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: Elise Broach, forgive me, but THIS was the book that I was supposed to write! Missing on Superstition Mountain (Holt 2011) is far better than anything I would have written…but still! My grandparents moved from New York state to be in Zane Grey country sixty odd years ago and settled on a couple of [...]

Lynn: I love to get book recommendations from friends and I especially love to get them from our book club teens!  That is the case with Death Cloud (Farrar 2011).  Cindy and I run an after-school book club in which the teens discuss the new just-out-of-the-boxes books for this year.  We like to hear what [...]

Cindy: Holy cow, Lisa McMann! I’m glad I can’t experience your dreams if your fiction is any indication of what goes on at night in your head! McMann’s WAKE trilogy is very popular in our high schools, but I can’t wait to booktalk Cryer’s Cross (Simon Pulse 2011) with my eighth graders this fall. I [...]

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 [...]

Lynn: Move over Philip Marlowe, a new gumshoe is in town.  Meet J.J. Tully, former search and rescue dog  – now turned out to grass in his retirement.    And sister, there’s chickens in that grass.  J.J. has barely settled in when trouble comes knocking – trouble in the form of a pretty tough bird.  [...]

Cindy: My first experience with Wuthering Heights comes from a Classics Illustrated version of the title from my childhood. Still, Heathcliff haunts me and who wouldn’t be intrigued by the story behind this brooding, evil character living on the English moors. The House of Dead Maids (Henry Holt, 2010) is Clare Dunkle’s creepy prequel-of-sorts to [...]

Lynn: There is always a big demand for mysteries for the middle school set so it was doubly exciting to find one that provides a well plotted puzzle AND a lot more besides. Crunch (Harper/Katherine Tegen, 2010) features the charming Marriss family: narrator 14-year-old Dewey, his 18-year-old sister Lil, shy 13-year-old Vince and the five-year-old [...]

Lynn: Don’t you love it when you find a book that is wonderfully written, will be a sure-fire winner with teens AND provides the perfect booktalking quote too? Revolver (Roaring Brook, 2010) does all this in 200 accessible can’t-stop-reading-them pages. The book opens with a bang as young Sig looks at the dead body of [...]