The story behind the story is one that really grabs kids: a fifteen year old boy from Montana, born in 1983 and home-schooled all his life, loves to read books about magic and dragons, spurred by reading Jeremy Thatcher, Dragon Hatcher by Bruce Coville. He starts to write… Read More

Larklight is a rambling, ramshackle house that spins on its own remote orbit out in the deeps beyond the moon. It was constructed in the early 1700s, which, if you recall your history, was just a few years after Sir Isaac Newton’s discoveries made it possible for people to travel… Read More

Fifth and sixth graders who think they like scary books are going to clamor for this one, the first in a series of five, once they see the dark and foreboding moonlit cover, but let me warn you—it’s really scary. Readers will not sleep at night if they’re foolhardy enough… Read More

"When my brother Fish turned thirteen, we moved to the deepest part of inland, because of the hurricane and, of course, the fact that he’d caused it." With that first sentence washing you over like a storm, meet Mibs Beaumont, from a most unordinary family, each member having an exceptional… Read More

Writing an essay about how the Smekday holiday (formerly called Christmas) has changed in the year since the aliens left, eighth grader Gratuity Tucci, known as Tip, offers her story of her singular experiences since the Boov invasion in 2013. Though the aliens have just announced that all Americans must… Read More

When Breaking Dawn, the fourth and final book in Stephenie Meyer’s vampire saga, came out in the summer of 2008, teens went wild, going to midnight costume parties at bookstores in a frenzy second only to the Harry Potter scenes of the past decade. Only one week after… Read More

From its first sentence—"There is nothing lonelier than a cat who has been loved, at least for a while, and then abandoned on the side of the road."—you are pulled into the aura of this extraordinary book, a melding of two seemingly unrelated stories. First, there is the abandoned calico… Read More

On the inside, there are the Socs (Socials). They’ve got money, nuclear families, and exclusionary, angry attitudes toward those not like them—kids like Ponyboy. With dead parents and a home with his two older brothers, he’s on the outside of the Socs’ world—a Greaser. So is his best friend Johnny.It… Read More

Ninth grader, Anthony "Antsy" Bonano, whom you may already know from his first venture, The Schwa Was Here, provides a teaser on the front flap about his latest escapade: "It was a dumb idea, but one of those dumb ideas that accidentally turns out to be brilliant-which, I’ve… Read More

Terra Rose Cooper can’t seem to escape. A permanent port-wine stain birthmarks her face, which causes stares from any and everyone she meets. Friends and family are no help. "Why not fix your face?" her own boyfriend, Eric, asks her. Her map-maker father discourages her from any surgery, but also… Read More

If you still idolize Wild West men like Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy, Wyatt Earp, and Kit Carson, author Gary Paulsen will soon set you straight. In his Foreword, he smokes out all of these icons as racist, thieving, shiftless cowards, chronic alcoholics, and outright thugs. In their place he… Read More

Bryce Loski describes how he has scrambled, ever since second grade when his family moved to the neighborhood, to avoid all contact with his pesty, oddball neighbor, Julianna Baker; while Juli recalls the past six years of being smitten with and pursuing blue-eyed Bryce, hoping he would kiss her. I… Read More

“I’m the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It’s awful. If I’m on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I’m going, I’m liable to say I’m going to the opera. It’s terrible.” Holden Caulfield takes the reader from… Read More

“I was born with water on the brain.” So begins the digressive and loquacious narrative and cartoon drawings of 14-year-old Arnold Spirit, better known as Junior. He lays out his limitations straight off: too much cerebral spinal fluid at birth has left him nearsighted in one eye and farsighted in… Read More

In 1935, when Moose Flanagan’s father gets a job as electrician and guard at Alcatraz prison, the family moves to the twelve-acre rock island in the middle of San Francisco Bay, joining the other families and kids who live there, not to mention the prisoners, including gangster Al Capone. Moose… Read More

"Looking back, I would say everything in my life changed the summer I turned thirteen and my dad turned into Elvis." Isn’t that a killer first sentence? Josh Greenwood is already what he calls a “shared kid,” having spent the last eight years shuttling between his mother’s place in Boston… Read More

