in eighth grade in this final book in the series) keep the reader’s interest by combining multiple plot threads. In this one: 1) Anastasia has just gotten a dog 2) she’s taking a Values class at school 3) her dad has…

  • Otto: A Palindrama by Jon Agee

    Although Otto is published by Dial Books for Young Readers, I think this “palindromic graphic novel” would be fun for readers of all ages who like wordplay. As others have mentioned, most of the book is a kind of daydream/reverie/fantasy journey, which means the plot doesn’t have to make a ton of sense, but that…

  • The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street by Karina Yan Glaser

    I’d been meaning to read The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street since it came out in 2017, but somehow hadn’t gotten around to it, despite the fact that this style of middle-grade novel is totally my jam. If you like Elizabeth Enright’s books about the Melendy family, or Jeanne Birdsall’s books about the Penderwicks, you will…

  • The Stolen Lake by Joan Aiken

    I went into The Stolen Lake expecting something like Nightbirds on Nantucket: an alternate-history romp with some peril for our heroine Dido Twite, but with humor and an expectation of a happy ending. The Stolen Lake felt much darker, with Dido as resourceful as ever but also sadder and in what felt like greater danger.…

  • Nightbirds on Nantucket by Joan Aiken

    I recently acquired a copy of The Stolen Lake, which is the fourth book in Joan Aiken’s “Wolves Chronicles”, and it prompted me to check out this book, which is the third in the series, from the library. Nightbirds on Nantucket is totally bonkers, and totally excellent. It opens on a ship at sea in…

  • The Charmed Children of Rookskill Castle by Janet Fox

    At one point in this middle-grade novel one of the characters remarks on how it’s weird to be living in a “crazy maybe haunted, maybe spy-filled castle in Scotland,” and yeah, this book is quite the mix of things. It’s 1940 and Kat Bateson and her two siblings are sent to a castle somewhere north…

  • Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo

    Last Night at the Telegraph Club was the 1950s sapphic coming of age story I didn’t know I needed, and was such an engrossing read for me. In the prologue we meet Lily, who’s 13 and with her family at a 4th of July celebration/Miss Chinatown pageant in San Francisco; Lily feels “as if she…