I’d already heard a lot of buzz in my Missouri SCBWI group before I read The Gollywhopper Games (HarperCollins 2008). After all, author Jody Feldman is a regular at Missouri SCBWI events. Well, the buzz was justified. The Gollywhopper Games was one middle-grade book that my 3rd grader couldn’t put down. She started reading one morning before school and by bedtime she’d read seventy-nine pages (and that’s with school and piano lessons thrown in...
The Garden of Eve by K.L. Going (Houghton Mifflin, 2007) takes the images of the Biblical Garden of Eden and reworks them into a poignant novel about life, death and love. When ten-year-old Evie’s mother dies of cancer, her father decides to buy an old apple orchard far away in Beaumont, New York. Evie longs to stay in her childhood home, a home full of memories of her mother. These very memories break her father’s heart again...
Caddie Woodlawn, Hermione Granger, Violet Beauregarde, Anne of Green Gables–you gotta love the girls that are smart and spunky, clever and courageous. Author Kelly Easton gives us another plucky heroine in her middle-grade novel The Outlandish Adventures of Liberty Aimes (Random House, 2009). Liberty Aimes, nicknamed Libby, lived in a decrepit old house on 33 Gooch Street. It was so run down, “If it could walk, it would limp. If it could talk, it would stutter. If...
I regularly run across news stories about the decline of the newspaper industry, but I was shocked when I saw the newspaper stand at my local gas station. The papers are so puny now, printed on shrunken, skinny paper, a telltale sign of the Internet takeover of media. Sue Corbett’s The Last Newspaper Boy in America (Dutton, 2009) explores a similar theme. Protagonist Wil has been dying for his twelth birthday because he’ll finally be old enough to inherit the family...