Baltimore school librarian, storyteller, and playwright Laura Amy Schlitz has a passion for history. When her fifth grade students were studying the Middle Ages, she set to writing 17 short monologues to stage so each child could have a decent part to memorize. It evolved into this powerful 2008 Newbery… Read More

Reading this biographical novel, narrated by Anne Sullivan and based on her many letters, I was reminded once again why I, like so many others, have always been captivated by the story of Anne and Helen Keller, the little girl whose life she transformed. It starts in 1887 with 20-year-old… Read More

Harper Lee’s only novel, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, is one of the most taught pieces of literature in the U.S., and as such, students will read it in school and see the Academy Award winning film with the memorable Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch. It’s… Read More

"Of all the kids in the seventh grade at Camillo Junior High School, there was one kid that Mrs. Baker hated with heat whiter than the sun. Me." So starts the sometimes slapstick, sometimes serious account by Holling Hoodhood about the Wednesday afternoons he is forced to spend with his… Read More

"Polio is a highly contagious disease. In 1949, there were 42,033 cases reported in the United States. One of those was a twelve-year-old girl in Austin, Minnesota: Peg Schulze. Me."Chapter I of children book author Peg Kehret’s astute memoir is titled The Diagnosis. It started on a Friday in early… Read More

When reading nonfiction, it’s grand to discover something new. Tell me something I don’t know! Or tell me something I do know, but present it in such a way as to make it feel brand new. In 2009, we celebrated the fortieth anniversary of a most memorable summer. Here on… Read More

What the author describes as a scrapbook is a handsome and mesmerizing collection of biographical and often humorous anecdotes, "bits and pieces" arranged within a broader subject, starting with "Boyhood Memories," and covering all aspects of Franklin’s life and career, from scientist to statesman. Copiously illustrated with portraits, cartoons, paintings,… Read More

Peter Lawson, the paleontologist who found and dug up Sue, the biggest Tyrannosaurus rex ever, reveals his down-in-the-dirt trade secrets about finding, excavating, preparing, and studying dinosaur fossils. For dinomaniacs, this is a gorgeously laid out hands-on manual, packed with color photos of bones and kids working with them in… Read More

This innovative and enticing biography introduces 20th century painter Wayne Thiebaud, famed for painting ordinary objects like cakes, slices of pie, ice cream cones, rows of shoes, and pinball machines. Color runs riot in this compact little book that reminds you of a box of candy. Each smooth-textured page and… Read More

This handsome and weighty compendium is not the usual linear biography for children, starting with the subject’s birth and moving on inexorably through childhood, career, reasons for fame, and then death. Instead, it is a meaty medley of stories, anecdotes, photographs and black and white reproductions that digs into the… Read More

Meet arachnologist Sam Marshall as he explores the floor of the rainforest of French Guiana in South America, studying the habits and habitat of the Goliath birdeater tarantula, the world’s largest spider. Marshall was an indifferent student at Bard College until he found his passion, researching the habits and behavior… Read More

Award-winning children’s book author and illustrator Peter Sís grew up in Prague, Czechoslovakia after World War II, and came to the U.S. in the 1970s. This remarkable autobiographical picture book, told in the third person, is about the making of an artist in a place where creativity was discouraged, free… Read More

We’ve come to expect quality nonfiction from Newbery Medal winner Russell Freedman, but he manages to exceed our expectations with his eloquent and gripping account of the brutal winter George Washington and his bedraggled army spent at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Students who claim history is dull will pay full attention… Read More

When you delve into David Macaulay’s extraordinary and encyclopedic ode to engineering, The New Way Things Work (1998), you are awed by the way he zeroes in on an object and explains, in words and pictures, how it is put together. Macaulay’s full-page pen and ink and watercolor illustrations makes… Read More

As handsome and riveting as any nonfiction book I’ve ever read, this imposing and stately sports book is unforgettable and spectacular. Enough adjectives for you? Until you hold it in your hands, you can’t imagine the impact it will have, starting with the stoic gaze of Negro League superstar Josh… Read More

