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Any reader who seeks out books with thrills, chills, high stakes, and a fast pace should grab Uncaged when it releases next month!  The first in a series called The Singular Menace by John Sandford and Michele Cook, Uncaged features two teens, Shay and Odin Remby, both in the foster care system after losing their parents. For his computer skills, Odin has been recruited by the Animal Rights Group STORM.  Hoping to sabotage their experiments and rescue the caged animals, the group raids a Singular Lab in Eugene, Oregon, a medical company doing Parkinson’s research.  What they discover, however, is shocking.  Singular appears to beRead More →

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Amber Lough writes The Fire Wish with a creative style that showcases the simile, so analogies like “The music hung thickly in the air, like the scent of cinnamon” (2-3) are common throughout her imagery-rich book.  The tale—told from the perspectives of two girls living in two different worlds—also features battles, magic, oud music, and many forms of love and loyalty.  One girl, Najwa, is a jinni—a being of fire and sand that lives within earthen tunnels among gems and magic.  In a simple transporting spell, Najwa penetrates the wards that protect the palace in Baghdad enabling her to bring back a rose from theRead More →

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Aspiring to be a female version of Walter Cronkite, thirteen-year-old Teresa (Tree) Taylor wants the freshman reporter position on the newspaper staff at Hamilton High School, despite her nemesis Wanda vying  for that same role with the “Blue and Gold.”  Her second goal for the summer is to kiss a boy, preferably Ray “with the eyes like two pieces of sky” (3), to collect a kiss worth writing about. Besides those two ambitions to move the plot forward, The Secrets of Tree Taylor by Dandi Daley Mackal, set in Hamilton, Missouri, in 1963, features a collection of quotations from famous writers and alludes to HarperRead More →

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 Fourteen-year-old Vance Ehecatl is a shape-shifter, who spends part of his existence as a quetzal and part of his life as a human in Midnight—the vampire’s empire, a pinnacle of civilization.  When Amelia Atwater-Rhodes’ novel Bloodwitch opens, Vance is living with Lady Brina in a greenhouse, a lush and comfortable existence.   Lady Brina is a talented artist with a penchant for painting mythological scenes; her paintings tell stories and capture cultures, like those of the ancient Mayan and Aztec civilizations.  In his quetzal form, Vance models for Lady Brina, ignorant of any alternative life until Malachi Obsidian visits, under the guise of selling paints.  WhenRead More →

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Imagine that every time you closed your eyes—whether to blink or to sleep—you entered another world.  Such is the reality for Nolan’s life.  Nolan, who lives in Farview, Arizona, gets to watch and smell and feel what happens to Amara, who lives in the Dunelands.  Since his earliest memories, Nolan has experienced life from two bodies, but knowing it isn’t his body or his pain doesn’t make it hurt any less.  Distracted by the happenings in Amara’s world when he was seven years old and out riding his bike, Nolan now wears a prosthetic foot because both his left foot and his bike were crushedRead More →

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Callie did not have an average childhood. She never had a home, never attended school, and has very little memories of her father. Not knowing her life was different than the typical child, Callie enjoyed traveling state to state with her mother, Veronica. Veronica held odd jobs (not all of them legal), allowing her and Callie to stay in hotel rooms and eat many of their dinners from the lobby vending machine. During the middle of the night, Veronica wakes Callie to tell her they are leaving and her suitcase needs to be packed within minutes. While Callie is used to her her mom pickingRead More →

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The Freedom Summer Murders by Don Mitchell was a difficult book to read.  I am always flummoxed by hate, preferring instead to stand up for social justice, to act as Anna Sewell said in Black Beauty all those years ago: “With cruelty and oppression, it is everybody’s business to interfere when they see it.” Still, this is an important nonfiction book, one that can easily be read alongside The Road to Memphis by Mildred D. Taylor.  As he commemorates the 50th anniversary of the murders of three civil rights workers by the Ku Klux Klan, Mitchell provides a look into one of the dark cornersRead More →

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This is the second book of the Mystic City series, and while I would have liked to have read the first book, not having done so was not a detriment.  This book stands alone perfectly. I am not sure if one could label this a dystopian novel, but there are dystopian elements present. There is a segment of the society that is mystic. The mystics look and act like “normal” humans, but as their name implies, they have mystic powers.  Somehow these mystics have been exploited to, basically, serve the wealthy. OK, as I write this, perhaps it would be better to read these books inRead More →

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In Katherine Kirkpatrick‘s Between Two Worlds, travelers on a race to the top of the world interrupted life during the 1900’s in Greenland.  The Greenland Inuits were amazed at the expansive wooden ships that rammed upon their shores bringing white men, women in impractical dresses, and canned food. Billy Bah was not exempt from the amazement. She followed the captain of the ship – Captain Peary – and spent time with his wife, especially after the birth of their daughter in the barren tundra of Greenland.  When the Peary’s sail home to America they ask to take Billy Bah with them – the first “Eskimo” toRead More →