Everlost by Neal Shusterman: Book Review
Nick and Allie were traveling in opposite directions on a windy mountain road. After a terrible accident, they find themselves traveling down a tunnel toward a light. But they bump into each other again and don’t get where they’re going. Instead, they end up in Everlost, a ghostly realm that co-exists with our world and […]
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi: Book Review
4 Stars. I just read Art Spiegelman’s Maus about a month ago and loved it. I thought I would go ahead and give this other highly-acclaimed graphic novel/memoir a try. I enjoyed it, if that’s the correct word, but it didn’t affect me quite the same way Maus did. I’m not too sure why. Maybe it’s because I know more about WWII than […]
Fluke by Christopher Moore: Book Review
Nate Quinn has spent his entire professional career following humpback whales around the ocean, trying to find out exactly why the males sing. He’s currently in Hawaii, where the whales spend the winter, still researching. His world is rocked on the day that he is taking pictures of one singer and sees BITE ME clearly […]
Moloka’i by Alan Brennert: Book Review
Seven-year-old Rachel Kalama is living in Honolulu in 1893. Her life is punctuated with a child’s hopes and dreams and drama. Her father is a sailor, and she loves it when he comes home on leave, mostly because she’s excited to see him, but also because she loves to hear his stories about the wider […]
Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey: Book Review
This started out a little slow for me. It dragged along for about the first 150 pages. Then the action started and I couldn’t put it down. To oversimplify the plot, this is the story of Phèdre, a masochist who sleeps with her patrons not only for money, but also for state secrets. So, there were […]
The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly: Book Review
“My name is Calpurnia Virginia Tate, but back then everybody called me Callie Vee. That summer, I was eleven years old and the only girl out of seven children. Can you imagine a worse situation?” “That summer” is the summer of 1899 and it is a scorcher. Amid the heat and the drought though, Callie […]
Rising Tide by John M. Barry: Book Review
Telling the story of an epic flood of the Mississippi River in 1927, this book explores the early history of flood control efforts and a rivalry that made flood controls at the time practically a joke, the politics involved in decisions for handling the flood itself, the politics of disaster relief, and the impact of […]
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson: Book Review
Jesse Aarons is the class misfit. Something of a dreamer, and a talented artist, he just doesn’t fit in with his practical, competitive classmates. But Leslie Burke moves next door at the beginning of their fifth-grade year, and the two eventually become best friends. Leslie shows him that a different life is possible. I’ll just […]
Without Reservations by Alice Steinbach: Book Review
Journalist Alice Steinbach decided that she was going to take a break from the life she was living. She was happy, but she felt that she needed some time to get acquainted with herself now that her two sons were grown. So she planned an open-ended months-long trip to Europe. She had only the vaguest […]
The Battle of the Labyrinth by Rick Riordan: Book Review
Annabeth has finally gotten her own quest. She must lead a group through the Labyrinth to find Daedalus, its creator, and ask for help defending the camp from Luke and Kronos’s minions. She’s only supposed to ask two people to help her, but she insists that Percy, Grover, and Tyson all come along. Of course […]
Daughter of the Blood by Anne Bishop: Book Review
In a society that seems to be loosely based on the habits of black widow spiders, the strong females have eliminated all but the weakest males and females, leaving only a few strong males to strengthen their bloodlines. This has been going on for centuries. But the coming of a female with power that has […]