Booklist Online: More than 130,000 book reviews for librarians, book groups, and book lovers - from the trusted experts at the American Library Association

Cindy: It’s Banned Books Week. What better time to review a Chris Crutcher book! Angry Managment (Greenwillow, 2009) is his latest and the fabulous title and cover is sure to draw in teen readers. This one features three novellas that incorporate characters from previous Crutcher novels and short stories. The three stories are wrapped in [...]

Cindy and Lynn: The best-selling first six-word memoir book, Not Quite What I Was Planning, has spawned the publication of this all-teen entry collection. When that first book published, we started thinking about six-word booktalks, but never got around to writing more than a few of them: “We have more ideas than time” (6 words!) [...]

Lynn: I have a woeful gap in my picture book knowledge, having spent most of my working years focusing on YA literature. Having grandsons and writing this blog is helping me to fill in the blanks and one of many delightful surprises is how many great YA authors also write wonderful picture books. In my [...]

Lynn: You could not ask for a better book to booktalk than Escape Under the Forever Sky (Chronicle, 2009)! Sit back and picture this: the Ethiopian wilderness, a thirteen-year-old American girl who has been kidnapped, escapes and with her captors right behind her, runs barefooted straight into a hidden pride of lions. After a heart-stopping [...]

Cindy and Lynn: Bookends thanks Nonfiction Monday for allowing us to host this week. On Mondays, many bloggers in the kidlitosphere review stellar nonfiction titles for children and teens. Bookmark the Nonfiction Monday website so you can find each Monday’s host, or volunteer to host yourself. Any bloggers who have a Nonfiction Monday post for [...]

Cindy and Lynn: Our Focus Group is aging! Here are Lynn’s twin grandsons Mason and Hayden on their first birthday. We first used these pictures in the 6th grade library orientation to illustrate the rule about not eating at the computers! Cindy still uses these even though the twins are growing up fast. Mason and [...]

Cindy: I think of this series of delightful books every August as my summer vacation winds to an end. In The Exiles (Margaret K. McElderry, 1991), the four Conroy sisters, Ruth, Naomi, Rachel, and Phoebe are excited when their parents come into an inheritance and they gleefully begin plotting how to spend their share. Their [...]

Lynn: One of the most delightful things about writing this blog is that we get packages on our porches. Even after a lot of years on committees, I haven’t gotten over the thrill of receiving a mysterious parcel from a publisher. We try not to blog books too far in advance of publication date so [...]

Lynn: Retold fairy tales are extremely popular in our area and it took us most of the summer to finally get Princess of the Midnight Ball (Bloomsbury 2009) away from our teens long enough to read it ourselves! As she did in Sun and Moon, Ice and Snow (Bloomsbury 2008), George shows that she is [...]

Lynn: Meet the kindergarten class at Wolong Nature Reserve – sixteen adorable baby pandas. Small humans will be enchanted by the irresistible photographs of these furry students as they pursue their lessons of playing, eating, napping and exploring their world. Panda Kindergarten (HarperCollins, 2009) is ideal for story hours or quiet time after a busy [...]