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Mix adventure, jokes, and a little mystery, and you have a recipe to keep most readers engaged.  Dave Eggers applies this formula to the writing of his recent middle-grade novel, The Lifters, which is actually an extended metaphor for combatting despair. The protagonist of The Lifters, twelve-year-old Granite Flowerpetal wishes for a name that is both easily understood and easily spelled, so he shortens his name to Gran, not realizing at the time how readily that version might be confused with the term some individuals use to refer to their grandmothers. Gran, who shares a bedroom with his five-year-old sister Maisie, hears his parents talkRead More →

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Maverick Falconer is the world’s lamest super-hero, in his estimation.  At age eleven, he’s small, weak, near-sighted, prone to allergies, and possesses an anti-dollar forcefield.  But none of those shortcomings deter Maverick from his goal: Doing good deeds, righting wrongs, standing up against evil, and protecting anybody who is small or weak. When Maverick was three, his military firefighter dad, died, leaving Maverick alone with an alcoholic and neglectful mother who dates a string of abusive men.  The only stable person in his life is Aunt Cat, who is as wild as her name.  But she loves, defends, and protects Maverick.  Wanting to live inRead More →

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Here’ the dirt on Dirt by Denise Gosliner Orenstein: Eleven-year-old Yonder attends Robert Frost Middle School in Vermont, where her classmates are “just dumb losers with mean mouths full of empty words” (5). After her mother dies, Yonder screams and yells for her mother to come back but realizes that words don’t work, so she stops speaking since “silence seems safer.” Yonder’s father masks his grief and fills the empty void with alcohol: “My father drank and drank and drank and didn’t really know how to be a regular father at all” (48). Despite his sobbing and his littering the floor with beer bottles, YonderRead More →

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Actually, David wears the headphones to keep him from feeling anxious, to help him cope with his symptoms of highly functioning autism.  He also makes notes in a notebook, to learn social norms and social cues, to remember names, and to make sense of all the parts of the world that confuse him.  These differences and his predilection for honesty and disclosure often get him in trouble.  So, when Kit sits at his table at lunch, David is surprised. A month after her dad’s death in a car accident, Kit is looking for quiet, for a port in the storm of confusing emotions. Grief hasRead More →

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Sometimes a story can take us to a place of understanding and awareness.  Cultural identity literature at its best, The Art of Starving by Sam J. Miller transports readers to a place so familiar we wonder whether we haven’t been here before, where we know the people and can relate to their challenges, where we share their hunger for fulfillment, their starvation for affection, attention, and validation, and their hunger for justice. This book will appeal to readers who enjoyed Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You by Peter Cameron or Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson.  Although it is a book for all readers,Read More →

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Just when I was beginning to think The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl was simply a fantasy to entertain tweens in a Marvel Comics style, the book turned into a legitimately powerful tale (pun entirely intended!).  With this Squirrel Meets World installment, the husband and wife team of Shannon Hale and Dean Hale cleverly pens a multi-genre adventure-mystery featuring superhero “Doreen Green, age fourteen. Over five feet tall and not an inch mean” (6), who is also “ with powers of squirrel and powers of girl” (259). Despite her super hero abilities, Doreen has realistic and adolescent relatable life-dilemmas—she has body image issues and friendship challenges at UnionRead More →

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Alex Meadows has just passed from primary to secondary school in Lambourn, England, so he is constantly on guard to protect his status and to avoid being targeted by Alan’s Battalion, a gang of school yard bullies commanded by Alan Tydman.  Alex plans not to react to any of the gang’s bait since reactors get hurt, a truth that David Marsh can testify to when he refuses to fly under the radar.  But when Alex—and everyone else in his grade—gets an invitation to the Icarus Show, he dares to believe in possibility.  From the teaser campaign to the main event, Alex is intent on solving theRead More →

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Nervy but not nuts, Buck Anderson craves adventure.  Most comfortable surrounded by rock and roots and earth, Buck’s passion is caving.  And living in southwest Virginia in the Appalachian foothills, this stubborn, risk-taker has many opportunities for discovering, exploring, and hoping to make history.  When his best friend David Weinstein moves away, thirteen-year-old Buck loses his cautious cave-exploring partner, and “the first rule of caving is never—not ever—do it alone” (2). Although Buck disobeys this rule more than once, his fascination with caves and their potential danger is only one strand of the plot in Going Where It’s Dark by Newbery Award-winning author Phyllis ReynoldsRead More →

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“A little mud never hurt anyone” turns out to be a HUGE understatement in Heath Cliff, Pennsylvania, when fifth grader Tamaya Dhiwaddi defends her friend, seventh grader Marshall Walsh, by throwing a handful of fuzzy mud at Chad Hilligas, a bully at Woodridge Academy. The “fuzzy mud” is a genetically altered slime mold grown by SunRay Farms to produce a gas alternative that will address the energy crisis in an over-populated world.  What was created to save mankind was never intended to destroy it.  Yet, Jonathan Fitzman’s ergonyms—“single-celled, high-energy organisms” (29), the main ingredient in Biolene—might mutate and spiral out of control to do justRead More →