Category: Young adult/children’s

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…

I’d been somewhat resistant to reading this book/series, in part because I am generally not crazy about dystopian fiction, and in part because the premise seemed so horrible/violent. Which, of course, it is: each year, twelve boys and twelve girls between the age of twelve and eighteen, called tributes, are made to fight to the…

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…