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Do you know what it’s like to have a best friend? In Smells Like Dog, you will meet an interesting twelve- year- old boy who doesn’t exactly have that privilege. At least until an unexpected event takes place. The morning started just like any other. Homer Winslow Pudding woke up on his family’s goat farm in Milkydale and finished his chores. He ate breakfast. And he thought about his most favorite thing in the whole entire world: treasure hunting. Just like his famous Uncle Drake Pudding, Homer wanted to be an amazing treasure hunter, working along Drake to find lost jewels and maps. Most ofRead More →

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Tell Us We’re Home, a fresh new book from Marina Budhos, has an interesting plot line, making a book full of mystery, friendship, and hardship. This new novel kept me reading for hours. Jaya, Maria, and Lola are just ordinary girls living in the town of Meadowbrook, New Jersey. Ordinary, that is, until you see that the girls have two things in common; they are all the daughters of maids and nannies, and they have all emigrated from a foreign country. Besides the obvious problem that they go to school with the people their mothers work for, all three also have many issues they mustRead More →

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 Sophie Masson’s Elizabethan romantic mystery, The Madman of Venice (Aug 2010), is the perfect companion for a summer trip, poolside escape, or as an enjoyable journey from the summer doldrums. The canals of Venice in 1603 are exciting, mysterious, and dangerous.  Celia, the spunky, smart daughter of a prosperous London merchant, and Ned, her father’s like-able but somewhat stubborn clerk, find themselves quickly caught up in two mysteries: the deadly pirate attacks that have been plaguing English ships; and the search for Sarah Tedeschi, a Jewish girl who has vanished from the Venetian Ghetto after being accused of witchcraft by the powerful Countess of Montemoro. As Celia and Ned, alongRead More →

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I’ve wanted to read Rick Yancey’s new book, The Monstrumologist, since it first came in last Fall, but never got around to it. Then it was named a Michael L. Printz Award Honoree, and I finally decided to make time to sit down with this intriguing looking book. And although it’s not quite what I expected, I am glad I did.  The Monstrumologistis the account of the spring of 1888 when Will Henry was a apprentice/assistant to the brilliant, but perhaps mad, Dr. Warthrop, who studies and hunts real-life monsters.  The story is framed by Rick Yancey’s present day acquisition of the notebooks from a doctor who caredRead More →

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Anna Jarzab’s debut murder mystery, All Unquiet Things, immerses the reader in the elite world of Brighton Day’ School’s student body.  It’s the start of senior year, and no one has been able to put the horrific murder of the beautiful, smart, self-destructive Carly behind them. Carly’s first love, Neily, is still torn apart by grief, anger and pain after losing his beloved Carly twice – first when she cruelly dumped him in front of the whole school the year before her death; and second when he discovered her gunned-down body. She’d called him multiple times the day of her death and he’s tearing himselfRead More →

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The wait was long; the wait was painful; but today the mystery was solved!  In Ghost in the Machine, Patrick Carman concludes his highly suspenseful, fast-paced, and tech-savvy thriller duo that started in last year’s Skeleton Creek.  When we left high school best friends Ryan and Sarah at the nail-biting end of Skeleton Creek, they were trapped in the defunct,  surface-mining gold dredge outside their tiny, isolated home town.  Forbidden to have contact with each other, yet bent on solving the sinister mysteries surrounding the dredge’s death-laden past, Ryan and Sarah snuck into the dredge late at night to find a secret room when they wereRead More →

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When Abbey’s best friend Kristen vanishes at the bridge near Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, she refuses to accept that Kristen is dead. As rumors fly that her death was no accident, Abbey goes through the motions of grief, including attending her best friend’s funeral, where she meets Caspian, a mysterious and handsome stranger that keeps popping into her life. As the story unfolds, Abbey quickly realizes that the truth can be a fickle friend, challenging everything she thought she knew about her best friend, the boy she is quickly falling for, and even herself. One of the most unique features of Jessica Verday’s The Hollow isRead More →

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One thing that I like about the Peter Abrahams’ mysteries I’ve read, Reality Check included, is that it’s regular people noticing things  who solve the mysteries around them; they’re not detectives, they aren’t Nancy Drew types; they just start paying attention and piecing both obvious and not-so-obvious things together until they figure it all out. The every-day guy in Reality Check (April 2009), is 17 year old Cody. He has 2 passions in life: being the QB for his high school football team and his smart, beautiful girlfriend Clea.  But as junior year starts, he loses both: football to a torn ACL and Clea toRead More →

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Edward Bloor’s Crusader is the kind of book I love: engaging plot; exquisitely drawn, realistic characters; and a thought-provoking story where both the characters and a patient reader grow and come to new realizations by the end of the book. When we first meet Roberta Ritter, a 15-year old girl who works, for free, in her family’s virtual reality mall arcade, she’s not much more than a oddball doormat. She’s observant and thoughtful, but also very naive and young for her age.  She tells everyone (and believes) that her mother died 7 years before of a heart attack and since then, Roberta really hasn’t grown up much. Read More →