Category: Young adult/children’s

(by Ann M. Martin, Becky Albertalli, Coe Booth, Sarah Kuhn, Peter Lerangis, Jahnna N. Malcolm, & Emma Straub) I read a big chunk of this book on a summer Sunday when I was fighting off a cold or something and had a temperature of 100.1 degrees Fahrenheit and couldn’t quite nap all day but also…

(by Karina Yan Glaser) I read this book a few weeks after this year’s New York City marathon rather than before it, but the timing still felt apt: the events of the book start on October 20 and culminate on the day of the marathon in early November, and this is a very autumnal book,…

(by Karina Yan Glaser) The plot of this third book in the Vanderbeekers series leans pretty hard on some coincidences/events that felt unlikely to me, but the book as a whole is so charming that I was mostly willing to overlook that. In this one the kids (now aged 6 to 13) are on spring…

(by Kate Milford) I read Greenglass House in February 2021, so it’s taken me a few years to get around to this sequel, but I think I’m OK with that: I thought this would be a good late-December book and it definitely is. It takes place in the days leading up to Christmas, and the…

(by Karina Yan Glaser) I loved The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street when I read it back in 2022, and I’m not sure why it took me so long to get around to the second book in the series, but I’m also glad that I read this summertime story in the midst of summer, rather than…

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…

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…

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…

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…