Category: Young adult/children’s

Delicious: silk and velvet and mystery, magic and power and desire. Victorian boarding school! Transgressiveness! I picked this book up at breakfast this morning and just kept reading, and now am all impatient to start the sequel.

If the first day of school is any indication of things to come, fourth grade is not going to be a good year for Leon Zeisel. The class bully is as mean as ever, and, what’s worse, the fourth grade teacher is a scary woman with a penchant for sewing. For Leon, who’s still clumsy…

Smart and funny and sweet book about Amal, an Australian-Palestinian high school junior who decides to wear the hijab full-time. Amal’s smart and independent, good at debate (and therefore also good at quick reactions to the stupid things people say to her based on the assumptions they make about her and her faith). Generally speaking,…

Clever and compelling: smart kids, puzzles, and peril—a bit of The Westing Game, a bit of The View from Saturday, and lots of excitement. The illustrations by Carson Ellis are totally charming, especially the last one, all stars and snow and rooftops.

I never read any of the Tintin books as a kid, so this was my first excursion into the world of Tintin et Milou, Dupond et Dupont, and the various bad guys Tintin and Milou manage to outsmart. Reading in French is very slow going for me, lots of pausing to consult my dictionary or…

Instead of talking about the book (so many good details! never mind the epilogue!) I’ll just say: if I had to spend a summer weekend sick with a cold, I’m glad it was this one, when really, I didn’t want to do anything anyway, other than re-read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and read…

So pleasingly fast-paced and funny. Hildi Kelmar lives in a village in the Swiss Alps, and works as a maid at Castle Karlstein. Her employer, Count Karlstein, is the guardian of his two orphaned English nieces and a thoroughly nasty individual, the sort who goes in for pacts with demons. It’s nearly All Souls’ Eve,…

As a child, I didn’t much like rural “old-fashioned” stories: I read a few Laura Ingalls Wilder books and thought they were OK, but couldn’t get through Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farms or Anne of Green Gables and had never even heard of Betsy-Tacy. I think I appreciate the sweetness (& quaintness) of this story, which…

David Case is anxious—more than anxious, actually: he’s convinced that fate is out to get him. So he decides to change entirely, beginning with his name (now Justin Case), to hide from his fate, whatever it is: never mind that, as one of his friends puts is, “If there really is some supernatural force out…

It’s a month from Jeremy Fink’s 13th birthday when a mysterious package arrives at his apartment. Inside, there’s a locked wooden box with four keyholes; the box is engraved with the words “The meaning of life: for Jeremy Fink to open on his 13th birthday.” Jeremy recognizes the engraving as the unmistakable work of his…