The Plot: Two girls, a horse, and the open road. The horse is old and it’s owners want to put it out down. Hattie, sixteen, wants to give Speed, a work horse all his life, a chance to “be a horse,” to live his last days as a free horse on the open range. Delores, eighteen, is happy for an excuse to leave home. Together, they hope to find –… Read More
The Plot: October, 1950. Kit has left Providence, Rhode Island for New York City. Kit, 17, is lucky — she’s found a job dancing in a Broadway musical. It’s not a great musical, it’s not a great job, it’s not great pay: she’s paying ten dollars a week to sleep on a couch in the Bronx. But it’s the start of her dream to be an actress, and it’s away from… Read More
The Plot: Amy Martin, 17, is frozen and placed on a spaceship with her parents and others. Three hundred years from now, the settlers will be unfrozen to settle a planet. Amy’s parents are important to the mission. Amy is going along because she is 17 and they are her parents.
Elder, 16, was born and raised to become the leader of the ship Godspeed. He’s been raised a… Read More
I want to post something in detail about Arizona, but instead I’ll quote Salon as a quick introduction: “As part of the state-mandated termination of its ethnic studies program, the Tucson Unified School District released an initial list of books to be banned from its schools today. According to district spokeperson Cara Rene, the books “will be cleared from all classrooms, boxed up and sent to the Textbook Depository for storage.”” (Links as they were in the Salon article, Who’s Afraid of The Tempest.)
The Plot: At the beginning of Lupita’s freshman year at high school, her mother is diagnosed with cancer. Mami has always been the one who held their large family together. Lupita, as the oldest, has always been responsible. Now even more falls on her shoulders. Like the mesquite, Lupita will survive and grow stronger.
The Good: Under the Mesquite is told by Lupita, using free verse. The reader is pulled into Lupita’s world… Read More
It’s About: Cooking! Flinn, who studied at Le Cordon Bleu, sees a woman in the foodstore stocking up on preprocessed and frozen meals and convinces her to try a few easy, simple substitutes… Read More
In my review of Kenneth Oppel’s This Dark Endeavor, I mentioned how I have never read Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. I wanted to make this fun, for me and you, so here’s what is happening. Instead of a traditional review, I’m going to be sharing my chapter by chapter reactions over several posts. Those posts will be on Friday, because, well, Frankenstein Friday. Get it? I’ll be starting the posts February 3.
The Plot: A robbery gone bad means Digger, sixteen, must flee her home city of Gerse. One lie leads to another, and the next thing she knows, Digger is going by the name Celyn and is a lady’s maid to a young, shy noblewoman, Merista Nemair, living in luxury, deep in the country. It should be a sweet setup: clothes, food, a soft bed, people who don’t keep an eye on the coins and jewlery and other small things… Read More
The Plot: Rory Deveaux is spending her senior year at Wexford, a boarding school in London. Meeting new people, figuring out a new school system, being in London instead of a small town in Louisiana, should be amazing. And it is — except for the murders. Murders that are mimicking the infamous 1888 Jack the Ripper murders. Rory and her fellow students try to… Read More
Those of you who haven’t read Rocco’s article yet, go, read, I’ll be here with my cup of coffee waiting.
Right. So that happened.
Part of me wants to talk about the article Rocco links to. Part of me doesn’t, because I think words like “insipid,” (as in the article) and then tweets like “Walter Dean Myers is not good for our children” and that Myers “pander[s] to black children
Looking for a place to talk about young adult books? Pull up a chair, have a cup of tea, and let's chat. I am a New Jersey librarian. My opinions do not reflect those of my employer, SLJ, YALSA, or anyone else. On Twitter I'm @LizB; my email is lizzy.burns.
