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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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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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Duncan Meade is a senior at Irving School, a prestigious, private high school that allows students to live on campus during their rigorous course studies. Not only is Duncan worried about the upcoming “Tragedy Paper” that his senior English teacher, Mr. Simon, has assigned, Duncan has to deal with the tragedy that happened at school last year. When Duncan is assigned the same room that the infamous Tim Macbeth had last year, Duncan knows that his school year will be anything but ordinary. Tim has followed the “tradition” of leaving Duncan a gift in his room. Most students receive “survival kits”, books, or even alcohol. Tim hasRead More →

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Sometimes when I like a book a lot, I have a hard time writing a succinct review of it. I just want to tell you everything about it, gush profusely about the use of language, the richness of both the characters and the setting, give a huge shout out for the deftly executed plot, and overwhelm you with so much detail that you don’t even need to read the book itself.  So the book sits on my desk, waiting for my feeble attempts to due it justice.  Blue Balliett‘s latest, Hold Fast, is one of those books.  From the the very first page, I wasRead More →

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It was, I’m sure, pure coincidence that the two books I recently read had main characters named Jane whose death seemed all but inevitable.  Loosely connected by the thread of “Janes in constant danger”, Helen Keeble’s campy, funny debut  Fang Girl and Graham McNamee’s spooky Beyond took me from the dark nights in a British suburb to the even darker, rainy nights in a small village on Canada’s “rain coast.” Waking up disoriented, in a small dark space, to the sound of a mobile phone ringing, Xanthe “Jane” Greene, realizes very quickly that she is dead. No, actually, she’s not dead, she’s undead. As in vampire undead.Read 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 →

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Reminiscent in tone to his Magic Shop Books, Bruce Coville‘s latest, Always October, is an imaginative chase through a land of nightmares. Sixth grade friends, Jake Doolittle and “Weird Lily” Carker, take turns telling the story of their discovery of, journey through, and daring escape from, a parallel universe, Always October, that is filled with humanity’s fears, nightmares, horrors, and monsters (literally).  It all starts on the day when a baby is left on Jake’s doorstep with a note imploring him and his mom (his dad’s been missing for years) to take care of “Little Dumpling.”  Both Jake and his mom are quickly won overRead 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 →