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

Lynn: Excuse me while I hop in my dirigible and zip down to the coffee shop.  This was Alberto Santos-Dumont’s preferred method of getting around Paris and the doormen were used to tying his airship to posts while Alberto shopped or visited with friends.  In the Fabulous Flying Machines of Alberto Santos-Dumont (Abrams 2011) readers [...]

Cindy: I’m reading a classic. Don’t faint. You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings. No, that quote is not about me reading a classic, although it could be. It’s the opening of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Last fall we read [...]

Cindy: Here in Michigan we aren’t getting any snow, so we have to read about it in books! Red Sled (Atheneum 2011) is a delightful nearly wordless wild ride. A young child props a red sled against the wall of a cabin and goes inside for the night. Along comes a bear who borrows the [...]

Lynn: Cindy deliberated with her YA Lit Jury last weekend for the L.A. Times Book Prize while I gleefully immersed myself in books I couldn’t take time for last year plus an outrageously tempting stack of shiny new 2012 arcs.  So we’re batting a little clean-up here on Bookends before leaping into posts on the [...]

Cindy: If I say, “Board Book,” I’m guessing that you might think of yellow duckies and furry puppies. The last thing that might come to mind is a set of NHL© concept books that use the players and trappings of NHL© teams to teach colors and numbers and animals. Christopher Jordan’s set, My First NHL© Books (Tundra [...]

Cindy: I’ve been immersed in teen lit this year but being the klutz I am, I couldn’t help but notice the cover of E-mergency! (Chronicle 2011) with poor E slipping on a flight of stairs headed straight for O. Oh-no! The importance of the most frequently used letter E is made perfectly clear in this funny story [...]

Lynn: Jurmain opens her charming book, Worst of Friends:  Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and the True Story of an American Feud (Penguin/Dutton 2011) by asking a most intriguing question, “Can Presidents be pals?”  In many cases the answer was no.  “Theodore Roosevelt thought McKinley had the backbone of a chocolate eclair.”  But sometimes the answer was [...]

Lynn: “It was a quiet morning at preschool until Adelaide annoyed Bailey.”  An escalating alphabetic chain reaction follows right up to the drenching moment when Zelda zaps Adelaide.  Miss Mabel asks Adelaide to apologize and soon calm returns to the school as everyone settles in for story time. Bottner’s delightfully droll disasters are cleverly captured [...]

Cindy: As I write this, Lynn is winging her way to The American Library Association Midwinter Meetings in Dallas…propelled as much by excitement and nerves as she is by Delta Airlines. Her 2012 Newbery Award deliberations start tomorrow and I am left behind to work for two more days before I can leave town and [...]

Cindy: I love when I find a nonfiction book that does something new. Music informational books are few and far between considering how much music means to teens. Of course, by the time you purchase and process a Justin Bieber biography, it seems there’s a new kid on the block so it’s hard to keep [...]