How to use this Page

Welcome to another edition of In Tandem, the read-and-review blog series where both A.F. and I give on-the-spot commentary as we read and blog a book together. (You can feel free to guess which of us is the yellow owl and which of us is purple... Read the rest of this post

By Becca... WHEN WE COLLIDED  By Emery Lord Hardcover: 352 Pages Publisher: Bloomsbury (April 5, 2016) Language: English Age Range: 14 and Up Goodreads | Amazon Meet Vivi and Jonah: A girl and a boy whose love has the power save or destroy them.Vivi and Jonah couldn't be more different. Vivi craves anything joyful or beautiful that life can offer. Jonah has been burdened by responsibility

Blog Tour: Becca TELL ME THREE THINGS By Julie Buxbaum Hardcover: 336 pages Publisher: Delcorte Press (April 5, 2016) Age Range: 12 and up Grade Level: 7 and up Goodreads | Amazon Everything about Jessie is wrong. At least, that’s what it feels like during her first week of junior year at her new ultra-intimidating prep school in Los Angeles. Just when she’s thinking about

Sometimes, you’ll meet a girl who bursts into a room and draws all eyes to her. Someone so charming and vivid that you can’t help but love and envy her–and perhaps wonder at how she burns so brightly, because there are times when it almost hurts to be in her orbit. Vivi Alexander shows up in a sleepy beach town one summer, and turns Jonah’s life upside down. In the stoic routine and worry of his life, Vivi is dazzlingly beautiful in her vintage dresses and bright lipstick, as well as kind to his little sister and wise beyond her years. Their attraction is immediate, and they’re soon sneaking kisses when people aren’t looking, he’s making her caprese sandwiches and leaving them outside her door, and she’s pulling him into a whirlwind of joyous outings and scandalous liasons. Their romance is sweet and funny and endearing, especially because they’re drawn... Read more »

The post When We Collided: review appeared first on The Midnight Garden.

I think this is a pretty effective cover.Synopsis: Need, which I randomly picked up as part of a recent library haul, is a suspenseful thriller with a topical premise—the insidious power of social media and the questionable ease of online... Read the rest of this post

Welcome to another session of Turning Pages! Synopsis: Liberty's junior year just cracked wide open and catapulted her out on the ground. Her mother - a placard-carrying, species-saving, liberal-agenda-advancing, chronic protestor - is currently... Read the rest of this post

Welcome to another session of Turning Pages! Synopsis: Privileged and perfect is how life could be described for fifteen-year-old Kambili and her brother, Jaja. In Nigeria, where so many deal with fuel shortages, power outages, strikes at hospitals... Read the rest of this post

The First Time She Drowned By Kerry Kletter Hardcover: 352 pages  Published by: Philomel Books (March 15, 2016) Language: English Goodreads | Amazon Cassie O’Malley has been trying to keep her head above water—literally and metaphorically—since birth. It’s been two and a half years since Cassie’s mother dumped her in a mental institution against her will, and now, at eighteen, Cassie

Welcome to another session of Turning Pages! Synopsis: Snarky, brittle, awkward, British-Greek teen Melon Fouraki is fifteen and unmoored after her mother is hit by a bus. Despite them going away to Crete every summer, somehow Melon never was... Read the rest of this post

Welcome to another session of Turning Pages! Trapped.Every fingernail scrapesOn shut doors,Ripping off.At least the bloodcan escape. - from the ARCSynopsis: Fifteen-year-old Hope is her mother's last chance for vicariously getting out of the... Read the rest of this post

Welcome to another session of Turning Pages! Synopsis: This book was my Valentine's gift to myself. upon a time in Hans Christian Andersonland, an evil troll creates a mirror which reflects things as they are not. Facing beauty, it regardless shows... Read the rest of this post