First there was the uproariously kinetic book, Technically It’s Not My Fault: Concrete Poems narrated by Robert, who, in 28 concrete or shape poems, spends a fair amount of time complaining about his annoying big sister, Jessie. Now it’s Jessie’s turn to snipe. She’s in ninth grade, so… Read More

Because he’s just flunked sixth-grade English, Stanford Wong, who thinks of himself as "the only stupid Chinese kid in America," won’t be able to go to basketball camp this summer. Instead, he’ll be taking a summer school English class with Mr. Glick, AKA Teacher Torturer. If he fails it, he’ll… Read More

As handsome and riveting as any nonfiction book I’ve ever read, this imposing and stately sports book is unforgettable and spectacular. Enough adjectives for you? Until you hold it in your hands, you can’t imagine the impact it will have, starting with the stoic gaze of Negro League superstar Josh… Read More

"Looking back, I would say everything in my life changed the summer I turned thirteen and my dad turned into Elvis." Isn’t that a killer first sentence? Josh Greenwood is already what he calls a “shared kid,” having spent the last eight years shuttling between his mother’s place in Boston… Read More

Ninth grader, Anthony "Antsy" Bonano, whom you may already know from his first venture, The Schwa Was Here, provides a teaser on the front flap about his latest escapade: "It was a dumb idea, but one of those dumb ideas that accidentally turns out to be brilliant-which, I’ve… Read More

There’s a ripple in the walls of the world. When nine-year-old Tiffany Aching is warned away from a sharp-toothed green-headed monster by two tiny red-headed blue-skinned men in a boat, it seems that she may be the new witch of the lowlands, for the Nac Mac Feegle, the most feared… Read More

Twelve-year-old orphan Lyra Belacqua lives at Oxford University’s Jordan College, where she has managed to avoid being educated by the scholars who look after her and runs wild. In this parallel world to ours, everyone has a daemon attached to them always-a sort of alter ego in animal form. Lyra’s… Read More

Ethan Feld hates baseball. The whole league calls him "Dog Boy," because he’s always wanting a walk-he’s the worst player in the history of baseball. The day the Roosters face the Angels, the only people holding Ethan back from quitting for good are his father and the team’s star, Jennifer… Read More

When you first pick up this very brown and battered-looking wordless picture book graphic novel with the sepia-toned photograph on the cover, of a man in a suit and 1950s-style fedora, carrying an old suitcase, it looks like an old photo album you found up in your grandparents’ attic. Then… Read More

Since Anand’s father left his family in India to go work in Dubai, he’s stopped sending home checks, leaving 12-year- old Anand, his ill younger sister, Meera, and their mother destitute. Anand now works in the Bowbajar Market as a dishwasher at a tea stall, scrubbing the pots and glasses… Read More

Coming soon, reviews on books we love, such as:The Phantom Tollbooth, by Norton Juster, illustrated by Read More

13-year-old Gilda Joyce has been interested in surveillance ever since reading Harriet the Spy back in elementary school. One of her plans for her boring summer vacation is to continue spying on Plaid Pants, AKA Hector Flack, who works at the convenience store and whom Gilda thinks could be a… Read More

For stealing a famous basketball player’s sneakers, overweight, unlucky, but innocent Stanley Yelnats, is sentenced to hot, desolate Camp Green Lake in Texas, a detention center for bad boys. Every day each of the teen inmates must dig a hole five feet around and five feet deep in the bone… Read More

“ARE YOU A GIFTED CHILD LOOKING FOR SPECIAL OPPORTUNITIES?” That newspaper ad brings together four resourceful and multitalented children, all of whom are orphans or alone in the world, to become secret agents for Mr. Benedict, a genius who has uncovered a nefarious international mind-control plot. There’s Reynie Muldoon, whose… Read More

Mild-mannered watchmaker Hermux Tantamoq is a quiet guy for a mouse. He likes nothing better than to fix clocks and watches, and then go home for a nice pot of soup and the company of his pet ladybug, Terfle. Bliss for Hermux is his ten a.m. break for coffee and… Read More

“Before I tell you about the biggest fish in the sea and how it tried to kill me and then ended up saving my life, first you got to know about the leaky boat, ‘cause it all began right there.” Now that is one great first sentence and it pulls… Read More