Category: Young adult/children’s

This is one of those charming summery kids’ books where a family goes on vacation and has adventures: the ordinary-life kind, not the magical kind. The Cape Cod summer house where the Penderwicks usually go has just been sold, so, instead, the four girls, their father, and their dog end up at a new summer…

Reading a kids’ book after reading Proust felt funny, and I’m not sure I have anything to say about this book, other than that I read it in two days and stayed up past bedtime to finish it. Parts of this book—the mystery of it, the friendship between children and an eccentric old woman—reminded me…

It’s the middle of the 21st century and East Anglia’s sinking into the sea. (But the coastline’s always shifted; there have always been ruins and layers beneath.) H, who is 100, thinks back to his own not-so-buried past: to his time at a boarding school on the coast, the year he was sixteen, the year…

This volume comprises two previously-published books: Charmed Life, which I’d read before, and The Lives of Christopher Chant, which I hadn’t. I owned a paperback copy of Charmed Life when I was a kid, and read it over and over: it’s just the right combination of magic and cleverness and humor and excitement. Eric (Cat)…

In this, the last book in the trilogy that began with A Great and Terrible Beauty, there is much at stake for Gemma Doyle and her friends. This is a story of power, of using it poorly and using it well, of chaos and order, and of finding some balance, finding some path forward. As…

L.M. Boston’s books are, without fail, a delight. I like how they don’t condescend, how, though they’re written for children, they use sentences with lots of commas and nested thoughts. Most of all, perhaps, I like how full of sensory detail they are: how light on water looks, how a stone feels in your hand.…

There’s something so satisfying about historical-fiction-meets-fantasy, and this book is especially lovely. It’s set in London in the mid-1600s, from the beheading of Charles I to the Interregnum and then the Restoration, and when I’d finished reading I felt sad to leave this imagining of London, the Thames winding through the city, the shouts of…

This book seems slow at first, dull at the very start, but then there’s a richness of detail that grabs your interest, a sense of life in Paris. And then the story properly starts. Oliver, who is eleven and an American living in Paris, finds himself at the center of a centuries-old struggle between good…

So delightful: plot twists and suspicions confirmed and suspense and danger, but also Christmas balls and gaslit London streets and desire. I like how Bray plays with the idea of illusion and what it means or how it works; I like emphasis on choice, choosing well, the “I choose this” of the first book and…