Category: Young adult/children’s

I liked this book for all the echoes of superstition and tradition and history: the way it’s set in the time from Midwinter’s Eve to Twelfth Night, the idea of the past being so very present, the way that Will and Merry and the Old Ones can travel through time and step outside it.

I read this book (and the rest of Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising sequence) as a child, but I didn’t remember anything about the plot: not the English-ness of them, not the Arthurian context, nothing, in fact, aside from a few lines of poetry from one of the later books. Re-reading Over Sea, Under Stone,…

(I read an advance copy of this several months ago, but didn’t want to write about it ’til it was actually out there to be read.) This book is really lovely, never strained or cheesy or simplistic or didactic or any of the bad things that young adult books can sometimes be. It’s filled with…

Sometimes this book is annoyingly meta-textual, like when the narrator refers to things that are going to happen, or calls other characters “characters,” but mostly it’s a quirky and cute story about a group of seventh-grade kids who are the class outcasts. I like how matter-of-factly everything is handled, how having divorced parents or a…

Rainbow Boys is about being young and queer and confused: it’s the story of three high school guys in various stages of the process of coming out. Jason is the popular jock with a girlfriend, Kyle’s the quiet swimmer with a crush on Jason, and Nelson’s the flamboyant school fag who’s Kyle’s best friend, but…

Oh, adolescent grumpiness & magic & adventure! I couldn’t put this book down (reading on the subway, despite its massive size) and now I’m all excited for the release of the next one.

I’d been waiting for months for the library to acquire this book. It’s the sequel to Sorcery & Cecelia, an epistolary novel that I absolutely loved. These books are a blend of historical fiction (set in 1817) and fantasy (magic/wizardry in the British tradition), and they’re clever and exciting and oh, wonderful. In this one,…

I have a thing for epistolary novels, and I liked the premise of this one: a college kid, after a fight with his best friend, decides he should avoid fucking up friendships by simply not speaking. He writes notes, instead, and that’s what this book is made up of: notes, e-mails, one-sided conversations in which…