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Delightfully blending mystery, fantasy, and adventure, Mark Steensland’s Behind the Bookcase is chock full of everything there is to love about scary stories.  From a creepy “haunted” house, to hidden passages that lead to a sinister shadow world populated by creatures straight from nightmares, to a race against time to save our world from being overrun by evil, once you go behind the bookcase, you won’t want to venture out. Soon-to-be twelve year old Sarah does not want to spend her summer living in and fixing up her recently deceased grandmother’s run-down, spooky old house far away from her home and friends in Southern California.Read More →

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I like the surprise of not reading the jacket flap before I read a book – cover, title, and maybe a familiar author – are all I know going in.  It’s a little game I like to play to let the story, whatever it may be, unfold and take me wherever it wants to go. So when I started Ned Vizzini’s The Other Normals, I expected a realistic fiction story about a possibly disaffected, alienated teen guy who liked to play role playing games.  Pretty safe bet and I was proved right – at first.  15 year old Perry Eckert is what his mother painfullyRead More →

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When Mike Jung was a kid, I have to believe he was like Vincent Wu, the kinda-geeky, big-hearted, superhero-crazed kid at the center of his debut novel, Geeks, Girls, and Secret Identities. Except Vincent is lucky enough to live a world that’s actually populated by real-life superheroes, maniacal evil geniuses, and giant killer robots. Vincent and his best friends, Max and George, are the hands-down experts on Captain Stupendous, even if they don’t get any respect from the “official” Captain Stupendous fan clubs in Copperplate City.  They thought geeking out on Captain Stupendous trivia and regaling his exploits from afar would be the extent of their connectionRead More →

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How would you feel if all of your friends had super powers and you had none? Jealous? Insecure? Left out? What if you suddenly manifested the power to steal the powers from those around you, your friends; a power shared by a recently defeated super villain who had stolen the powers and memories from a hundred generations of “supers”? This is especially disconcerting to Daniel Corrigan, as he was the one who helped vanquish this villain, Herman Plunkett aka The Shroud. This new power appears as Plunkett’s grandson, Theo, returns to Noble’s Green and things begin to go awry in a disturbingly familiar way. Shadows,Read More →

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Life is about to change in the sleepy little town of Blackbird Tree for two 12 year old best friends, Naomi and Lizzie.  When a charming, but unusual boy, Finn, drops out of a tree, the girls don’t quite know how to react to his questions about their town and the people who live there.  Finn’s unexplained arrival isn’t the only mystery in town, either;  a dapper Dingle Dangle man has also recently arrived, snooping around asking the adults lots of questions.  And Naomi wonders about other mysteries and secrets too: 3 dusty, sealed trunks, a pair of crows, a crooked bridge, and some long-supressedRead More →

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For a thrilling, fast-paced, and action-packed paranormal adventure, Mark  Frost’s  Book One in The Paladin Prophecy series is a must read.  In a class with books like Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne novels, The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, and The Maze Runner by James Dashner, Frost’s book explores how disaster wakes up the system. The story features 15-year-old Will West who lives a quiet, contained, and invisible life to ensure he remains mediocre and under the radar of powerful forces who might exploit his true talent.  For him, school is a daily drone, “Novocain for the brain” (4), until Dr. Robbins shows up and offersRead More →

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 Anyone looking for lessons in courage, determination, ingenuity, and selfless giving should read Diane Stanley’s medieval fantasy, The Cup and the Crown, the second in her series featuring Lady Marguerite, aka Molly.  For her brave loyalty and other acts of fealty, a royal decree has transformed Molly from scullery maid to lady.  But this tough, hard, brash, resilient, and joyful girl who can not embroider, sew, or read poetry struggles to match the conventional definition of lady.  A descendant of the great silversmith and magically gifted William Harrows, Molly possesses her own magical gift of visions and other unharnessed powers. To locate one of herRead More →

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David Levithan‘s latest, Every Day, is an interesting exploration of identity. The 16 year old main character, A, has awoken every day in a different body.  At first, it seemed normal, and only around age 5-6 did the strangeness of A’s life without continuity begin to be bothersome.  After accepting the reality of this existence, A developed coping mechanisms to be able to determine the basic details of the life and body of the day and be able to function without causing too much chaos or change in the host body’s life.   Since A has been a boy and a girl, every race andRead More →

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Readers who like plots that revolve around danger and destiny and who enjoyed the Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan will likely find Tera Lynn Childs’ trilogy riveting.  The major difference in the two text sets is the genders of the protagonists and the prominent roles played by mythological monsters—like the manticore, harpies, or Gegenees giant, rather than just gods and goddesses. The second book in Childs’ series, Sweet Shadows, which features Greer, Gretchen, and Grace—the Key Generation—tells the story of the shadow life of the triplet sisters and their mythological legacy.  The diversity of the three girls represents a Pythagorean balance—appropriate for this trinityRead More →