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: The aspiring teen writer in me wishes this book had been available 35 years ago. Barring the development of a time machine, I will have to settle for sharing it with kindred spirits in my book club, and I am eager to do so. The Curiosities (Carolrhoda LAB 2012) is the joint effort of [...]

Cindy: What a deliciously creepy collection of ghost stories. On the Day I Died: Stories from the Grave (Random House/Schwartz & Wade 2012) begins with a variation of the popular Vanishing Hitchhiker story that sets up the structure for the collection. Mike picks up a girl, she disappears before he gets her home, but leaves [...]

Lynn: Cindy deliberated with her YA Lit Jury last weekend for the L.A. Times Book Prize while I gleefully immersed myself in books I couldn’t take time for last year plus an outrageously tempting stack of shiny new 2012 arcs.  So we’re batting a little clean-up here on Bookends before leaping into posts on the [...]

Lynn: Everyone has a theory about Harris Burdick, but Lemony Snickett, never known for his lack of opinions, asserts in his introduction to The Chronicles of Harris Burdick (Houghton 2011) “that these are the actual stories written by Harris Burdick, given by Burdick to the various authors who are pretending to write them.”  Well, I’m always [...]

Cindy: Ok, so I don’t have a whole room in my house dedicated to my Star Wars collection like a certain friend’s husband does, but I have a lot of geek traits that prompted me to seek out Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd (Little, Brown, 2009). YA authors Holly Black and Cecil Castellucci spawned [...]

Cindy: Can an author really scare me in 30 seconds or less? The answer is yes when it is Margaret Atwood or Jack Gantos or M. T. Anderson or Art Slade. Yikes! Each story, poem, or graphic story in this slim volume can be read in less than half a minute. Lynn brought Half-Minute Horrors [...]

Cindy: It’s Banned Books Week. What better time to review a Chris Crutcher book! Angry Managment (Greenwillow, 2009) is his latest and the fabulous title and cover is sure to draw in teen readers. This one features three novellas that incorporate characters from previous Crutcher novels and short stories. The three stories are wrapped in [...]

Cindy: How do arch rivals survive together? Very carefully. Lynn is a dyed in the (black and gold) wool Purdue Boilermaker while I am an Indiana Hoosier fanatic. Big Ten Basketball season tests our friendship every winter. When we worked in the same library we used to threaten to put a line down the middle [...]

Cindy: Lynn has been waiting for me to read this for forever. I have no excuse except that it is a thin book and kept getting lost in my stacks and piles of reading despite my eagerness to read it. Fortunately it is just publishing this month, so I’m not really too far behind. Tales [...]