Prolific author for both children and adults, Ridley Pearson has written another edge-of-your-seat, action/adventure book in his Kingdom Keepers series. Book V of the series, The Shell Game, takes the five Kingdom Keepers–Finn, Maybeck, Charlene, Willa, and Philby–on a Disney cruise infiltrated by Disney villains. Disney World is under seige and it’s up to the Kingdom Keepers to save the day. I’m not quite finished reading the book, but true to form, Ridley Pearson takes...
Maile Meloy’s (pronounced MY-lee like Miley Cyrus) middle-grade novel The Apothecary is a bit like Harry Potter meets the pharmacy meets the Cold War. Instead of wizards and spells you have apothecaries and magical elixirs, and instead of evil Voldemort you have governments bent on nuclear domination. The year is 1952. The place is London. Janie Scott has been forced to move from Los Angeles with her screenwriter parents who have been blacklisted. Soon she...
Wouldn’t it be awesome to discover you had magical powers? Like Harry Potter—one day living a completely normal, nothing special kind of life, and the next day—poof! Off to Hogwarts. That’s exactly what happens to eleven-year old Abby Carnelia in Abby Carnelia’s One and Only Magical Power, a middle-grade novel by David Pogue (Roaring Brook Press, 2010). It’s another regular old evening helping mom make chef salad for dinner. Abby happens to pull her...
What kid hasn’t taken a pile of junk (aka treasures), combined it with a heavy dose of imagination, and then spent untold hours making something wondrous? Violet Van Winkle does just that in Violet the Pilot. Written and illustrated by Steve Breen (Dial 2008), this picture book captures the imaginative spirit that all kids seem to possess. While other girls her age play with dolls and tea sets, Violet plays “with monkey wrenches and needle-nose pliers.” Violet also...
As a girl, I read every Nancy Drew mystery written. A few years later, I graduated to Agatha Christie. Recently I ran across the book Nancy Drew and Clue Crew #1: Sleepover Sleuths (Simon and Schuster, 2006). I was surprised to see the author as Carolyn Keene since the original Carolyn Keene (a pseudonym for Mildred Wert Benson) died in 2002. A google search led me to this Fantastic Fiction link by a UK bookstore that shows...
I’ll be honest. I got this book exclusively based on the teaser quotes on the back cover: “The new C.S. Lewis” and “Hotter than Potter.” Wow! I thought. The first book in The Doppleganger Chronicles, The First Escape (Tyndale Press, 2008) introduces us to the Dopple twins, Saskia and Sadie, who have been abandoned at Isambard Dunstan’s School for Wayward Children. Although their mother said she would return, the twins are now fourteen and she hasn’t...
Special thanks to my son, co-writer of this blog entry. Steampunk fiction is a sub-genre of sci-fi “set in an era or world where steam power is widely used” (wikipedia). Think 19th century Victorian England with a fantasy/sci-fi twist. Scott Westerfeld’s steampunk novel Leviathan (Simon & Schuster, 2009) is set during the beginning of World War I, and follows many of the historical events of World War I. A big part of what makes this novel...
Susan Beth Pfeffer’s the dead & the gone (Harcourt 2008) is a companion story to her previous YA novel Life as We Knew (Harcourt 2006). The novel takes the same cataclysmic disaster, but this time tells the story from the perspective of Alex Morales, a seventeen-year-old boy living in New York City. When a meteor hits the moon and pushes it closer to the Earth, the change in gravitational pull causes massive worldwide destruction. Tides...
When you’re a sister sandwiched between two sets of twins, you pretty much get ignored. It’s the twins everyone finds interesting, they’re the novelty–you’re just an extra. At least that’s how Miri feels in The Magic Half (Bloomsbury, 2008). This middle grade novel by Annie Barrows weaves a story of family and friendship with a unique time travel twist (and a surprise ending to boot). When Miri’s family moves to a new house, Miri has no one to...
Seems like everyone likes a treasure hunt. Add to that a web of historical artifacts, ancient symbols, and mythic beliefs, and you’ve got such stuff as The DaVinci Code and National Treasure are made of (to paraphrase Shakespeare). You’ve also got the stuff of the YA Novel Ring of Fire: Century Quartet #1by Pierdomenico Baccalario and translated by Leah D. Janeczko (Random House, 2006) has mystery, action, and seemingly endless clues that make you think everything...
