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Lynn: Eleven-year-old Suzanna Snow has a busy schedule!  Her parents who manage the swanky Rosemount Hotel in Loch Harbor, New Brunswick, are intent on training Zanna to someday run the hotel.  Zanna is busy all day doing everything from fetching the day’s catch from the docks for dinner to delivering tea and helping out in [...]

Cindy:  It’s no mystery that fans of the National Book Award Winner, What I Saw and How I Lied, will line up for Judy Blundell’s latest historical mood-saturated drama, Strings Attached (Scholastic 2011). Kit Corrigan learns the hard way that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Seventeen and struggling to make ends [...]

Lynn: Cindy discovered Bug Butts (EarlyLight 2011), took one look and handed it off to me and the Focus Group straight away.  Let’s see, bugs with shooting butts, spinning butts, exploding butts, bubble butts – hmmm, need I say more about small boy appeal?  The EWWW Meter is pegged on this book and while the [...]

Cindy and Lynn: We always love when publisher boxes show up on our doorstep and have wished we could share some of that joy with the rest of you. Last week the book fairies from Scholastic sent a particularly intriguging package so we thought it might be fun to share the fun with our Bookends readers. [...]

Cindy: While Lynn is booking a real trip to Europe this summer, I have to pacify myself with a virtual trip through The Last Little Blue Envelope (HarperTeen 2011).  Those of you who followed Ginny’s European scavenger hunt in the first book, Thirteen Little Blue Envelopes, will remember that her backpack was stolen in Greece [...]

Lynn: Quick quiz!  What are hovering and whiffling, rumbling, ear flaps and trunk curls?  All these are among the many ways elephants communicate.  In Elephant Talk:  The Surprising Science of Elephant Communication (Twenty-First Century 2011) Downer presents not only the story of the complex story of elephant communication but also the scientific processes behind these [...]

Lynn: Cindy and I are painfully aware that our picture book posts are heavily weighted toward books that appeal to small boys.  Blame that on our all-male focus group who, despite my best efforts, have no interest in books with pink covers, feature princesses, gorgeous shoes or dancing.   I am also conditioned by years [...]

Cindy: Well, it’s Mystery Month here at Booklist and The Romeo and Juliet Code (Scholastic 2011) is an historical mystery set in Maine during WWII masquerading as a contemporary romance. The up side to all the flack that Scholastic has taken for this absurdly inaccurate cover art is that it has brought a lot of attention to [...]

Cindy: Does anyone have a bottle of india ink I may borrow? Margaret Peot has me fired up to get creative with her intriguing book Inkblot: Drip, Splat, and Squish Your Way to Creativity (Boyds Mills 2011). She lays out the process for creating inkblot designs and then transforming them into works of art by [...]

Cindy: We’re starting a new feature here at Bookends, based on something that happened in my middle school library just now. A 7th grade student walked up and said, “Look at me! I’m on a book.” He does look like the young man on the cover of Walter Dean Myers’ book, Somewhere in the Darkness, down to [...]