Booklist Online: More than 130,000 book reviews for librarians, book groups, and book lovers - from the trusted experts at the American Library Association

Lynn:  The lives of artists are often a challenge to write about for children and none more so than Diego Rivera.  Controversial in almost all aspects of  his life, Diego Rivera was also a towering figure in the art world (and in stature) and his work remains incredibly powerful today. Susan Goldman Rubin’s new book, [...]

Cindy: Sometimes the biggest mystery about a book is the cover art! When Lynn and I worked together in the library we did tandem booktalking a lot. It was good for the students since we each had our own genre strengths and preferences (hers were science fiction and mystery and I favored horror and sad [...]

Cindy: I recently ran two book fairs in my middle school libraries and ran into a real-life mystery: WHY is this cover art on the paperback of Susan Beth Pfeffer’s Life As We Knew It???? Seriously. Look at this photo I took of the trilogy as displayed in the sale cases: Which one of these [...]

Cindy: I’m still digesting carbs from all the cookies I’ve consumed in the past week, but I am also chewing on the Cover Story blog post over at Booklists’ Book Group Buzz blog. Neil Hollands asks us to think about book covers that trigger memories or are iconic. I left a comment there this morning about how [...]

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 [...]

Cindy and Lynn: We all know we are not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but we all do. Our students do and it certainly influences us. We get really irritated (and so do our teens) when the cover art does not accurately portray the contents of the book. We understand that marketing is the [...]

Cindy: Well, it’s Mystery Month here at Booklist and The Romeo and Juliet Code (Scholastic 2011) is an historical mystery set in Maine during WWII masquerading as a contemporary romance. The up side to all the flack that Scholastic has taken for this absurdly inaccurate cover art is that it has brought a lot of attention to [...]

Cindy: We’re starting a new feature here at Bookends, based on something that happened in my middle school library just now. A 7th grade student walked up and said, “Look at me! I’m on a book.” He does look like the young man on the cover of Walter Dean Myers’ book, Somewhere in the Darkness, down to [...]

Lynn: I’m feeling a little frantic about getting some of my top picks for the year blogged before THE big youth award announcements.  Cindy and I didn’t do lists of our top picture books this year but if we had Mirror (Candlewick, Nov. 2010) would have been on mine!  This is a stunningly designed and [...]

Lynn: Incarceron (Penguin/Dial 2010) has already gathered five starred reviews and is one of the most talked about books of the new season. As a devoted skeptic, I started this book with a prove-it-to-me attitude but this is a bandwagon I am happily joining. Set in a future earth, the story follows two teens, each [...]