Booklist Online: Book Reviews from the American Library Association

Lynn: Marcus Jordan, star quarterback of his previous team, is the new guy in town. To make things worse, the local football team was undefeated last year and no one sees any reason to change the starting line-up. Marcus makes the team but resigns himself to working hard and riding the bench for [...]

Lynn: “You gotta be kidding! You never heard of Sandy Koufax?” says the unseen fan narrating this strikingly different picture book. Readers drawn to the “lenticular” cover (lenses creating the illusion of movement) will be fascinated by the story inside. The enigmatic Sandy Koufax was, arguably, the greatest left-handed pitcher ever to play [...]

Lynn: We live on the Lake Michigan shore where winter starts in October, hangs on through April and where feet and feet of snow pile up. Our summers may be short but they are glorious! So I often find myself shopping for a new bathing suit, staring horrified at pale wobbly parts of my anatomy [...]

Cindy: March Madness is behind us and I’m at a loss. College basketball is my favorite fan sport, and even the excitement of the Masters golf tournament doesn’t completely satisfy the hole I feel in my sports world each April. Fortunately, there’s a tonic for us round ball fanatics in David Gill’s debut novel, Soul [...]

Cindy: Whenever Lynn makes me read a science fiction book I respond by forcing her to read something that tugs at her emotions. She would rather cavort with aliens than have to pull out a tissue while she reads. Oh well, baseball season is upon us and I’ve been begging her to read The Girl [...]

Cindy and Lynn: We first wrote about Swim the Fly (Candlewick, April 2009) back in November at our original blog site, and you can read the complete comments here. But this funny book has done laps in our brains since then and we wanted to reprise our enthusiasm for it now that its pub date [...]

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 [...]