Category: Young adult/children’s

Fangirl follows Cath Avery through her first year of college, and it’s totally charming in that way that Rainbow Rowell’s novels tend to be. It opens on move-in day, with Cath and her identical twin sister Wren both arriving at University of Nebraska–Lincoln. They’re not roommates—Wren’s choice, not Cath’s—and Cath is anxious about being on…

This is the fourth Anastasia Krupnik book, and, like the third one, I’m pretty sure it’s one that I read as a kid, though there was a lot I didn’t remember very well. Anastasia is now thirteen and in seventh grade: the book starts in October, so we don’t actually see any back-to-school/making friends stuff,…

The Penderwicks in Spring might be my favorite book so far in this series, and not just because it centers on Batty, who’s been my favorite of the Penderwick siblings from the first book, when she was a sweet and shy four-year-old wearing butterfly wings. When this book opens she’s ten, almost eleven, and still…

I recently re-read The Penderwicks, and enjoyed it, though I don’t feel like I have anything to say that I didn’t already say when I wrote about it in 2008, except that this time around one chapter totally made me teary-eyed on the subway. And then I re-read the sequel, The Penderwicks on Gardam Street,…

The Hollow Land appears under the heading “For Children” on the list of Jane Gardam’s work at the start of the book, but these nine linked stories read perfectly well as grown-up literature, too. The stories are mostly centered around a pair of children (Bell Teesdale, who’s eight when the book opens, and who narrates…

Coffin Castle, the setting of this fairy-tale-like book, is not a happy place: it’s cold, and the thirteen clocks of the book’s title have all stopped, and the Duke who lives there with his “niece” (she’s not really his niece: she’s a princess he stole away from her family when she was a baby) is…

I definitely owned this book as a kid, and was pleased to remember some parts of it as I read—including the really excellent/hilarious opening scene, in which Anastasia is so bored she’s lying on the floor acting out all the deathbed scenes she can think of (Beth from Little Women, Juliet from Romeo and Juliet,…

This is the third book in Gail Carriger’s “Finishing School” series, which is to say it’s a YA book set in a steampunk Victorian world with vampires and werewolves, in which the main characters are students at a school of espionage that’s housed in a dirigible. Most of the action in this one, though, takes…

I read El Deafo, Cece Bell’s incredibly charming graphic-memoir about her childhood, in one day, and totally loved it. I laughed a lot, and kept interrupting my boyfriend to show him great pages, and there were a few places where I got a little teary-eyed. Bell’s art, which is rendered in vivid color by David…

At the start of The Accidental Highwayman, which is set in England in the mid-1700s, sixteen-year-old Kit Bristol feels pretty pleased with where he’s ended up: he’s an orphan who used to be a trick-rider in a traveling circus, and now he’s an indentured servant to a gentleman who isn’t much trouble, though he’s fond…