Category: Young adult/children’s

Mixed Magics consists of four stories set in the same worlds as the Chrestomanci books, all during the time when Christopher Chant is Chrestomanci, the enchanter in charge of overseeing the use of magic. The longest story is almost sixty pages; the shortest is twenty pages; they’re all pretty fun. The book starts with humor,…

When he’s around eight, Conrad Tesdinic’s Uncle Alfred tells him he has a lot of bad karma and needs to be careful. When he’s twelve and it’s time either to continue his education or to leave school and get a job, Uncle Alfred gives him very bad news: “I’ve been doing a lot of divining…

The prologue/first poem in I Don’t Want to Be Crazy, Samantha Schutz’s YA memoir in free verse about getting through college while coping with an anxiety disorder, narrates the experience of having a panic attack: My hands are shaking. I try to squeeze them, try to make it stop, but now my fists are shaking,…

Witch Week was published in 1982 and is therefore the third, in publication order, of the Chrestomanci books, but it’s the fourth one presented in the two volume set of The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, and that set determined my reading order of the books. Actually, you could read Witch Week on its own, but it…

This book is set in the same world as Charmed Life and The Lives of Christopher Chant, except instead of taking place in a magical version of England, it’s in a magical version of Italy. Caprona, where the action takes place, is known for the quality of the magic spells it produces and sells. The…

This volume contains two separate books, Charmed Life, which I read multiple times as a kid, and The Lives of Christopher Chant, which I read for the first time about six years ago. Last month, I was at an amazing used book sale in my neighborhood and found a copy of another book in the…

My boyfriend gave me a copy of this book for my birthday last year, but my birthday’s in late April and this is definitely a wintry book, or maybe a winter-on-the-edge-of-spring book, so it took us a while to pick it up. We read this aloud to each other, alternating chapters, on the evening of…

I enjoyed this book more than the first in this series, maybe just because I was more in the mood for it, or maybe because the setting and characters are largely already established, which lets things flow more smoothly. The book opens with an interruption: fifteen-year-old Sophronia Temminick and her best friend, Dimity, both students…

I liked the voice and tone of Picture Me Gone from the first page, which starts with 12-year-old Mila talking about her name: “The first Mila was a dog. A Bedlington terrier. It helps if you know these things,” she says, and then, a bit farther down the page: “I don’t believe in reincarnation. It…

At the start of The Wind on the Moon, Dinah and Dorinda are watching their father, Major Palfrey, pack his trunk: he’s getting ready to go to war. He tells them to be good while he’s gone, but no one’s very sure the girls will be able to: Major Palfrey says the ring of mist…