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: 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 [...]

Lynn: Long-time readers of Bookends will remember that I am not a big fan of verse novels or of sad books.  So you are probably surprised to see me leading off a review of this door-stopper of a verse novel about an immensely famous disaster.  I’m pretty surprised myself but every so often a book [...]

Lynn: I really shouldn’t reveal how clay-like my reviewer’s feet are but I seem to confess my failings in this blog all the time.   This clearly has to stop but before I talk about Martha Brook’s new book, Queen of Hearts (Farrar 2011), I need to say that I usually dislike books about people [...]

Lynn: Eleven-year-old Suzanna Snow has a busy schedule!  Her parents who manage the swanky Rosemount Hotel in Loch Harbor, New Brunswick, are intent on training Zanna to someday run the hotel.  Zanna is busy all day doing everything from fetching the day’s catch from the docks for dinner to delivering tea and helping out in [...]

Cindy:  It’s no mystery that fans of the National Book Award Winner, What I Saw and How I Lied, will line up for Judy Blundell’s latest historical mood-saturated drama, Strings Attached (Scholastic 2011). Kit Corrigan learns the hard way that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Seventeen and struggling to make ends [...]

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: I have to admit that when Lynn suggested Bird in a Box (Little, Brown 2011) for our blog schedule, I was less than enthusiastic. I’m not a boxing or fight fan of any sort and was not eager to read about the fascination with the Brown Bomber, Joe Louis. But to pass on this [...]

Cindy: Fans of Newbery Honor title The Wednesday Wars will be delighted with Schmidt’s new companion novel, Okay For Now (Clarion 2011).  “I’m not lyin’.” Doug Swieteck is dismayed to learn that his father lost his job and is relocating the family to the small upstate New York town, “Stupid Marysville.” I hate this town. I hate [...]

Lynn: 15-year-old Lina is a gifted artist from a loving family looking forward to an exciting future in Between Shades of Gray (Penguin 2011).  But it is 1941 in Lithuania and in the middle of the night, Soviet soldiers storm into her home, seize her and her family and force them onto trains packed with [...]