By:
On:
In: Middle Grade Reviews, Realistic Fiction
With: 0 Comments

Targeting ‘tweens, How to Disappear Completely by Ali Standish is an interesting novel about difference, not only about how we treat others who are different but the ways our own differences can empower us and even transform us into more than we thought we could be. It is also a book about navigating junior high school and about coping with death. Set in Lanternwood, a town with the feel of stepping back in time, the plot revolves around twelve-year-old Emma Talbot who has just lost her grandmother, who is also her best friend. With Gram, Emma had lived in a world “made of old booksRead More →

By:
On:
In: Middle Grade Reviews, Realistic Fiction
With: 0 Comments

In his newest book The Other Better Me, Antony John writes about fifth grader Lola Harmon and the emptiness she feels by not having her dad in her life.  As this inquisitive and energetic people-person navigates life with her classmates at Shoreline Elementary school in North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, she learns some important lessons about identity and about bullying behavior and bullies. Lola’s best friends are Nick Merlo and Kiana Richards.  Both live more affluent lives than Lola, who resides in a mobile home with her single mother who battles a thyroid condition.  Lola describes Nick as igneous rock since he resembles cooled lava. Read More →

By:
On:
In: Action & Adventure, Middle Grade Reviews, Multicultural, Mystery & Suspense
With: 0 Comments

In a word, Tim Tingle’s recent book, Doc and the Detective in Graveyard Treasure is a FUN book!  It features Timmy, a member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma who is a twelve-year-old detective.  Made for action, Timmy finds waiting the most difficult part of detective work.  Tingle’s fast-paced writing style propels the reader into the midst of Detective Timmy’s life as he learns that sometimes bad ideas lead to good information and as he struggles to find proof for his hunches and suppositions. When a group of thieves start to prey on the elderly and Timmy’s friend, Dr. Moore gets targeted, Timmy can’t sitRead More →

By:
On:
In: Action & Adventure, Middle Grade Reviews, Mystery & Suspense, Supernatural & Horror
With: 0 Comments

In Small Spaces, the prequel to Katherine Arden’s newest book Dead Voices, Coco Zintner, Olivia Adler, and Brian Battersby were alone, lost, and running from Seth, also known as the smiling man, and from living scarecrows who hunted in a dark corn maze and who tried to drag them off and turn them into scarecrows, too, Good at playing chess and making plans, Coco is a careful and nervous girl.    Ollie, Coco’s best friend who lost her mother in an airplane accident, excels at math and wishes to be as fierce, reckless and brilliant as her mother the math professor and adventurer had been—“always laughing,Read More →

By:
On:
In: Middle Grade Reviews, Realistic Fiction
With: 0 Comments

Like a tower built from Jenga blocks, eleven-year-old Piper Trudeau’s former life in Cypress Point, Texas, all comes crashing down after a series of unfortunate events: her parents’ job hours cut, lost jobs, unexpected medical bills, car trouble, bills piling up, and eventually an eviction.  Now, she and her family are homeless and living in a shelter in Idaho—experiencing new places and new people and learning that a rough patch can seem like a “football field full of briars” (39). But this is only one plot thread in Stay by Bobbie Pyron, a novel targeted for middle grade readers that alternates between the story ofRead More →

By:
On:
In: Elementary Book Reviews, Middle Grade Reviews, Multicultural
With: 0 Comments

Born to Austrian and Indonesian parents, Alexa is nearly ten years old and attends Nelson Elementary School in London.  She dreams of having the best job in the world: “being a reporter and getting to solve mysteries and go on adventures” (2) just like Tintin and Snowy, her favorite comic book characters. One day, a boy with lion’s eyes joins Alexa’s class and sits in the back.  Intrigued by the mysterious boy, Ahmet, Alexa and her friends—Josie, Tom, and Michael—set out to discover where Ahmet is from and how he came to be in London.  During their discovery phase, the group learns not only thatRead More →

By:
On:
In: Middle Grade Reviews, Mystery & Suspense, Realistic Fiction
With: 0 Comments

All the Greys on Greene Street by Laura Tucker tells the colorful story of Olympia, a twelve-year-old artist who is named after a painting by French painter Manet.  Olympia’s (aka Ollie) dad Graham is an art restorer and her mom Doll is a sculptor.  The family lives in the Soho neighborhood in Manhattan, New York. Ollie’s best friends are Alex, an agile young man who Spiderman’s his way up a wall and who practices jumps like a stuntman in training; and Richard, a monster aficionado fascinated by science who is developing a scrapbook that he calls the Taxonomy.  Using her sketching talent, Ollie will occasionallyRead More →

By:
On:
In: Middle Grade Reviews, Realistic Fiction
With: 0 Comments

In 2008, Malcolm Gladwell published his New York Times bestseller, Outliers.  Based largely on the research of Anders Ericsson, Gladwell frequently refers to the 10,000-hour rule, citing it as the magic number that contributes to developing greatness.  Since the writing of that book, Gladwell has fallen under criticism for failing to adequately distinguish between the quantity of hours spent practicing, and the quality of that practice. The takeaway here is that practice may be important, but it’s not the whole story.  In authoring a personal story of success, a person needs to employ very specific, deliberate methods of practice. All of these details flooded back to me when I pickedRead More →

By:
On:
In: Middle Grade Reviews, Sci Fi & Fantasy
With: 0 Comments

Eleven-year-old Buddy Pennington is hexed with bad-luck blood so that everything he touches seems to end in disaster, it does.  (I found the author’s use of these parentheticals, along with his Huckleberry Finn-like river setting, a clever way of establishing local color). When Buddy accidentally sets his mother’s bakery on fire, he decides that he is tired of being a burden to his mother and would be better off with his father, so he leaves Collardsville, a boring but respectable town, and sets out for the swamplands in search of freedom and his pop, a true wild man. After five years absent from his father andRead More →