Category: Young adult/children’s

A book about fairy-tales, stories, memories and dreams, family-history—and how all these things live on, or don’t. I was charmed from the opening lines: “Sylvie had an amazing life, but she didn’t get to live it very often.” Clever and sweet and pleasingly book-ish.

Megan and I read this book aloud to one another over the course of several months, and oh, it was the perfect book for reading aloud. A family on summer holiday, the children allowed to go sailing and camping on their own: all the details of their camp, the tents and the teakettle, and all…

I love E. Nesbit and this book is especially lovely: four children go to the seaside for a summer holiday and learn, on the way there, that a mermaid has been sighted. This is very exciting news, especially for Francis, the eldest, who has never seen the sea before but is entranced by a print…

A play written for high-schoolers that seems like it’d be loads of fun to put on, especially for theatre-kids who are familiar with the conventions of the stage, who’ve acted in a Chekov play or a murder mystery, who had to read something by Tennessee Williams for English class, who’ve maybe read some Beckett or…

David Levithan’s books always delight me so much: I love the sense of play that both he and his characters have: the word play (two kids driving down I-95 and “speaking Connecticut” to one another, “What’s Groton into you?” etc), the quirks, the charm. In this book, two brothers travel in Italy together, and learn…

It’s Dizzy’s twelfth birthday, and her “New Age traveler” mom, who left when Dizzy was four, suddenly appears in her life again, with plans to take Dizzy on the festival circuit for the summer. To the reader, it’s clear very early on that Dizzy’s mom, Storm, is bad news: she’s flighty and selfish and dishonest,…

Jed, an 8th grader, is dealing with the aftermath of his older brother’s death: his dad has renounced Judaism and thrown himself into work; his mom’s on leave from her job, but isn’t very present as a parent. Jed, meanwhile, is having a hard time speaking. When his English teacher tells the class to document…

This is a well-written and engrossing story of a fourteen-year-old girl whose divorced parents are in the midst of a custody battle. Erika’s been living with her dad, but her pushy mom wants this to change: when the book opens, Erika parrots hollow phrases from her mother, like, “a girl should be home with her…

At first, this book seemed too slow, too flat, but after a few chapters, I was entranced. Selvadurai’s descriptions of Sri Lanka, its streets and architecture and its climate, its trees and birds and foods, are precise and vivid, and then there’s also the sense of history, both personal history and the colonial legacy of…

These two short books, both illustrated by Ruth Chrisman Gannett (the author’s stepmother) are so wonderful and charming. In the first, young Elmer Elevator runs away from home to free a young dragon from wild animals who are keeping him captive. In the second, Elmer and the dragon head back towards the town where Elmer…