Category: Young adult/children’s

How to Catch a Bogle, which is set in London circa 1870, is a fun middle-grade novel that’s part fantasy, part historical-fiction: the setting of Victorian London feels very real, aside from the fact that the protagonists spend their days hunting child-eating monsters (bogles). Birdie, who’s ten, is a bogler’s apprentice/bait: she sings to lure…

At the start of Getting the Girl, Cameron Wolfe is alone and lonely: he’s never had a girlfriend, and he doesn’t really have any friends outside his family. His best friend is his older brother Rube, and he’s friendly with his oldest brother, Steve, as well, but he’s also overshadowed by them: he’s not a…

Deirdre, the sixteen-year-old narrator of Lament, plays the harp, and plays it very well. But she has an overbearing mother and a major case of stage fright, and she feels pretty much invisible at school: she has a best friend, James, who’s also a musician, but that’s basically it. But the summer between her sophomore…

In Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan, one of the title characters is best friends with a guy named Tiny Cooper, who’s a self-described “loud and spectacular” gay football player who has written a musical about his life (1). This is that musical: as the title page puts it, it’s “A…

My mom remembered having read Shadow Castle when she was a kid, and was tickled to see it back in print, so I got it for her for Mother’s Day, and then borrowed it when I was visiting her for Christmas. I was bothered by a line or two of casual racism (e.g. “This was…

At the start of We Were Liars, the narrator, Cadence Sinclair Eastman, describes her family, the “beautiful Sinclair family,” like this: “The Sinclairs are athletic, tall, and handsome. We are old-money Democrats. Our smiles are wide, our chins square, and our tennis serves aggressive” (3). But it’s clear from the start that appearances aren’t the…

This is the fifth of Lois Lowry’s Anastasia Krupnik novels, and I found it as delightful and funny as the others. The book opens at dinnertime, with Anastasia’s mom being distressed that she forgot to defrost any meat for dinner, again. “I just can’t get my act together when it comes to making dinner,” she…

(Note: throughout this post I’m going to use they/them/their as a singular gender-neutral pronoun. I known some people hate it, but I find it less clunky than “he/she” and “his/her” (which also implies a gender binary in a way I don’t necessarily think is appropriate here) and also less clunky than ze/hir.) I like David…

Earlier this month, I read Fangirl, a Rainbow Rowell novel in which the protagonist is majorly into the (fictional) Simon Snow series, which is a Harry-Potter-esque series featuring a magical Chosen One and a magical world at a moment of crisis. Carry On is not the fanfic novel that Fangirl‘s protagonist is writing, but it…