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: 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 [...]

Lynn: “Can a girl get a job fighting death,” asks 16-year-old Prudence Galewski in her diary.  It is 1906 and Prudence sees death everywhere in New York City, wonders how illness occurs and how it can be conquered.  Deadly (S&S/Atheneum 2011) is a riveting historical novel told in the diary entries of a young girl [...]

Cindy:  First time author Lai draws on her childhood experiences as a Vietnamese immigrant in this verse novel Inside Out & Back Again (Harper 2011). Ten-year-old Hà fears the escape from her native land, not just because of the unknown she faces but because her father is still missing in the Vietnam War, and how [...]

Cindy: “It’s funny how you can be in a story but not realize until the end that you were in one.” Zora and Me (Candlewick, 2010) spins the story of author Zora Neale Hurston’s childhood in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated black town in America. Told from best friend Carrie’s perspective, the novel begins with [...]

Lynn: Why did they do it? What made a group of teenage girls accuse over 144 people of witchcraft? In the end 19 people were hanged and one man pressed to death in one small community. In her brilliant new book, Wicked Girls: A Novel of the Salem Witch Trials (Harper/Balzer + Bray 2010), Hemphill [...]

Lynn: Homesickness is a raw and powerful feeling that many children experience intensely whether related to that first trip to camp alone or a terrifying move to another country. Rosemary Wells heard an interview on the radio with Secundino Fernandez, a Cuban emigre and now architect who still longs for the Havana of his childhood, [...]

Cindy: I am so grateful for Margarita Engle’s recent books that shed light on Cuba’s history. The Poet Slave of Cuba (2006) and 2009′s Newbery Honor book The Surrender Tree were both excellent, but The Firefly Letters: A Suffragette’s Journey to Cuba ( Henry Holt, 2010) is my favorite to date due to its themes. [...]

Cindy: Gary Paulsen first achieved fame with his Newbery Honor winner Hatchet, a tale of young Brian’s wilderness survival. He also wrote the acclaimed Soldier’s Heart, illuminating the horrors of the Civil War. In Woods Runner (Random House/Wendy Lamb, 2010), he combines war historical fiction with his strong suit of wilderness survival in a slim, [...]

Cindy: Lynn raved about Countdown (Scholastic, 2010) early this spring, as did many other bloggers and reviewers so I’ve been eager to read it but we were waiting for its publication to discuss it further. I was not disappointed. If you’ve not read it yet, hunt it down and do so. If you’ve not bought [...]