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How cool would it be if your parents were part of a secret organization, charged with protecting the world’s cultural artifacts?  Wouldn’t it be awesome to fly around the globe at a moment’s notice to hunt down a shady criminal who’s stolen an ancient treasure?  And can you imagine being privy to all kinds of top-secret information about international events, intrigue, and the criminal underworld?  Some kids have all the luck.  Kids like Jose, Anna, and Henry, whose parents are part of the secret Silver Jaguar Society, would seem to be the kids you’d be jealous of.  But even though the 3 friends have alreadyRead More →

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This post comes from Brian Griggs: The Tallest Librarian in the World; check out his blog briangriggs.com. I’m really liking the amount of humorous, realistic fiction that has come out recently. It takes a lot of skill to write characters that are believable and yet live in big enough experiences to keep the narrative interesting. Tommy Greenwald succeeds in doing that with Jack Strong Takes a Stand. Jack is an overscheduled middle-schooler who decides to stage a sit-in on his family’s couch until his schedule frees up. It reminded me a little bit of Avi’s Nothing but the Truth as one tiny action escalates into a media storm. Newspapers,Read More →

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Any reader fascinated by math or science or curious about the universe will likely find Pi in the Sky by Wendy Mass intriguing.  Mass tells the story of thirteen-year-old Joss, the seventh son of the Supreme Overlord of the Universe. Each chapter of her book begins with a quote from an astronomer, physicist, mathematician, cosmologist, chemist, engineer, naturalist, or writer captivated by the universe.  These quotes form the underlying themes of the book. Joss, virtually an immortal life form, lives in The Realms, which are located inside dark matter, so parts of it reach out into all the galaxies.  In The Realms, many of theRead More →

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How would you feel if you had to constantly move, change your name, appearance, and high school? Sadly, this is a feeling that Anna Boyd and her family know all too well. Anna’s parents and little sister are in Witness Protection and have had six identities in less than one year. Moving around is hard enough, but Anna has no idea why she and her family are in Witness Protection to begin with. Not only does Anna have to pick a new name and memorize her “childhood memories”, she is constantly being placed and taken out of various high schools during her senior year. HerRead More →

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I’ve said before that I have a rule about reading books about dogs, and for the most part I stick to it – they just tear me up and it’s not worth the emotional upheaval to take a chance.  But every once in awhile I break my rule and, wouldn’t you know it, I am rewarded with a good story, characters I care about, and a dog (or two) that I wish I could bring home and call my own. When Randi Barrow‘s prequel to Saving Zasha, Finding Zasha, came across my desk, I knew it would be one that’d be a rule breaker.  Read More →

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Imagine everything you’d do over if you had the chance.  Ten-year-old Odessa  Green-Light in Odessa Again by Dana Reinhardt  does more than imagine do-overs.  In her attic, jumping gives her the power to make today yesterday all over again.  In the early stages, Odessa’s magic helps her to erase humiliation, misunderstanding, and poorly orchestrated choices, and readers will discover whether Odessa can change the things that matter most in the bewildering life of a tween.  Can she make her life resemble the online game Dreamonica, where she gets to make every decision—“how many puppies, how big a mansion, even what color hair and eyes she had” (107),Read More →

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“Well, that’s the thing about knots, isn’t it?. . . If you don’t know the trick, it’s a muddled predicament.  But in fact each loop of every knot is carefully placed, one end twisting right into the other in a way you might not have expected. I find them rather beautiful, really.” (5) So says the Man in the Gray Suit, who appears and reappears unexpectedly, but at just the right moments, throughout Lisa Graff’s charming tale, A Tangle of Knots.  And while the man is talking about knots on the literal level, as we see in this finely crafted, intricately interlaced story of belovedRead More →

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Georgie Burkhardt is a feisty, smart, and headstrong girl.  She speaks her mind plainly, will not abide nonsense and foolishness, and has the truest aim with her rifle that anyone has ever seen.  Georgie is certain about most things in her life: the fact that she and her older sister Agatha will one day run their grandfather’s general store in their small prairie-edge town of Placid, Wisconsin; that gold has more value than paper; and that “living with uncertainty is like having a rock in your shoe.  If you can’t remove the rock, you have to figure out how to walk despite it.  There isRead More →

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“Forgetting who you are is so much more complicated that simply forgetting your name. It’s also forgetting your dreams. Your aspirations. What makes you happy. What you pray you’ll never have to live without. It’s meeting yourself for the first time, and not being sure of your first impressions.” (8)  There’s only one thing you can count on in a world without memories, and that’s your heart.  The feelings that flood you, the warmth or the chill that envelopes you, that’s the only barometer you have when nothing else makes sense. Learning that you must let it guide you to those you can trust andRead More →