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: Holy cow, Lisa McMann! I’m glad I can’t experience your dreams if your fiction is any indication of what goes on at night in your head! McMann’s WAKE trilogy is very popular in our high schools, but I can’t wait to booktalk Cryer’s Cross (Simon Pulse 2011) with my eighth graders this fall. I [...]

Lynn: There is an irritating new rule about new book reserves at my public library.  Well, that is another story but because of that it sometimes it takes me a while to get my hands on a book and that is the case with Mindblind (Marshall Cavendish 2010)  I wanted to read this since I [...]

Lynn: As a dedicated escapist reader I routinely run the other way from “disease” books. I made an exception for Drums, Girls and Dangerous Pie (Scholastic 2005), Sonnenblick’s wonderful book about Steven Alper, his tumultuous 8th grade year and his little brother Jeffrey’s battle with leukemia. That exemption continues for After Ever After (Scholastic 2010), [...]

Cindy: Young teens who feel no one understands them will be a natural audience for Out of My Mind (Atheneum, Mar. 2010). Melody is a fifth grader who loves words but has never spoken any.  She has cerebral palsy and cannot dress or feed herself or communicate more than some basic needs with facial expressions [...]

Cindy: Last year Gaiman gave us a boy named Bod. This year, “there was a boy called Odd, and there was nothing strange or unusual about that, not in that time or place.” Odd meant the tip of the blade and it was a lucky name.” But like most folktale heroes, Odd is not lucky, [...]

Cindy: The Black Book of Colors (Groundwood, 2008) is a gem of a book that flew under the radar last year even though it garnered four starred reviews and a prize at the 2007 Bologna Children’s Book Fair. How does someone who can’t see comprehend colors? Through his other senses of touch, smell, sound, and [...]

Lynn: We live on the Lake Michigan shore where winter starts in October, hangs on through April and where feet and feet of snow pile up. Our summers may be short but they are glorious! So I often find myself shopping for a new bathing suit, staring horrified at pale wobbly parts of my anatomy [...]

Lynn: In recent years we have seen several books centering on a narrator with a condition in the Asperger’s syndrome spectrum. The device allows commentary from a detached perspective on social interaction, language and the customs we take for granted. The risk is in creating a voice that does not sound authentic, but books such [...]