Joel Higgins is a high school junior who lost his best friend Andy to cancer. He struggles with loss but also guilt that he began to shirk off visiting Andy in his last days. While he is surrounded by parents… Read More ›
Month: November 2018
The Lying Woods
Owen Foster is from the small town of Lake Cane in Louisiana, where his father has done exceedingly well in the fracking business. Because of this, Owen attends a hoity-toity private school several hours away. It took him a little… Read More ›
The Guggenheim Mystery
This book is the second in a pair featuring Ted Spark, an almost-13-year-old on the autism spectrum. As in the preceding book, THE LONDON EYE MYSTERY, he joins with his sister Kat and cousin Salim in a suspenseful plot featuring… Read More ›
The Season of Styx Malone
Caleb Franklin and his older brother Bobby Gene are watching the last few weeks of summer disappear before school starts, spending time in what has in the past been idyllic pursuits in the surrounding woods and fields. Caleb, though, is… Read More ›
The Perfect Secret
This book is a sequel to one called THE PERFECT SCORE, which I had not read. It does make reference to events in the earlier book, so read that one first if you want a fuller experience (though it is… Read More ›
Watch You Burn
When seven-year-old Jenny Breland goes on her very first sleepover at a friend’s house, a catastrophic fire in the middle of the night destroys the house and everyone but her in it. Though the fire is declared of unknown origin,… Read More ›
Counting to Perfect
Julia is a 17-year-old who, wild about her boyfriend Carter, gets pregnant by him. Her family supports her in keeping the child, finishing high school, and planning to continue her education at a local community college. Carter proposes marriage but… Read More ›
What Not to Do if You Turn Invisible
Ethel is a 12-year-old girl living along the northeast coast of England with her grandmother. Her own mother died when she was three and her dad split to parts unknown. She has a great-grandmother nearby in a senior living community…. Read More ›
In Your Shoes
Four middle-schoolers navigate blossoming boy-girl romances, attending their first school dance, dealing with parents and the older generations, and managing anxieties over various issues. Miles sometimes overthinks problems and is an obsessive worrier. His Grandpop Billy, who is wheelchair-bound because… Read More ›
The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein
“To Be Weak Is Miserable” is the chapter heading that begins and totally summarizes this remarkable, fantastically-imagined literary-revisionist version of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s FRANKENSTEIN. Supposedly born to nobility but cast adrift when her mother dies and her father is imprisoned,… Read More ›
Before You Buy YA 