Booklist Online: Book Reviews from the American Library Association

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 [...]

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 [...]

Cindy: Ladies and gentlemen, Children Of All Ages, with delightful derring-do and glitzy grammatical garnishing, Cindy Dobrez and Lynn Rutan, in conjunction with the superior cyberspectacular known as www.Ringling.com are proud to present the following fabulous book review! (this website will Barnumize your email or text!) Where to start in describing the wealth of interesting [...]

Lynn: “I tried to make August last because September, and school, didn’t look good. We were not only newcomers, but we were P.K.’s - preacher’s kids. So everybody’d be gunning for us, and we’d be living in a fishbowl.” 11-year old Bob has a lot to worry about. Not only is his family new in [...]

Lynn: Here in Michigan we have two glorious weeks left before the school bell rings the day after Labor Day. Many families are wedging in one more trip and we’d like to remind everyone of a terrific way to while away the miles, avoid squabbles and enjoy something together. Listen to an audio book! I [...]

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:
Things That Suck You In
Books that make you want to flip back to the beginning and start an immediate reread. Books you actually take the time to reread. When You Reach Me (Random House/Wendy Lamb, 2009). Books you want to read a third time. Books you want to clutch to your chest.
Things You Care About
Sixth [...]

Lynn: It’s not every fourteen-year-old girl who can successfully work as a Perditorian (finder of lost things) on her own in the teeming dangerous streets of London. Enola Holmes is no ordinary girl and she is doing quite nicely, thank you, solving cases that baffle even her famous brothers. Before she disappeared, Enola’s eccentric mother [...]

Lynn: Sometimes you just fall in love with a book and that is the case with The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate (Holt, May 2009) for me. I read it under trying circumstances too. I was suffering from a really horrendous case of poison ivy. (Yes, yes, I know about shiny leaves of three but [...]

Lynn: Do not be deceived by the saccharine sweet cover! This wonderful little gem is a wacky mix of Jane Austen, Sherlock Holmes and Jack Gantos at his bizarre best. Wealthy orphaned Petronella Arbuthnot is celebrating her sixteenth birthday with an assembly of friends. Her guardian, Augustus T. Percival, laughing widely at a joke, inadvertently [...]