MORE 'REVIEWS' POSTS
The Mine-o-saur By Sudipta Bardhan-Quallen Illustrated by David Clark Putnam Juvenile (Penguin imprint) $16.99 ISBN: 978-0399246425 Ages 4-8 On shelves now Books with a message are the most frightening kind of picture book on the planet. They can go real bad, real preachy, and real ugly real fast. Self-published authors love `em. So too do […]
Louisiana’s Song By Kerry Madden Viking (Penguin imprint) $16.99 ISBN: 978-0-670-06153-2 Ages 9-12 On shelves now Here’s my general rule regarding sequels: If you can pick it up and read it through without knowing one teeny tiny detail about the previous book (and I am including the author’s name in that statement) and still feel […]
Four Legs Bad, Two Legs Good! By D.B. Johnson Houghton Mifflin $16.00 ISBN: 978-0618809097 Ages 4-8 On shelves now I remember the first time I saw this book. It was at an American Libraries Association meeting and I was strolling leisurely through the Houghton Mifflin booth on the convention floor. The order in which I […]
Nacky Patcher and the Curse of the Dry Land Boats By Jeffrey Kluger Illustrations by David Elliot Philomel (Penguin imprint) $18.99 ISBN: 978-0399246043 Ages: ???? On shelves now As a children’s librarian who reviews a book or two on the side, I’ve seen my fair share of new titles. And the one thing I almost […]
Phooey! By Marc Rosenthal Joanna Cotler Books (Harper Collins imprint) $16.99 ISBN: 978-0060752484 Ages 4-8 On shelves now This will probably mark the fourth time today that I have attempted to sit down and write my review of this book. Attempt #1 was foiled when I looked at the art and was reminded of old […]
The Black Book of Secrets By F.E. Higgins Feiwel and Friends $14.95 ISBN: 978-0312368449 Ages 9-12 On shelves now The power of the first page. A lot of authors don’t respect it these days. They’ll scribble down the first two mildly exciting sentences that pop into their brains, usually blowing the central conceit of their […]
Little Rooster’s Diamond Button By Margaret Read MacDonald Illustrated by Will Terry Albert Whitman and Company $16.95 ISBN: 978-0807546444 Ages 4-8 On shelves now A story, before we begin. All children’s librarians working for the New York Public Library system go through an intensive training process. Part of that training involves storytelling. This means that […]
America Dreaming: How Youth Changed America in the ’60s By Laban Carrick Hill Little Brown & Company $19.99 ISBN: 978-0316009041 Ages 12 and up On shelves now Essentially what we have here is a book written about the children of the 50s and 60s for the children of the 00s, reviewed by a child of […]
I wasn’t going to miss it. When I lived in Portland, Oregon I used to spend my days huddled in the Powell’s bookstore, desperately paging through each of the His Dark Materials books as I munched on cookies in the coffee shop. It was there that I read The Golden Compass in its entirety, and […]
(CONTINUED FROM PART ONE) So it works on the whole? It does and it doesn’t. Certainly the movie is a faithful adaptation. As faithful as any author could hope for, really. Only a little was cut. Lyra finding the room full of daemons… that was in the book, right? Not the film. And as far […]