Things That Are Normal: Sixth grader, Miranda, lives on the Upper West Side with her single parent mom, a paralegal. She and Mom's boyfriend, Richard, AKA Mr. Perfect, are helping Mom practice for her appearance in three weeks (on April 27, 1979) on the TV game show "The $20,000 Pyramid,"... Read More

Sixteen-year-old twins Lia and Alice Milthorpe are horrorstruck to find their father dead by unknown causes in their house's Dark Room, the room in which their deceased mother used to live. But his death pales in comparison to the dark events that follow Lia the next few days: her sister... Read More

In 1840, with more of the children falling ill in their isolated little village of Clifton, Indiana, Jessie's ma takes her into the woods to look for herbs. Ma has been acting secretive and strange, but what she now tells Jessie is incomprehensible. It seems that Clifton isn't an ordinary... Read More

Meet Yorkshire terrier detective Samuel Blackthorne as seen through the eyes of his chronicler, friend, and fellow canine, Edward R. Smithfield, a retired veterinarian. In their first thrilling case together, they come to the assistance of elegant greyhound, Molly Kirkpatrick, who seeks their help to find out why her brother,... Read More

When Ted and his older sister, Kat, get a free ticket from a stranger to ride the London Eye, the huge observation wheel, they give it to their visiting thirteen-year-old cousin, Salim. They track his capsule as the wheel makes it orbit, but when it lands and the passengers disembark,... Read More

Wow! WHAT a heart-thumping adventure I had the day I read this spectacular collection of twelve adventures of Gilgamesh. Based on seventh century B.C. Assyrian clay tablets that recorded the legend of Gilgamesh, king of Uruk in Mesopotamia (now Iraq) sometime between 3200 B.C. and 2700 B.C, this epic is... Read More

Nick's biology teacher, Mrs. Bunny Starch, nearly six feet tall, with died blonde hair, bright violet eye shadow, and polyester pantsuits, is the most feared teacher at the Truman School in Naples, Florida. Nick's friend, Marta, still has nightmares since she threw up in class and Mrs. Starch assigned her... Read More

It's 1939, and in London, it seems as if war with Hitler is imminent. Dr. James Hamilton, a dedicated, low-paid London doctor and a widower, is reluctantly sending away his only child, eleven-year-old Tally, on scholarship to Delderton, a boarding school in the south of England, to escape the expected... Read More

Fiver has a vision that the warren he and the other rabbits live in will soon be covered in blood. A small group of rabbits, Bigwig, Blackberry, Holly, Pipkin, and more, led by Fiver’s brother, Hazel, heed Fiver’s warnings and they set out to find a new warren. The group... Read More

Aboard the gargantuan airship, Aurora, riding high above the Pacificus, heading from Sydney to Lionsgate City, 15-year-old cabin boy, Matt Cruse, helps to rescue an unconscious man in a hot air balloon that is listing in the night sky. The sixty-year-old pilot, Benjamin Malloy, who had been attempting to float... Read More

Young pickpocket Ludlow Fitch manages to escape from the dank and squalid basement where the notorious tooth surgeon of Old Goat's Alley, Barton Gumbroot, plans to extract the boy's teeth for money, assisted by Ludlow’s own drunken and larcenous parents. There's no place he can hide in the City, so... Read More

Coming soon, reviews on books we love, such as:The Adventures of Samuel Blackthorne, by Scott EmersonNorth, by Donna Jo Napoli  Read More

Now you don't have to wait until you're older to appreciate the dark, hip, wiseguy first person detective style of Dashiell Hammett in The Maltese Falcon and Raymond Chandler in The Big Sleep. Move over Bogart, now there's Matt Stevens on the job, a worthy successor... 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