Category: Young adult/children’s

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…

Stephen is invisible: he was born that way. He doesn’t know the logistics, just that he can’t see himself, and no one else has ever seen him, either. He knows his invisibility is the result of a curse, but by the time he’s almost sixteen, and his mother (who raised him) is dead, it’s just…

Having abandoned my TBR Double Dog Dare plans of reading from my own shelves until April 1st by checking out Speaking from Among the Bones from the library, I couldn’t resist checking out Etiquette & Espionage, too. It might not have been the right book at the right time for me, though: reading this particular…

Un Lun Dun seems, at first, like it’s going to be one of those standard YA fantasy stories where a young person is somehow chosen to learn about another world whose existence he or she hadn’t ever imagined And, you know how it goes, that other world is in peril, and the chosen one has…

The Difference Between You and Me is a queer high school story that isn’t a coming-out story: Jesse Halberstam is a sophomore, and she’s already been out as a lesbian for a year. She gets harassed at school because she’s out and gay and butch and wears big clompy rubber fisherman’s boots all the time.…

The art was my favorite thing about Mokie & Bik (which I wrote about here)—it was crisp and fleshed out. In this book, the art (some of which you can see on Jonathan Bean’s website) is in pencil rather than pen, and it’s sketchy, looser. Sometimes this works for me—I love the opening spread, with…

Mokie and Bik are fraternal twins who live on a boat with their mom, their nanny, and some pets, which is just as exciting as it sounds. The art, by Jonathan Bean, is great: the cover, with Mokie swinging from a rope, pigtails flying, sets the tone of mischievousness and charm, and the endpapers—one of…

It’s April 1979, and twelve-year-old Miranda is helping her mom get ready to be a contestant on The $20,000 Pyramid. But the arrival of the postcard saying her mom gets to be on the show reminds Miranda of something else—an anonymous note she’d gotten during the winter, a note that included the date of the…

I should start by saying: It’s hard to write about the last of the Hunger Games books in a in a non-spoilery way, so if you haven’t read this book yet, you might want to stop reading now. In Catching Fire, Katniss Everdeen unwittingly inspired revolution: now, in Mockingjay, the Districts are in full-out war…

I liked The Hunger Games, but I wasn’t sure how much I was going to like Catching Fire. The early pages felt clunky; I couldn’t find or get into the rhythm of the narration. But then the plot got going and I didn’t care about the quality of the prose at all, I just cared…