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Lynn:  Most mystery fans love sequels.  We fall in love with a character and can’t wait to read along as he or she takes on a new case.  I’m in that camp and I love nothing more than another installment of my favorite sleuth.  So for our continuing celebration of Mystery Month, here are two [...]

Mystery Month is underway at Booklist and there is a lot of fun ahead. If you like your mystery served up with a heavy dose of fantasy, you will enjoy puzzling out the many mysteries woven into Sage Blackwood’s stellar novel. Cindy: It’s a good day when you find a new fantasy that reminds you [...]

Cindy: The aspiring teen writer in me wishes this book had been available 35 years ago. Barring the development of a time machine, I will have to settle for sharing it with kindred spirits in my book club, and I am eager to do so. The Curiosities (Carolrhoda LAB 2012) is the joint effort of [...]

Lynn:  When will I learn to listen to the book club kids?  They have been raving about The False Prince (Scholastic 2012) for months now and I JUST got to it.  In my defense, it was in such hot demand that it took me a long time to get it away from the kids.  Still, [...]

Lynn:  I love fantasy but we read a LOT of them each year and the sad truth is that some tend to blur as the sheer mass of them float around in my brain.  So you’ll understand that when I come across something different I get REALLY excited!  And I am really excited by Seraphina [...]

Lynn:  Cindy and have spent our school careers focusing on teen literature but with Bookends we acquired the responsibility of covering books from birth to 18!  It has been really fun to delve into the rich world of books for younger readers but every so often I realize just how much catch up I have [...]

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 [...]