Review by Sara... WHAT YOU ALWAYS WANTED By Kristin Rae Series: If Only #8 Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: Bloomsbury (March 29, 2016)  Language: English Goodreads | Amazon If Only . . . he was the boy she's been dreaming of. The If Only line continues in this fun high school theater-themed romance!Drama girl Maddie Brooks has always had high standards for guys. But she has

Welcome to another session of Turning Pages!Synopsis: Twelve-year-old Lloyd Saunders' grandfather had gone to fish off of Pedro Bank, and hadn't returned. He'd called the family from his cell phone on Tuesday, and should have been back on Thursday,... Read the rest of this post

Facing illness, sexuality, family issues, and life-and-death situations, the following teen protagonists maturely and deeply explore the world around them while also looking within themselves.

Until the hospital called, asking her mother to pick up elderly Mary, seventeen-year-old Katie — star of Jenny Downham’s Unbecoming — didn’t even know she had a grandmother. Katie, her brother, and their mum bring home Mary, who is suffering from dementia. As Katie learns more about her grandmother’s and mother’s pasts, she struggles with her own secret: she is pretty certain she is gay. Told from a limited third-person perspective, the book offers implicit commentary on the historical and contemporary constraints on young women’s lives and their freedom to love freely. (Scholastic/Fickling, 14 years and up)

In Kate McGovern’s Rules for 50/50 Chances, Rose’s mom has advanced Huntington’s disease and Caleb’s mom and little sisters have sickle cell disease. The teens meet at the annual Walk for Rare Genes fundraiser, and their immediate attraction soon develops into something more meaningful. Rose spends much of the novel locked in indecision about whether or not to be tested for the Huntington’s gene, and what the results will mean for her future plans: college, a dance career, a relationship with Caleb. Rose’s realistically confused and complex anger and grief about her mother’s decline adds poignancy to the teen’s dilemma. (Farrar, 14 years and up)

In Instructions for the End of the World by Jamie Kain, Nicole’s father is a survivalist who believes wilderness skills are the surest protection from a dangerous world. When Dad decides to leave the grid altogether, moving the family to a ramshackle forest homestead, Mom balks and runs off. Dad goes after her, leaving Nicole and her younger sister, Izzy, behind. Nicole worries about Izzy’s involvement with teens living at a nearby commune; at the same time a brooding resident there named Wolf stirs up her own rebellious yearnings. Most chapters feature multiple narrators (Nicole, Izzy, Wolf, and others), but Nicole’s voice provides a steady through line to follow her genuine and compelling struggle. (St. Martin’s Griffin, 14 years and up)

Sensory details (especially scents) evoke the physical and emotional landscape — 1970s Birch Park, Alaska — in Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock’s The Smell of Other People’s Houses. Four distinct first-person narrative voices breathe life into the adolescent protagonists. Escaping her alcoholic father’s abuse, Dora finds a welcome haven in Dumpling’s family’s fish camp. A few stolen nights with handsome Ray Stevens leaves sixteen-year-old Ruth pregnant and alone. The characters’ engaging individual stories, thematically linked by loss and yearning, are enriched by the tales’ intersections, and are grounded in emotional honesty. (Random/Lamb, 14 years and up)

From the February 2016 issue of Notes from the Horn Book.

The post Not your average problem novel appeared first on The Horn Book.

By Becca... FIRSTS By Laurie Elizabeth Flynn Hardcover: 320 pages Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin (January 5, 2016) Language: English Goodreads | Amazon  Seventeen-year-old Mercedes Ayres has an open-door policy when it comes to her bedroom, but only if the guy fulfills a specific criteria: he has to be a virgin. Mercedes lets the boys get their awkward, fumbling first times over

Welcome to another session of Turning Pages!Synopsis: One day she's leaping in the waves near the family's Paradise-by-the-Sea beach home, the fittest of the fit, dreaming of finishing Little Women and having a new best friend; the next moment her... Read the rest of this post

The cover even LOOKS like a Libba Bray book...Summary: England in the Edwardian era…Besides bringing to mind a whole slew of fabulous Edward Gorey drawings, it was a time in which society was still stumbling out from under the long shadow of Queen... Read the rest of this post

