May 13
2007
Like many other YA novelists, Laurie Halse Anderson writes books about troubled teenagers (although their troubles vary widely on the crisis-o-meter). We usually avoid novels like these, but Ande...
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May 13
2007
Gregor and the Code of Claw, the final installment in Suzanne Collins’s Underland Chronicles, is the most unsatisfying book I have read this year. It’s not a bad book—Collins’s characters...
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May 1
2007
Catherine Jinks’s novel Evil Genius opens with a list of the classes offered at the Axis Institute. Students can sign up for “Applied Physics”, “Cultural Appreciation”, or “Pragmatic Philosophy”. There’s even a wholesome-sounding offering entitled “Coping Skills”. It looks a lot like any other class list... or it would, if someone hadn’t crossed out the official class names and written in more accurate descriptions...
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Apr 30
2007
Catherine Jinks is a Very Big Deal in Australia, and Harcourt is clearly hoping that her book Evil Genius (the focus of one of our Bok of the Week reviews) will be equally successful here in the S...
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Jan 7
2007
Ysabeau S. Wilce is a Chicago-based YA fantasy author (although she calls herself a “fabulist and scribbler”, which... okay). Her first book, succinctly titled Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal A...
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Jan 7
2007
Ysabeau S. Wilce’s Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Adventures of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), A House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog is...
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Nov 13
2006
Best known as the author of The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame actually spent most of his career working in a bank. He started out as a lowly minion at the Bank of England in 1879, he retir...
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Nov 13
2006
Not much information is available on Mr. Renier, as his website is still under construction. All I know is that A) he has a dog named “Beluga”, and B) that he’s the author of the awesome graphic...
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Oct 26
2006
At first glance, Stephanie Lessing’s novel Miss Understanding looks pretty generic. A fish-out-of-water comedy set in a fashion magazine? Shades of Ugly Betty. A neurotic, obsessive heroine with a bevy of psychosomatic illnesses? Shades of Bridget Jones. A female-empowering adult-coming-of-age story featuring lots of Mean Girls-style bad behavior and a romantically mismatched couple...
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Sep 17
2006
Marina Lewycka is a tutor at Sheffield Hallam University, the child of Ukrainian immigrants, the author of six books on “aspects of elder care” and the novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukraini...
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Sep 17
2006
The original cover of Marina Lewycka’s novel A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian was extremely tasteful. The background is a lovely grayish blue, and there’s a yellow border running down the edge, dec...
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Sep 7
2006
Jonathan Stroud is the author of the excellent "Bartimaeus Trilogy", a fantasy/alternate history series starring a terrorist, a fairly unpleasant boy, and a very sympathetic demon. In Stroud’s un...
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Sep 7
2006
Pamela Dean’s 1991 fantasy novel Tam Lin has recently been reprinted by Firebrand Books. Tam Lin is a creepy retelling of an even creepier old ballad, set in a college in the 1970s, and starring ...
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Sep 7
2006
We held off on reviewing author K.P. Bath until we were sure that there was going to be a sequel to his first book, The Secret of Castle Cant. It’s not that we didn’t love The Secret of Castle Ca...
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Sep 4
2006
Sheila Williams is the Ohio-based author of one of our Book of the Week picks, the enjoyably melodramatic friendship saga Girls Most Likely. Ms. Williams apparently spent many years as paralegal ...
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Sep 4
2006
I confess—I didn’t think that I’d like Sheila Williams’s novel Girls Most Likely, being both turned off by the cover art and actively repelled by the purple prose on the back cover, which made the story sound like something by Danielle Steel. Happily, Girls Most Likely turned out to be far superior to its packaging...
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Aug 18
2006
There is some debate as to who wrote what in the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. Wilder was an intelligent, well-spoken woman who wrote a newspaper column, but her education was erratic. Her daughte...
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Aug 18
2006
Catherine Gilbert Murdock’s Dairy Queen is one of the most thoughtful YA books I’ve read in years. It’s the story of D. J. Swenk, a teenage girl living on her family’s near-failing Wisconsin dair...
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Aug 13
2006
Teen literature is full of dorky main characters. Meg Cabot’s entire career is based on stories about low-on-the-social-totem-pole heroines falling in love with hot-yet-geeky Stargate fans. Loui...
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May 25
2006
I try to avoid romance novels that feature heroines under the age of twenty-six*. There are a few books about people in their early twenties that are okay, but I prefer to read about people that have their heads on at least semi-straight before they make any major decisions about their life partners...
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Apr 11
2006
Suzanne Collins is the author of the critically acclaimed Underland Chronicles. Collins’s series is an Alice-in-Wonderland-on-crack story about an eleven year old boy named Gregor who tumbles thr...
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Apr 11
2006
Pretty much the only things that went through my head while reading Suzanne Collins’s novel Gregor the Overlander were My God, this book is awesome! and There’s a sequel, right?. It’s been a long...
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Mar 21
2006
No Logo author Naomi Wolf recently published an essay in The New York Times bemoaning the current state of YA literature for girls, specifically mentioning the popular...
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Mar 11
2006
As everyone who spent any time around me in the fall of 2005 knows, I couldn't stand the most recent film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It played up the dramatic aspects of the story and played down everything else. I thought it was too short to do the story justice. The casting was all wrong. (I’m not saying Mr. Darcy wasn’t very pretty, because he totally was, but prettiness isn’t everything.) The whole thing felt like a commercial for a longer, better movie...
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Feb 18
2006
Peter Abrahams has written several intelligent, entertaining mystery/suspense novels for adults, and two phenomenal mysteries for teens, 2005’s Down the Rabbit Hole: An Echo Falls Mystery and its ...
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Feb 18
2006
Michael Buckley is the author of the Sisters Grimm books, a highly enjoyable series that has some striking similarities to Bill Willingham’s Fables series. So if you’re not old enough for Willing...
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Jan 28
2006
Obert Skye is the author of the very entertaining Harry Potter-esque YA fantasy Leven Thumps and the Gateway to Foo. I wouldn't recommend going to great lengths to hunt this book down, but if you...
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Dec 26
2005
Kiyohiko Azuma is the author of two highly entertaining manga titles: Azumanga Daioh and Yotsuba&!. Azuma’s books are funny and innocent, with most of the humor in the stories coming from his tal...
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Nov 26
2005
I have to admit it--I really wanted to hate Christopher Paolini's Eragon. C’mon, who can blame me? Paolini is an eighteen-year-old kid from Nowheresville, Montana who produced a best-selling chi...
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Oct 25
2005
So-Hee Park is the author of the excellent Korean manhwa Goong. Goong is an alternate universe story about an ordinary high school girl forced to marry into the Korean royal family. (In Park’s w...
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