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: Months behind the rest of the book-reading world, I finally read The Fault in Our Stars (Dutton 2012). I did not preorder the book–like the thousands of other true nerdfighter fans–because I could not trust myself to have the new John Green book in my house and stay focused on my 2011 L.A. Times [...]

Cindy and Lynn: We are lucky enough to get boxes of advanced reader copies on an almost daily basis. They delight us–and sometimes overwhelm us as the to-be-read piles grow so high that it is difficult to see our spouses across the room. But this post on editor Sharyn November’s Facebook page this morning made [...]

Cindy: Grab your tissue box and some popcorn and settle in to read The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate (Harper 2012). I initially picked this up based on the cover art and out of a curiosity for what Animorphs author Applegate was up to these days. I was not prepared for what I [...]

Cindy: There are books that make me sad. Some that make me cry. And then there are books that unhinge me like A Monster Calls (Candlewick 2011). I read this on a plane last spring and was crying from the forward explaining the back story. Siobahn Dowd, one of my favorite authors, lost her life [...]

Lynn: 15-year-old Lina is a gifted artist from a loving family looking forward to an exciting future in Between Shades of Gray (Penguin 2011).  But it is 1941 in Lithuania and in the middle of the night, Soviet soldiers storm into her home, seize her and her family and force them onto trains packed with [...]

Cindy: Why don’t I immediately listen to Lynn when she really begs me to read a book? She wrote a solo blog for When the Whistle Blows (Philomel, 2009) last October when I hadn’t gotten to it. Everything about the premise spoke to me: stand-alone chapters that build into a cohesive novel, a complex father-son [...]