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: If Annie Oakley had to solve her sister’s mysterious disappearance…you’d have One Came Home (Random/Knopf 2013) and one of the best books I’ve read so far this year. 13-year-old Georgia is a whiz with a rifle and is helpful in her family’s general store in Placid, Wisconsin. The book opens with this intriguing passage: [...]

Lynn:  It’s March and we bloggers have mostly leaped into the new publishing year.   I’m still playing catch-up though and I’m so glad I didn’t miss Shadow on the Mountain (Abrams/Amulet 2012).  Preus writes about a part of WWII history that most of us know little about and bases her book on the “true [...]

Cindy: I feel as if I shouldn’t really say anything about this wordless picture book, Unspoken: A Story from the Underground Railroad (Scholastic 2012), other than to urge you to set your eyes on a copy and “read” it with a child. The story opens with a quilt draped over a farm rail fence and [...]

Lynn:  As veteran Bookends readers know, we are never short of opinions!  So let me say straight out that Elizabeth Wein’s earlier Arthurian/Ethiopian series  is as innovative as it is beautifully written and, in my opinion anyway, never received the attention it deserved.  Her new book, Code Name Verity (Hyperion 2012) again displays this extraordinary [...]

Cindy: What a deliciously creepy collection of ghost stories. On the Day I Died: Stories from the Grave (Random House/Schwartz & Wade 2012) begins with a variation of the popular Vanishing Hitchhiker story that sets up the structure for the collection. Mike picks up a girl, she disappears before he gets her home, but leaves [...]

Cindy: Talk about a timely historical fiction novel. Tough economic times, fathers who have to relocate to find work, and children who are caught in the middle. The Mighty Miss Malone (Random/Wendy Lamb 2012) could be describing many families today instead of in Great Depression era Gary, Indiana. As the cover proclaims, “Deza Malone from [...]

Lynn: Hang onto your slouch hat and seven-shot derringer! Caroline Lawrence trades togas for buckskins as her new Western Mysteries series gets off to a rip-snorting start in The Case of the Deadly Desperados (Penguin/Putnam, 2012). The story opens as P. K. Pinkerton inscribes the events that have brought him to be in the deepest mine [...]

Lynn: As a child, I was fascinated by my parents’ stories about growing up during the Depression.  Neither of them, like the children in this story, ever went hungry but the scarcities and tough times shaped them for their entire lives.  My mother, at 91, still cannot bear to let anything go to waste and [...]

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 [...]

Cindy: When you read as many books as we do, strange moments of serendipity are bound to arise, but they still often surprise–like reading two books back to back in which an undertaker’s process of sewing shut the jaw of a corpse is described in great detail! The Titanic’s undertaker did so in The Watch That Ends [...]