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Lynn: Wow! I never thought anything would top my awed regard for Craig Thompson’s Blankets but Stitches (W.W. Norton, Sept. 2009) has elbowed through to do just that and the two stand shoulder to shoulder for me. Both books are coming-of-age stories, both explore the power of artistic expression (among other things) and both books [...]

Cindy: Poetry and collage art combine for a colorful celebration of the seasons in Red Sings from Treetops (Houghton, 2009). What’s not to love? It’s summer, so I’ll focus there. A bright yellow sun fills half a page of a summer picnic on a dock.     In SUMMER, White clinks in drinks. Yellow melts [...]

Lynn: There are many fine books this year commemorating the July 20, 1969 landing on the moon and I have enjoyed them all. Mission Control, This is Apollo (Penguin/Viking, 2009) may be my favorite. We all have those personal memories of pivotal moments and one of mine is sitting in front of our black and [...]

Cindy: We can’t let any more summer slip away without blogging this perfect beach read. Lynn and I are both fans of Han’s first book, Shug, about a 7th grade girl grappling with middle school and the transition from child to adolescent. The Summer I Turned Pretty (Simon & Schuster, 2009) features an older girl, [...]

Lynn: Jerry Pinkney’s splendid new book, The Lion and the Mouse (Little, Brown, Sept. 2009) may be wordless but anyone who reads it will be using a lot of words such as gorgeous, stunning, evocative, and Caldecott. This adaptation of the familiar Aesop fable clearly proves that storytelling with both power and nuance can be [...]

Follow Bookends on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/bookendsblog Don’t worry, we’re not going to get addicted to Twitter. We like getting more than 140 characters for our blog posts.  We are, however,  going to try to remember to tweet when we post a new review here at Bookends and we’ll be adding some news and comment about youth [...]

Cindy: I’m embarrassed by how much I didn’t know about Bob Marley. I have visited Jamaica twice, listened to his music for decades, purchased a 4-foot carved statue of him this spring to feature at our backyard tiki bar and hosted a grad party for my daughter with a Jamaican/ rasta/ reggae theme. I should [...]

Cindy and Lynn: We’ve returned home from ALA and added to our teetering stacks of books to read. It’s hard to decide what to read first (oh, yeah, the books that have Booklist review deadlines to keep our editors happy) but our teens are probably feasting away while ignoring their parents’ chore lists. We have [...]

Lynn: Almost a week ago we posted about the YALSA Board proposal to eliminate the Best Books for Young Adults list. Many people felt as strongly about the situation as we did. We received many comments on the blog, people posted to listservs and on other blogs, tweeted, and commented on Facebook. In Chicago it [...]

Cindy and Lynn: What an exciting day! Our BBYA teen club arrived by bus this morning and as soon as badges hung around their necks, they were headed for the exhibits at break speed. We tried to photograph them in the publisher booths, but they were moving too quickly for us to keep up. Their [...]