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: 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: 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: Hazel and Jack have been like two peas in a pod ever since Jack moved in next door when they were six.  He was wearing a pirate patch and was the only person she knew “who saw things the way they could be instead of just what they were.”  Years later, when he suddenly [...]

Cindy: Our middle school students demanded a reserve list for Christopher Paolini’s new book Inheritance (Random/Knopf 11-8-2011) last school year the minute the publication date was announced. It was 7:30 a.m. yesterday when the first student asked if we had the book yet! Um, no…the bookstore isn’t open and our UPS delivery of the preorders [...]

Cindy: Alex Flinn’s Beastly and A Kiss in Time are very popular in my middle school libraries and her latest romance featuring lesser known fairy tales, Cloaked (HarperTeen 2011) is sure to be as well. Let’s start with The Elves and the Shoemaker: Johnny is a shoe-repair expert working in a small shop in a [...]

Lynn: I love fantasy but it’s a crowded genre and sadly far too many of them blend into an indistinguishable blur for me.  So it’s a true delight to meet a book as fresh and inventive as Akata Witch (Penguin/Viking 2011).  Sunny was born in New York to Nigerian parents and the family returned to [...]

Lynn: Already racking up 6 starred reviews, Chime (Penguin/Dial 2011) is winning admirers everywhere. I am one of the throng and if Bookends gave stars we’d add to the count.  It’s been a while since a book hooked me so thoroughly or kept me so spellbound.  I could probably save a lot of writing time [...]

Cindy: I’m embarrassed to tell you how many months Lynn has been waiting for me (euphemism for “nagging me”) to read Finnikin of the Rock (Candlewick 2010). I knew it was a complex political fantasy that would take some concentration and I had planned to sink into it last summer, but life had other plans. [...]

Lynn: Talk about an early holiday gift!  One of my favorite literary characters, Bartimaeus, is back!  Bartimaeus –   snarky, egotistical, irreverent, utterly disrespectful of authority and just as utterly unable to control his smart mouth, king of the footnotes, djinn of the Fourth level – is back.  Hurray!  In The Ring of Solomon (Hyperion [...]

Lynn: Lovers of fairy-tale twists and library-related stories – have we got a book for you! The Grimm Legacy (Penguin/Putnam 2010) is the sort of clever charming book perfectly designed to curl up with at the end of a long frustrating day. It is balm for a battered soul. If only I could distill and [...]