Category: Young adult/children’s

I read El Deafo, Cece Bell’s incredibly charming graphic-memoir about her childhood, in one day, and totally loved it. I laughed a lot, and kept interrupting my boyfriend to show him great pages, and there were a few places where I got a little teary-eyed. Bell’s art, which is rendered in vivid color by David…

At the start of The Accidental Highwayman, which is set in England in the mid-1700s, sixteen-year-old Kit Bristol feels pretty pleased with where he’s ended up: he’s an orphan who used to be a trick-rider in a traveling circus, and now he’s an indentured servant to a gentleman who isn’t much trouble, though he’s fond…

Near the start of Enchanted Glass, Andrew Hope, a thirty-something-year-old academic, finds out his grandfather has died, which means he’s inherited the family home, Melstone, where he spent happy weeks on school holidays when he was a kid. Andrew Hope’s grandfather, Jocelyn Brandon, was a magician, so Andrew has also inherited his field-of-care—a magical area…

I’d been sort of resistant to reading Love Is the Higher Law, because as the cover photo of the Tribute in Light makes clear, it’s David Levithan’s “9/11 book,” and I wasn’t sure I wanted to read a 9/11 book. But, well, it’s David Levithan, and I love how he writes, and I love how…

The style of Railsea, the language and syntax, won me over at the start. Plot-wise, Miéville is playing with Moby-Dick crossed with Treasure Island, with some nods to Robinson Crusoe and the Odyssey, but weird, because this is China Miéville. Our protagonist is Sham, or, really, Shamus Yes ap Soorap, and when the book opens…

I liked Eleanor & Park, but not nearly as much as other people seem to have liked it, and I’m not sure why. It’s a YA love story set in Omaha in 1986, in which the two “star-crossed sixteen-year-olds,” as the flap-copy puts it, meet on the school bus and fall for each other without…

This YA book starts with “A Piece of Evidence,” a letter dated 2007 from one Frances Rose Landau-Banks (everyone calls her Frankie) to the headmaster of Alabaster Preparatory Academy, confessing that she “was the sole mastermind behind the mal-doings of the Loyal Order of the Basset Hounds” (1). Based on this, and the list that…

The engravings by John Lawrence that illustrate this book may have been my favorite part: I was charmed from the tiny first-page illustration of a descending balloon on. Look at the one below: the snowy sky, those smoking chimneys, the windows and their shutters, the lantern on the corner: I love it all: Not that…

Anastasia Again! starts with twelve-year-old Anastasia’s reaction to her parents’ announcement that they’re moving to the suburbs: to say she’s not pleased would be an understatement. Anastasia has lived in Cambridge (where her dad teaches at Harvard) her whole life, and she’s sure that suburbia will be an aesthetic and intellectual wasteland, which results in…

I think I read this book as a kid—I certainly owned a copy of one of the later books in the series, and pieces of this one felt familiar—but it wasn’t one of my favorites, and I’m not sure why. Anastasia Krupnik is ten, and hilarious. She’s an only child, living with her English-professor/poet dad…