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: When you read as many books as we do, strange moments of serendipity are bound to arise, but they still often surprise–like reading two books back to back in which an undertaker’s process of sewing shut the jaw of a corpse is described in great detail! The Titanic’s undertaker did so in The Watch That Ends [...]

Lynn: Hazel and Jack have been like two peas in a pod ever since Jack moved in next door when they were six.  He was wearing a pirate patch and was the only person she knew “who saw things the way they could be instead of just what they were.”  Years later, when he suddenly [...]

Lynn: Everyone has a theory about Harris Burdick, but Lemony Snickett, never known for his lack of opinions, asserts in his introduction to The Chronicles of Harris Burdick (Houghton 2011) “that these are the actual stories written by Harris Burdick, given by Burdick to the various authors who are pretending to write them.”  Well, I’m always [...]

Lynn: One of the best – and most humbling – benefits of being a book reviewer is the constant collision with new knowledge.  As an adult I’ve come to appreciate Dickens’ writing much more than I did in my high school years when we painfully dissected his novels in class.  I knew only a little [...]

Lynn: I usually don’t think much about my age but while I certainly wasn’t around in 1896, the time of Basketball Belles:  How Two Teams and One Scrappy Player Put Women’s Hoops on the Map (Holiday 2011), I did play “Girl’s Basketball” rules in high school.  Girls were considered too delicate to do more than [...]

Lynn: “It was as if I didn’t exist without music,” Leonard Bernstein.  It is Berenstein’s intense purpose that is the focal point of Rubin’s outstanding new biography, Music Was IT!:  Young Leonard Bernstein (Charlesbridge 2011). Teens with a similar driving passion in their lives will discover a strong connection to the incredibly gifted young man [...]

Lynn: I love to get book recommendations from friends and I especially love to get them from our book club teens!  That is the case with Death Cloud (Farrar 2011).  Cindy and I run an after-school book club in which the teens discuss the new just-out-of-the-boxes books for this year.  We like to hear what [...]

Cindy: There are books that make me sad. Some that make me cry. And then there are books that unhinge me like A Monster Calls (Candlewick 2011). I read this on a plane last spring and was crying from the forward explaining the back story. Siobahn Dowd, one of my favorite authors, lost her life [...]

Lynn: “I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world.” – Georgia O’Keeffe.  Rubin has chosen this most appropo of quotations for the title of her latest biography, Wideness and Wonder:  The Life and Art of Georgia O’Keeffee (Chronicle 2011).  It is an absorbing book and [...]

Cindy: Alex Flinn’s Beastly and A Kiss in Time are very popular in my middle school libraries and her latest romance featuring lesser known fairy tales, Cloaked (HarperTeen 2011) is sure to be as well. Let’s start with The Elves and the Shoemaker: Johnny is a shoe-repair expert working in a small shop in a [...]