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 [...]

Cindy: One Crazy Summer is not only a description of the months ahead in the Dobrez household with a daughter fresh home from her first year of college and another graduating high school in a month. One Crazy Summer (Harper/Amistad, 2010) is the new middle grade book from Rita Williams-Garcia, who usually writes for older [...]

Lynn: OK – let me just get this out of my system at the start. I am furious with Philip Reeve! I have PILES of books that I need to read, review deadlines and a blogging partner who was wondering quite vocally why I hadn’t passed Fever Crumb (Scholastic, April 2010) along to her. It [...]

Lynn: As a teen (a loooong time ago) I balanced my sf/fantasy reading with big doses of romantic mysteries by authors like Mary Stewart and Victoria Holt. As a librarian, I struggled to find books to meet that same interest for the girls in my 8th-9th grade building. This new series, The Agency, promises to [...]

Lynn: So – Cindy and I are reading the great new 2010 arc’s as fast as we can turn the pages but we don’t want to move on without wedging in some of the outstanding late 2009 books. Raiders’ Ransom (Scholastic/Chicken House, Dec. 2009) is one I don’t want anyone to miss. It’s 23rd century [...]

Lynn: You could not ask for a better book to booktalk than Escape Under the Forever Sky (Chronicle, 2009)! Sit back and picture this: the Ethiopian wilderness, a thirteen-year-old American girl who has been kidnapped, escapes and with her captors right behind her, runs barefooted straight into a hidden pride of lions. After a heart-stopping [...]

Lynn: We left Todd Hewitt and Viola Eade in a breathless cliff-hanger at the end of The Knife of Never Letting Go. It has been a long year of waiting! The second volume, The Ask and the Answer (Candlewick, Sept. 2009), picks right up from that point. Todd and Viola have run right into the [...]

Lynn: It’s not every fourteen-year-old girl who can successfully work as a Perditorian (finder of lost things) on her own in the teeming dangerous streets of London. Enola Holmes is no ordinary girl and she is doing quite nicely, thank you, solving cases that baffle even her famous brothers. Before she disappeared, Enola’s eccentric mother [...]

Lynn: We live on the Lake Michigan shore where winter starts in October, hangs on through April and where feet and feet of snow pile up. Our summers may be short but they are glorious! So I often find myself shopping for a new bathing suit, staring horrified at pale wobbly parts of my anatomy [...]

Cindy: It’s very exciting to have had an early peek at Catching Fire (Scholastic, Sept. 1, 2009) but that just means the wait for book three will seem even longer! One thing I know for sure, it will be worth the wait, whether you are a lucky soul in the same boat, or if you [...]