Category: Young adult/children’s

Another excellent romp featuring Cecelia & Kate, and the magical England in which they live. The year is 1828, and a German magician/surveyor has gone missing near Leeds, while investigating a new railway line. Lord Wellington asks Cecelia’s husband James to look into the matter, and Cecelia travels north with him to see what’s going…

Lighthousekeeping is the story of an orphan named Silver. Tanglewreck is also the story of an orphan named Silver. It’s a story about duty, hope, multiplicity, possibility. Possibility: the Silver of Tanglewreck as the Silver of Lighthousekeeping, elsewhere in the multiverse? “There are Lighthousekeepers and Lock Keepers, and Housekeepers […] and there are Timekeepers.” (p…

A funny and sweet book, with a perfect smart-ass narrative voice. Alex, who is sixteen, is arrested for drunk driving: he’d planned to tell off his dad for leaving his mom, but he only makes it as far as a neighbor’s lawn. As an alternative to a trial and jail time, he gets probation—and a…

This book’s set in a not-too-distant future in which America, after struggling through “the Greater Depression” and fighting a failed “War to End All Wars,” has elected a gay Jewish president. Predictably, this doesn’t sit well with some people: a recount is ordered and it’s unclear as to whether the machinations of the opposition party…

Time-travel and lost souls and lots of Catholicism: this book could so easily be so bad, but it’s well-written and actually quite pleasing. Martin’s depressed, bullied at school and feeling pressured by his mom to live up to the reputation of his grandfather, who worked with the Kennedies. But then Martin starts having vivid dreams…

This is the last book in the trilogy that begins with The Sky Is Falling, and it’s as pleasing as the first one was. As the war in Europe comes to an end, Canada’s “war guests” start to return to England. Norah and Gavin wonder when their turn will come: Norah’s excited, but Gavin, who…

This is the second book in Kit Pearson’s “Guests of War” trilogy, and it’s pleasing, but less exciting to me than the first. Gavin is still wonderfully charming and quirky, and I like the historical details, the sense of time and place, but Norah’s now thirteen and feeling all topsy-turvy and falling in love with…

The flap copy of this book notes that Pearson is “a librarian as well as a writer,” which might be part of why the book includes so many pleasing library-ish and book-ish moments. The novel is the story of two British children who are evacuated to Canada during WWII, and while parts of it are…

At first, this book, about a family that’s grown bitter and distant and how they begin to reconcile, seemed slow and flat. But things pick up as soon as 13-year-old Ellsworth is back in the town of Smiths Mills, where he and his distant cousin Jess set about hunting for the treasure that gives the…

This is a sweet chapter book about a boy who’s from a family of trapeze artists. Robin, whose parents died in a circus accident when he was a small child, has been traveling the country with his uncle, moving when the circus does, staying in cheap hotels, never settling down. After an injury puts him…