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In her recent release, High and Dry, Sarah Skilton skillfully and accurately portrays the drama of high school.  Through protagonists Charlie Dixon and Ellie Chen, along with a cast of other characters in Palm Valley, California, Skilton writes a sports story while realistically capturing the conflicts of adolescence.  After a traumatic experience in Little League when he was saved by his friend Ryder, Charlie has grown into a “soccer hottie” who loves the glorious lunacy and unpredictable bliss of the game.  Ryder, on the other hand, failed the drug test required to compete in high school sports, so despite his being “the best hitter, runner,Read More →

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Jake Collier is a cyclist, a fierce competitor and a smart strategist.  He’s also a bit jealous of his talented teammate Juan Carlos from Ecuador.  Caught in the middle is Tessa Taylor, the seventeen-year-old host of KidVison, a television show for young people that runs on Greater Boston Cable News (GBC N).  Although Tessa is known as the “PBS Princess” and Juan Carlos is known as the “altar boy,” Diana Renn’s book Latitude Zero proves that we are all more than a nickname. Set in both Cambridge, Massachusetts (latitude forty two), and Ecuador (latitude zero), where poinsettia trees grow wild and unpruned among the lushRead More →

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Any reader who seeks out books with thrills, chills, high stakes, and a fast pace should grab Uncaged when it releases next month!  The first in a series called The Singular Menace by John Sandford and Michele Cook, Uncaged features two teens, Shay and Odin Remby, both in the foster care system after losing their parents. For his computer skills, Odin has been recruited by the Animal Rights Group STORM.  Hoping to sabotage their experiments and rescue the caged animals, the group raids a Singular Lab in Eugene, Oregon, a medical company doing Parkinson’s research.  What they discover, however, is shocking.  Singular appears to beRead More →

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Amber Lough writes The Fire Wish with a creative style that showcases the simile, so analogies like “The music hung thickly in the air, like the scent of cinnamon” (2-3) are common throughout her imagery-rich book.  The tale—told from the perspectives of two girls living in two different worlds—also features battles, magic, oud music, and many forms of love and loyalty.  One girl, Najwa, is a jinni—a being of fire and sand that lives within earthen tunnels among gems and magic.  In a simple transporting spell, Najwa penetrates the wards that protect the palace in Baghdad enabling her to bring back a rose from theRead More →

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Aspiring to be a female version of Walter Cronkite, thirteen-year-old Teresa (Tree) Taylor wants the freshman reporter position on the newspaper staff at Hamilton High School, despite her nemesis Wanda vying  for that same role with the “Blue and Gold.”  Her second goal for the summer is to kiss a boy, preferably Ray “with the eyes like two pieces of sky” (3), to collect a kiss worth writing about. Besides those two ambitions to move the plot forward, The Secrets of Tree Taylor by Dandi Daley Mackal, set in Hamilton, Missouri, in 1963, features a collection of quotations from famous writers and alludes to HarperRead More →

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 Fourteen-year-old Vance Ehecatl is a shape-shifter, who spends part of his existence as a quetzal and part of his life as a human in Midnight—the vampire’s empire, a pinnacle of civilization.  When Amelia Atwater-Rhodes’ novel Bloodwitch opens, Vance is living with Lady Brina in a greenhouse, a lush and comfortable existence.   Lady Brina is a talented artist with a penchant for painting mythological scenes; her paintings tell stories and capture cultures, like those of the ancient Mayan and Aztec civilizations.  In his quetzal form, Vance models for Lady Brina, ignorant of any alternative life until Malachi Obsidian visits, under the guise of selling paints.  WhenRead More →

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Imagine that every time you closed your eyes—whether to blink or to sleep—you entered another world.  Such is the reality for Nolan’s life.  Nolan, who lives in Farview, Arizona, gets to watch and smell and feel what happens to Amara, who lives in the Dunelands.  Since his earliest memories, Nolan has experienced life from two bodies, but knowing it isn’t his body or his pain doesn’t make it hurt any less.  Distracted by the happenings in Amara’s world when he was seven years old and out riding his bike, Nolan now wears a prosthetic foot because both his left foot and his bike were crushedRead More →

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Laden with pain that she sometimes forgets to hide, pain from the loss of a brother on the day she was born, twelve-year-old Jewel Campbell wonders where joy goes when it leaves a family.  A Jamaican/White/Mexican mixed race girl living in Caledonia, Iowa, Jewel feels like a misfit.  In Caledonia, where folks think “that Jamaica is some country in Africa” (62), mixing doesn’t happen—except in Jewel’s family.  Outside of Caledonia, people ask Jewel what she is, a question that makes Jewel bristle: “Shouldn’t they ask who I am?  Why am I a what?” (62).   Jewel wonders what it would be like to have two parentsRead More →

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Separated from their parents while at sea, fourteen-year-old Molly McConnachie, an Irish immigrant escaping the famine in County Donegal, Ireland, has found herself in Cellar Hollow with her ten-year-old brother, Kip.  Along with their horse Galileo—who is as loyal as he is stubborn—the children make their way to Windsor Estate, where Molly has a job, but folks along the route warn them against the sourwoods.  Hester Kettle, a storyteller who plays the hurdy gurdy, is vehement about the foreboding that awaits: “They say the sourwoods changes folks. . . brings out somethin’ horrible in ‘em” (10).  Convinced this is all frightening nonsense, she and Kip,Read More →