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: How about these ingredients: fascinating animals, an urban animal rescue team, a group of resourceful kids and a lively family? Yup, cannot miss for kid appeal. Add well-written stories based on actual events and you’ve got a winner of a new series for middle grade readers. I read Gator on the Loose! (Random/Knopf, May [...]

Cindy: While strolling the ALA exhibits last week we were in the Penguin booth and Lynn noticed a poster about John Flanagan’s Ranger’s Apprentice series. She loves the series and said, “Oh, there’s a series I’m all caught up on. I’ve read all six.” We picked up a few galleys they had out on the [...]

Lynn: There are so many wonderful elements in Where in the Wild (Tricycle Press 2007) and this year’s follow up Where Else in the Wild (Tricycle Press 2009) that it is hard to know where to start! Lovely poetry, gorgeous photography, skillful book design and well done factual material combine to make books that are [...]

Lynn: Unfortunately the flu is spreading fast. Children are worried too and it is important to provide them with accurate information. This new book in the Gross Body Science series is about the body’s defenses and reactions to minute invaders. Crust and Spray (Lerner/Millbrook 2009) addresses this timely subject with humor and a high grossness [...]

Cindy and Lynn: Bookends thanks Nonfiction Monday for allowing us to host this week. On Mondays, many bloggers in the kidlitosphere review stellar nonfiction titles for children and teens. Bookmark the Nonfiction Monday website so you can find each Monday’s host, or volunteer to host yourself. Any bloggers who have a Nonfiction Monday post for [...]

Cindy: I think of this series of delightful books every August as my summer vacation winds to an end. In The Exiles (Margaret K. McElderry, 1991), the four Conroy sisters, Ruth, Naomi, Rachel, and Phoebe are excited when their parents come into an inheritance and they gleefully begin plotting how to spend their share. Their [...]

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 [...]

Cindy: Here’s a fun new series for elementary and younger middle school readers. In volume one, The Gecko & Sticky: Villain’s Lair (Knopf, 2009), Dave has a talking pet gecko named Sticky, who gets him involved with a dastardly, demented villain due to a magical Aztec wristband Sticky has stolen that Damien Black (said villain) [...]