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A Fuse #8 Production
by Betsy Bird
The Classroom Bookshelf
by Denise Davila
January 24, 2014 by Mark Flowers
Probably the most successful program I have ever held at my library was a “minute mystery” program–where I simply posted a short mystery and invited teens to solve it. Today, I’m have a review of a collection of short stories by French novelist Paul Halter. You may remember that a little more than a month […]
January 23, 2014 by Angela Carstensen
You’ve probably already heard about Mary Miller‘s debut — it’s received some very nice starred reviews (LJ, PW, Booklist) and is popping up in more popular magazines like Vogue, Redbook and Elle. The Last Days of California is the first person narration of a naive 15-year-old girl on a road trip with her family. We […]
January 21, 2014 by Mark Flowers
MARK: Last year at this time, I tempted the fates by titling our pre-Alex Awards post “Extremely Scientific Predictions of the Alex Awards”, and the fates promptly put me in my place, as Angela and I each managed to predict only a single title correctly. I’ve also already gone on record as stating that “this […]
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January 20, 2014 by Mark Flowers
Two young women with recently deceased fathers find themselves immersed in relics of the past: these are the striking parallels between the two novels reviewed below. In Ellen Marie Wiseman’s What She Left Behind, the teenaged heroine is sucked into the past by the journals of another young woman who had been committed to an […]
January 15, 2014 by Mark Flowers
Today we look at two memoirs of harrowing childhoods. Today’s teens are too young to remember the media onslaught brought on by Elizabeth Smart’s kidnapping and rescue. But they will be by turns riveted and revolted by her account of her abduction, which was made especially horrific to her as she was forced to act […]
January 14, 2014 by Angela Carstensen
Ishmael Beah took bestseller, best of the year, and school reading lists by storm in 2007 with his memoir of being swept up in Sierra Leone’s civil war as a child soldier. It almost seems anti-climactic to mention that A Long Way Gone won an Alex Award. Seven years later it is still a popular suggestion for […]
January 10, 2014 by Angela Carstensen
The Costa Book Award winners were announced earlier this week. We were thrilled when a review of the winner for First Novel arrived from Diane Colson on the very same day! The Costa Book Awards “honour some of the most outstanding books of the year written by authors based in the UK and Ireland.” The […]
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