Category: Young adult/children’s

I didn’t even know there was a prequel to the Mysterious Benedict Society books, until I happened to be looking at books in Target while waiting for my boyfriend to finish his shopping. Clearly, once I knew about it, I had to read it: I really liked the rest of the books in the series,…

Grace has grown up watching the wolves behind her family’s house in Mercy Falls, Minnesota. As a child, she was actually attacked by them once: one dragged her from her tire swing on a cold winter day, and the others circled around—but one wolf stopped the attack partway through. That wolf, the yellow-eyed wolf, becomes…

The book opens with a fact: “In 1996 less than half of all American high school students had ever used the Internet.” And then we meet Josh and Emma, two high school students (he’s a sophomore, she’s a junior.) They’re neighbors, always have been, and were best friends as kids, though over the past 6…

In London, in 1882, sixteen-year-old Becky Winter gets her first tutoring job: she’s to teach German (her first language) to a girl named Adelaide, who’s a few years older than Becky, and who needs tutoring in more than just German, it turns out. Though she’s married to the prince of a tiny kingdom called Razkavia,…

Though The Tiger in the Well is a Sally Lockhart Mystery, the “mystery” isn’t so mysterious: the identity of the villain becomes apparent pretty early in the book—or, in my case, earlier: the back cover of the edition I read makes it pretty clear. But that doesn’t make the book any less satisfying or even…

The Shadow in the North is the second of Pullman’s Sally Lockhart mysteries, and I think it’s better-written than The Ruby in the Smoke, or maybe I just liked it more because I already know the main characters. Sally, who’s now twenty-two, is a partner in Garland & Lockhart’s photograph studio and has also set…

It’s October, 1872, and sixteen-year-old Sally Lockhart, whose father died in late summer, has just gotten a letter from Singapore. Singapore is where her father was last, but the note’s not in his handwriting, and she’s got no idea what it means: it says to beware of the Seven Blessings, and it says that someone…

Unlike the rest of the Melendy Quartet, this one’s not really about the whole family: summer has ended, the older boys (Rush and Mark, who’s an adopted Melendy now) are away at boarding school, and Mona is living in the city, where she’s staying with Mrs. Oliphant, a family friend, and going to school and…

As you probably gathered from my last two posts, I’m totally enjoying Elizabeth Enright’s Melendy Quartet, in which this book is the third volume. The kids (Mona, Rush, Randy, and Oliver) are all satisfying characters (though I feel like Mona’s a bit less developed than the others, or maybe I’m just less interested in her),…

The Four-Story Mistake, the sequel to The Saturdays, picks up some months after that book left off: it’s October, and the Melendy family is moving out of their Manhattan brownstone to a house in the country. As in The Saturdays, the characters and the story are charming, and Enright is emotionally astute: I loved this,…