Booklist Online: Book Reviews from the American Library Association

Lynn: Here in Michigan we have two glorious weeks left before the school bell rings the day after Labor Day. Many families are wedging in one more trip and we’d like to remind everyone of a terrific way to while away the miles, avoid squabbles and enjoy something together. Listen to an audio book! I [...]

Cindy:
Things That Suck You In
Books that make you want to flip back to the beginning and start an immediate reread. Books you actually take the time to reread. When You Reach Me (Random House/Wendy Lamb, 2009). Books you want to read a third time. Books you want to clutch to your chest.
Things You Care About
Sixth [...]

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: Any other re-readers out there? I confess to being a major re-reader most of my life. It is harder to do these days but I still love to revisit old favorites. Sometimes it can be disappointing but I am happy to say that I recently reread two Nancy Werlin mysteries and [...]

Lynn: Do not be deceived by the saccharine sweet cover! This wonderful little gem is a wacky mix of Jane Austen, Sherlock Holmes and Jack Gantos at his bizarre best. Wealthy orphaned Petronella Arbuthnot is celebrating her sixteenth birthday with an assembly of friends. Her guardian, Augustus T. Percival, laughing widely at a joke, inadvertently [...]

Lynn: The clock is ticking. Humanity’s days are numbered as the earth’s population sickens and dies following a close pass by the comet Bhaktul and the virus it spread through the atmosphere. Only those under 18 seem to be immune and as society breaks down, a scientist steps forward with a controversial [...]

Lynn: In recent years we have seen several books centering on a narrator with a condition in the Asperger’s syndrome spectrum. The device allows commentary from a detached perspective on social interaction, language and the customs we take for granted. The risk is in creating a voice that does not sound authentic, [...]

Lynn: Glancing out her classroom at St. Veronica’s Upper School, Sophie St. Pierre sees a ghostly face in the house next door. Before you can say Nancy Drew, Sophie and her three friends are deeply embroiled in a twenty-year-old mystery involving hidden clues, a missing treasure, blackmailing villains, at least one red herring and, [...]