Booklist Online: Book Reviews from the American Library Association

Lynn: Marcus Jordan, star quarterback of his previous team, is the new guy in town. To make things worse, the local football team was undefeated last year and no one sees any reason to change the starting line-up. Marcus makes the team but resigns himself to working hard and riding the bench for [...]

Lynn: Kristin Cashore is a gifted storyteller - one of those remarkable writers who spin a web of words that wraps around readers, capturing them completely with a tale. I’d wager my classic sf collection that every reader coming to the end of the first book, Graceling (Penguin/Dial, 2008), immediately asked when the second volume [...]

Lynn: “You gotta be kidding! You never heard of Sandy Koufax?” says the unseen fan narrating this strikingly different picture book. Readers drawn to the “lenticular” cover (lenses creating the illusion of movement) will be fascinated by the story inside. The enigmatic Sandy Koufax was, arguably, the greatest left-handed pitcher ever to play [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Lynn: If you are a regular reader of this blog you have heard us say over and over what a tremendous year it is for nonfiction. Sorry to sing the refrain again but, wow, what a year for nonfiction! Here is another remarkable nonfiction book that MUST be added to collections everywhere. This is Mother [...]

Lynn: We left Todd Hewitt and Viola Eade in a breathless cliff-hanger at the end of The Knife of Never Letting Go. It has been a long year of waiting! The second volume, The Ask and the Answer (Candlewick, Sept. 2009), picks right up from that point. Todd and Viola have run right [...]

Cindy: We can’t let any more summer slip away without blogging this perfect beach read. Lynn and I are both fans of Han’s first book, Shug, about a 7th grade girl grappling with middle school and the transition from child to adolescent. The Summer I Turned Pretty (Simon & Schuster, 2009) features an older girl, [...]

Lynn: I had forgotten what a milestone losing a tooth is for kids until my grandsons developed wiggly teeth. Suddenly teeth were falling like rain and they and their kindergarten classmates seemed to have more gaps than teeth. I instantly started looking for good loose tooth books to share with them. I found Arthur’s Tooth [...]

Cindy: There’s a girl licking chocolate frosting (or Nutella spread) off her finger on the cover. That’s all I need to pick up The Sweet Life of Stella Madison (Random/Delacorte, July 2009). Actually, one of our BBYA teen readers reviewed this at book club and it was her comments that spurred me to read it. [...]