Anyone who knows me well knows that I’m a sucker for any book that’ll give me the feels. My debut is, admittedly, a tearjerker, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that I was drawn to another middle grade tearjerker, Melanie Conklin‘s debut Counting Thyme. Eleven-year-old Thyme Owens has just left her beloved home (and grandmother, and… Read more »
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ARC Review: Hour of the Bees by Lindsay Eagar
Sometimes you read a book, and you’re surprised by how much it mirrors your life in unexpected ways. In Lindsay Eagar’s Hour of the Bees, I felt an immediate kinship with twelve-year-old Carolina (pronounced “Caro-leeen-a”), who goes by Carol. Instead of spending the summer before junior high with her friends in Albuquerque, she’s stuck in… Read more »
ARC Review: Fenway and Hattie
As a pet owner (or parent to a fur child, if you will), there’s a small amount of time each day that I spend pondering my cat. I wonder what goes on in her little head — what’s that internal narrative as I pet her or put down her food dish. When she suddenly decides… Read more »
ARC Review: The Remarkable Journey of Charlie Price
The further I get from working on The Distance To Home, the easier I find it to read books dealing with grief. For a while, as I was still writing and revising, I didn’t want the way other people dealt with the subject to cloud my vision for my story. Anyway. I’m glad to be past that… Read more »
Some news . . .
It’s been a busy summer — trying to read ALL of the books, while also writing some of the books, and doing all of the summer things (beach, Walden Pond, drinking all of the Del’s lemonade I can get my hands on) — but I’m happy to share some news about The Distance To Home. One:… Read more »
ARC Review: The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary
How much can change in one school year? For the eighteen kids in Ms. Hill’s fifth-grade class, the answer is: a lot. Knowing that their school, Emerson Elementary, is slated to be torn down at the end of the year to make way for a supermarket, the class is instructed to write poems for a… Read more »
Random acts of booknerdiness
About a month ago, I heard about #mgbookbomb through fellow Sweet 16er Brooks Benjamin and marked my calendar for July 11th. Now, I’m all for giving out books. If you know me well, you will know that I am often trying to foist free books upon you. (Yes, we have too many and seem to get more and… Read more »
Interview with Jennifer Chambliss Bertman, author of Book Scavenger
Via the Sweet Sixteens, I had the chance to interview 2015 debut middle grade author, Jennifer Chambliss Bertman. I also count myself lucky, because as part of this interview, I got my greedy little hands on an advanced reader’s copy of Book Scavenger. It’s out in the wild now, and man, are readers in for a treat…. Read more »
Adventures in Author-land: The Dreaded Headshot
Family and friends close to me know that in the midst of the many, many (I kid) things I do well, there’s one area where I have a significant deficit. Picture-taking. It’s been that way for as long as I can recall. As a kid, I had my photogenic moments… But they were few… Read more »
Friday Reads: The War That Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley
This is a bit of a cheat, since in truth I read The War That Saved My Life while I was on vacation in France last week. But wifi was hard to come by, so the review is coming a bit belatedly. I’ve been hearing such great buzz about this book, and I have to say,… Read more »
