Out of this world. No, really! Debut author Monica Tesler, who just so happens to be a friend of mine and a wonderful earthling, takes us beyond the Earth’s atmosphere in the adventure-filled first book of a new series. Twelve-year-old Jasper is the first from his family to be a cadet in the Earth Force…. Read more »
middle grade
ARC Review: My Seventh Grade Life in Tights
Seventh grader Dillon is a bench rider on the football team. But he’s okay with that. The thing is, the football team is his dad’s dream for him. It’s not his. What Dillon really wants, though, is to be a dancer. A real one. Right now, he’s a dancer . . . if doing his… Read more »
ARC Review: The Last Boy at St. Edith’s
Girls, girls, girls. No matter where he turns, Jeremy Miner is surrounded by them. At home, it’s mom and his two sisters. And then all day at school it’s . . . well, everyone. St. Edith’s Academy, a former all-girls school, made an effort to go co-ed, but there’s been a lot of attrition among… Read more »
ARC Review: Counting Thyme
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 »
Middle grade research, or How I overcame my fear of heights/amusement park rides
The great thing about writing middle grade fiction is that you can draw from a deep well of memory. Your own, your friends’, your children’s (okay, I don’t have kids yet, but say, my nephew’s life experiences), etc. Even when I’m writing from the point of view of characters that I don’t have a ton… Read more »
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 »
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 »
Friday Reads: Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms by Katherine Rundell
When Katherine Rundell’s second novel won the Boston Globe Horn Book award, I immediately requested it from my local library. I think of myself as someone who reads a fair amount of the best-reviewed middle grade and young adult novels published every year, and yet somehow, I had totally missed this one. The moment it came into… Read more »
