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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 [...]

Lynn: Stiefvater kicks off  The Scorpio Races (Scholastic 2011) with one of the most attention-grabbing sentences of the year: “It was the first of November and so, today, someone would die.” Find me one soul who could put the book down after that opening!  Stiefvater doesn’t make it any easier to stop reading after that [...]

Lynn: I’m reading for Newbery this year so I’ve gifted myself with only an occasional upper YA book and most of them have been on audio.  Few have shaken me as much as Mal Peet’s newest, Life:  An Exploded Diagram (Candlewick 2011).  When brilliant narrator Simon Vance (Brilliance 2011) read the last sentence, all I [...]

Lynn: Peer into the heart of any of us who have watched a ballet performance and you will find a secret wish to join the corps!  Those gorgeous costumes, the beautiful music, those amazing leaps that must feel like flying!  After seeing my first ballet at 8 I too fell in love with the idea [...]

Lynn: The amazing Terri Windling conceived the idea of Bordertown in 1986, invited some amazing writers to contribute stories and together they created a place that took on a life of its own in the imagination of scores of readers.   The 4 anthologies and 3 novels about that world included the work of writers such [...]

Lynn: Long-time readers of Bookends will remember that I am not a big fan of verse novels or of sad books.  So you are probably surprised to see me leading off a review of this door-stopper of a verse novel about an immensely famous disaster.  I’m pretty surprised myself but every so often a book [...]

Lynn: It is only fair to warn you – if you have deadlines, important obligations or responsibilities, don’t start The Name of the Star (Penguin/Putnam 2011)!  I guarantee that once you start reading, you will set aside everything else.  Damn the deadlines, full speed ahead!  I won’t disclose all the major tasks I ignored but [...]

Cindy: As I said last week, while Lynn is spending the month in France I am soothing my travel lust with literature. To Timbuktu: Nine Countries, Two People, One True Story (Roaring Brook 2011) is just the ticket! I admire adventurous people and these two young adults spin a good tale about their travels. Casey [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]