Category: Young adult/children’s

“It would have to rain today,” said Rush, lying flat on his back in front of the fire. “On a Saturday. Certainly. Naturally. Of course. What else would you expect? Good weather is for Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday; and rain’s for Saturday and Sunday, and Christmas vacation and Easter.” “Oh, Rush, do stop grousing,”…

Dion James has been a fan of Alcott-Simpson’s, the big department store in the city where he lives, since the time he first saw it, back when he was eight or nine and shining shoes on the sidewalks. The first time he went inside, it made an impression: After the ordinary winter world outside, dirty…

I found a copy of this book on the sidewalk and picked it up without realizing it had been annotated by its previous owner, a kid (his name and classroom number are written on the inside front cover and on the sides of the pages). This lead to some amusement: mostly, this kid underlined words,…

Rose, the younger sister of Oliver from Gopnik’s other kids’ book, The King in the Window, has a little bit of a speech impediment: she’s prone to Spoonerisms, switching the starts of her words to say, for example, “U Nork” instead of “New York.” She’s adopted—she was born in Russia, and lived in an orphanage…

I heard about The Homeward Bounders thanks to this post during this summer’s Diana Wynne Jones Week over at Jenny’s Books, and decided to pick it up at the library. Jamie Hamilton, the narrator of this book, looks thirteen but isn’t really. He should be thirteen. His life is quite ordinary until he’s twelve: he…

Philip Haldane’s parents are both dead, so Philip, who is ten, has been raised by his older half-sister, Helen. She’s the only family he’s had or wanted, and has always been a kind and caring (and fun!) parent. But now she’s getting married to her childhood sweetheart, whose first wife died, and Philip is none…

This collection of stories about love isn’t my favorite of Levithan’s books—I think his particular explorations of emotion and connection work best for me when they’re novel-length. But because I already like his work, I’m glad I read this book, which does have its share of excellent moments. The eighteen stories collected here (most of…

“Frank and Jess thought Own Back Ltd. was an excellent idea when they first invented it. Three days later, they were not so sure” (1). That’s how this book starts, and reading those sentences, you know you’re in for a lesson-learning sort of book, but this being Diana Wynne Jones, it’s not too heavy-handed. Own…

19-year-old Polly is supposed to be packing, getting ready for another year of college, but she’s been reading instead. As she reads, she pauses and realizes a funny thing: though the cover on the book, which is similar to a picture that hangs above her bed, is familiar, she’s sure the book used to be…

What if the stars weren’t just distant balls of gas: what if each one had, or might have, a “denizen,” a being who inhabited its sphere? What if these denizens had their own lives, their own politics, courts, and jealousies? That’s part of the premise of this novel, which the flap-copy describes, sort of cheesily…