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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 →

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High above the dense Central American rain forests, Mad and her younger sister Roo fly in a tiny plane towards a massive volcano.  Roo is barely able to contain her excitement while Mad’s hanging on for dear life as the little plane shifts this way and that.  They’re on the way, with their mom and Ken/Neth (an annoying “friend of the family”) to meet Mad’s dad, “The Bird Guy” – a world renowned ornithologist – who’s been holed up at an exclusive resort at the base of the volcano for more than 7 months.   Mad’s dad would go anywhere to study rare birds, and when heRead More →

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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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12 year old Lenny “the boy with the golden voice” loves hanging out on the couch with his best friends and announcing the play-by-play for the games of his beloved hometown team, The Philadelphia Phillies. When he wins the chance to do it for real, as the “Armchair Announcer,” for one inning of an upcoming game, Lenny knows this is the future for him.   Surely it will be the chance he’s been waiting for: to be noticed and recognized for his skills, both by major league pros and by his own, self-obsessed, work-aholic parents. But the game goes wrong before Lenny’s chance to announce: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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Christina Diaz Gonzalez‘s second novel, A Thunderous Whisper, brings us to Guernica, Spain.  Here we meet 12 year old Ani, a quiet, insignificant whisper of a girl who lives on the periphery of society, daughter of a sardine seller.  Ani’s father has gone to the front lines of the Spanish Civil War to fight against General Franco’s forces, hoping to protect the Basque homeland from impending seizure.  Left with her cold-hearted, harsh mother, Ani’s life has never felt more bleak and lonely. Then she meets a boy, Mathias, who is spirited, sure of himself, and interested in being her friend.  Mathias is new to Guernica and heRead More →

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Jeffrey Salane has created an action-packed book for tweens with his new novel, Lawless. Although the book has multiple settings, the story largely occurs in the southern hemisphere atLawlessSchool, a private and exclusive school for the children of master criminals.  The story’s protagonist is twelve-year-old M Freeman, whose doting dad gave her the moon but is now dead and has remained a beautiful mystery for six years.  M’s mother, an impeccably stylish artist mogul and unstoppable workhorse has little time for M.  Home-schooled and living in a house the size of a small castle, M feels neither like a princess nor a prisoner.  Instead, sheRead More →

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In Emily Fairlie‘s The Lost Treasure of Tuckernuck, an unlikely pair of friends, sixth graders Bud and Laurie, are on the hunt of a lifetime.  For eighty years, since the founding of the middle school, Tuckernuck Hall, a “treasure beyond bounds” has been hidden somewhere in the school’s rambling, eccentric building. Laurie wishes she could attend Hamilton Junior High with her friends, but she’s stuck being a Clucker at Tuckernuck.  Bud’s been a social outcast since his science project resulted in a ban on all candy, soda and junk food from the entire school district.  When the two are assigned Gerbil Monitor duty, they stumbleRead More →