Category: Young adult/children’s

I found this book on the sidewalk and picked it up without having heard of this author or the series (this book is the third of four, but it works as a stand-alone story as well). It seemed promising—London! Italy! Intrigue! 1898!—but as I started reading, I was a little grumpy. The story opens with…

This is the third book about the Mysterious Benedict Society, a group of four very smart (and extraordinarily talented) friends who fight to keep a nasty villain from taking over the city/country/world. Like the first and second books, this one is clever and sweet and exciting (and yes, I stayed up ’til midnight to finish…

I read Al Capone Does My Shirts back in 2005; this book’s the sequel to that one and picks up where the first left off. Moose Flanagan is still living on Alcatraz, playing baseball and hanging out; his autistic sister Natalie is about to start at a new school, and Moose is trying to figure…

Hava Aaronson is seventeen and feels like she’s never fit in: “I guess I was just born different,” she says on page 1, which sort of made me roll my eyes and wonder if I was really in the mood for a YA novel after all—and maybe I wasn’t—but I kept reading. Hava’s an Orthodox…

Mog Winter is the printer’s devil: “the youngest apprentice in a printing shop,” (or, in this case, the only apprentice), and an orphan who lives in a small room above the shop in Clerkenwell, not far from the New Prison and the stinking River Fleet. Despite the long hours and low pay, Mog’s job has…

These short stories are wizarding-world fables, “translated from the ancient runes by Hermione Granger” (though sadly, without any kind of textual commentary in Hermione’s voice), with “commentary by Albus Dumbledore.” The commentary, with its amusing footnotes and asides, is the best part of the book, though the stories themselves aren’t bad either. I liked “The…

I am such a sucker for city-romances like this, and also for David Levithan’s particular post-gay brand of optimism and charm, and also for the occasional slightly-breathless young adult novel. “I know this is going to sound strange, but would you mind being my girlfriend for the next five minutes?” is how Nick and Norah’s…

While I enjoyed this collection of six short stories about nighttime epiphanies, by Peter Abrahams, Libba Bray, David Levithan, Patricia McCormick, Sarah Weeks, and Gene Luen Yang, I definitely liked some of the individual stories more than others. Part of it, I think, is the length factor, or the intended-audience factor: I like short short…

This was the sort of book I am not sure if I would have liked as a kid (I can’t remember if I liked adventure-ish books or found them stressful or else just never really read them, other than A Wrinkle in Time), but that I totally enjoy now. It’s full of adventure and riddles…

In this sequel to The Penderwicks, summer vacation is finished and the Penderwick sisters are back in school. Their autumn is going along pleasingly…until their Aunt Claire visits them, and gives their father a letter from their mother, who had died several years before. The letter encourages Mr. Penderwick to start dating again, and the…