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What if there was an invention that could create ANYTHING you could imagine? For ten year old Tim, this invention is not only real, it is life changing! Tim was recently adopted by Elisa and Chris Green, owners of the Dawn Store Hotel. Tim’s adoption was finalized just two weeks before the hotel opened, which means Elisa and Chris have been very busy working. This gives Tim plenty of time to roam the hotel and even run into trouble at times. One day, Tim stumbles across a peculiar hotel guest, Professor Eisenstone. The professor’s hotel room happens to be across the hall from Tim’s, and afterRead More →

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There are many, many, many adaptations of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice in this world and only a few are capable of standing on their own. The Season by spouses Jonah Lisa Dyer and Stephen Dyer is the newest adaptation of Austen’s classic story, one that, while a bit cliché, is a memorable version of a beloved tale. Megan McKnight fills the role of Elizabeth Bennet as a soccer player in her early twenties, someone who is definitely not a girly-girl. It’s her sister, Julia, who likes dresses and makeup and dances. When their mom enrolls them in the super exclusive Bluebonnet Club’s 2016 Dallas DebutanteRead More →

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Twelve Reasons to Read (and Enjoy) The Twelve Days of Dash and Lily Rachel Cohn’s and David Levithan’s novel Is a “mittens and hot chocolate and snow angels that lifted from the ground and danced in the air” (3) romance, until it’s not. Confirms that some people together are toxic. Shares multiple definitions of love, including a piece of exquisite pattern prose on pages 28-29, and explores the paradox: “The people you know the most, the people you love the most—you’re also going to feel the parts of them you don’t know the most” (80). Shows why “trying too hard plus good intentions does notRead More →

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Of all the revelations that her afterlife brings, perhaps the most startling for Molly Bellamy is the discovery that being dead doesn’t mean being done with life.  Murdered by a trusted friend when she was sixteen and in love, Molly finds herself, not in heaven, but trapped in a valley of nonexistence beside a lake—like being in a snow globe but without glass walls.  She shares this virtually unchanging place devoid of sensations with others like her who have also died young and in a violent, sudden, and painfully brutal way. All of the ghosts beside the lake occasionally travel back into the real worldRead More →

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Neal Bascomb, author of The Nazi Hunters, is back again with Sabotage: The Mission to Destroy Hitler’s Atomic Bomb. This gripping non-fiction novel is complete with science, mystery, and suspense as it follows the true tale of Hitler’s plan to engage in total destruction. The novel begins in 1940, when Germany attacked Norway. Bascomb gives the reader a background and scientific knowledge about nuclear fission and surprisingly, the importance of water. Readers will learn how complicated and specific the recipe was to create this bomb and the tactic mission involved.  Ironically, scientists were not planning on creating this destruction, yet their discovery of it helpedRead More →

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Maguire is a magnet for bad luck. Everywhere she goes, something horrific happens to the people around her. Her bad luck started when she was just eleven years old. She was riding in the car with her father, uncle, and older brother when her dad lost control of the vehicle and had a severe accident. Maguire was the only survivor of the car crash; in fact, she walked away from the accident with nothing more than a scratch. A year later, Maguire went to an amusement park with friends. While riding a rollercoaster, there was a sudden crash and every passenger was seriously hurt, exceptRead More →

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Kelsey has always been taught to view the world as dangerous. Her mother was the victim of a brutal kidnapping seventeen years ago. When she was finally able to escape, she vowed to stay indoors and raise her daughter, who she was now pregnant with. Since her mother’s kidnappers were never caught, Kelsey learned from a young age to protect her identity and to always be cautious when she left the house. To protect them, Kelsey’s mother built their home into a protected fortress complete with iron bars, video security, and bulletproof glass windows. To enter the home, Kelsey must enter a secret code. AllRead More →

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Adriana Mather’s How to Hang a Witch is about a girl who moves to Salem, Massachusetts from New York City with her stepmother and dad. One of their reasons for moving was because they wanted to make sure that her dad continued to get the care that he needed in order to stay healthy until he wakes up from his coma. When Samantha Mather moves to Salem, she realized because she is a descendant of Cotton Mather that her transition to Salem would not be that easy. After some research about her ancestors and the ancestors of the citizens she recognized some events that correlatedRead More →

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When coping with emotional turmoil, our subconscious often takes us away as a kind of protection.  In the event that disassociation doesn’t occur, we find other ways to deal with or to control deep psychological pain.  Because physical pain can cancel out emotional pain, some people resort to self-harm to feel a sense of control over an otherwise uncontrollable situation.  This external way to express inner turmoil distracts the sufferer from painful emotions or helps the person who self-injures to actually feel again. Inundated with impressions of horror and hiding those impressions until they are unbearable, Charlotte Davis, the seventeen-year-old protagonist in Kathleen Glasgow’s debutRead More →