Review by Krista... INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE END OF THE WORLD By Jamie Kain Hardcover: 224 pages Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin (December 8, 2015) Language: English Goodreads | Amazon  He prepared their family for every natural disaster known to man—except for the one that struck.When Nicole Reed’s father forces her family to move to a remote area of the Sierra Foothills, one without any modern

Review by Sara... RULES FOR 50/50 CHANCES By Kate McGovern Hardcover: 352 pages Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (November 24, 2015) Language: English Goodreads | Amazon  A heartrending but ultimately uplifting debut novel about learning to accept life's uncertainties; a perfect fit for the current trend in contemporary realistic novels that confront issues about life, death, and

Review by Jackie  THE WAY I USED TO BE By Amber Smith Hardcover: 384 pages Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books (March 22, 2016) Language: English Goodreads | Amazon In the tradition of Speak, this extraordinary debut novel shares the unforgettable story of a young woman as she struggles to find strength in the aftermath of an assault.Eden was always good at being good. Starting high

Welcome to another session of Turning Pages!Synopsis: Sixteen-year-old Victoria Mahler is the reluctant daughter of a has-been star, one Micky Wayne, who once fronted the band rising indie rock band, Dusty Moon. That was a long time ago, now, as the... Read the rest of this post

Review by Sara... SYMPTOMS OF BEING HUMAN By Jeff Garvin Hardcover: 352 pages Publisher: Balzer + Bray (February 2, 2016) Language: English Goodreads | Amazon The first thing you’re going to want to know about me is: Am I a boy, or am I a girl?Riley Cavanaugh is many things: Punk rock. Snarky. Rebellious. And gender fluid. Some days Riley identifies as a boy, and others as a girl. The thing

We read to get to know other characters, but at the same time we read to get to know ourselves. Some of my students really want to get inside and feel what the characters in books are going through. Enchanted Air and Fish in a Tree appealed to readers who like heartfelt, emotional stories.

Enchanted Air
Two Cultures, Two Wings: A Memoir
by Margarita Engle
Atheneum / Simon & Schuster, 2015
Google Books preview
Your local library
Amazon
ages 10-14

Fish in a Tree
by Lynda Mullaly Hunt
Nancy Paulsen / Penguin, 2015
Google Books preview
Your local library
Amazon
ages 9-12

Aly Nickerson has changed schools nearly every year: seven schools in the past seven years. With each new teacher, she acts out and dodges questions to cover up the fact that she cannot read. Letters and words dance on the page. Aly's confusion and anger touched my students, but it was really her journey that made them recommend this to friends with earnest enthusiasm.

"I thought that the characters were strong because I felt what they felt. The author could evoke their feelings." -- Rebecca

student responses (click to enlarge)

Students talked right away about how Lynda Mullaly Hunt helped them understand the range of Aly's complex emotions, feeling empathy but never pity. Aly's friends were all interesting, distinct characters. While adults might wonder why Aly's previous teachers never noticed her dyslexia, my students just loved her relationship with Mr. Daniels.

"I like how the book showed that just because you are different doesn't mean you can't shine." -- Norah

This is a book that will continue to touch students for years to come.

The review copies were kindly sent by the publishers, Simon & Schuster and Penguin, but we have also purchased additional copies for our school library. If you make a purchase using the Amazon links on this site, a small portion goes to Great Kid Books. Thank you for your support.

©2016 Mary Ann Scheuer, Great Kid Books

Review by Krista CUT BOTH WAYS by Carrie Mesrobian Hardcover: 352 pages Publisher: HarperCollins (September 1, 2015) Language: English Goodreads | Amazon Will Caynes never has been good with girls. At seventeen, he’s still waiting for his first kiss. He’s certainly not expecting it to happen in a drunken make-out session with his best friend, Angus. But it does and now Will’s conflicted—he