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Her dad’s leaving after fifteen years with her mom makes Sophie Evans realize that with love there are no guarantees.  Now, somewhat of a cynic on the topic of love, Sophie has a habit of not giving guys a chance.  Furthermore, Sophie has hitched her dreams to her passion: to attend design school in New York.  Craving a place full of action and creative energy, Sophie yearns to escape the simple and uncluttered life of Rockside, Alabama.  Because she is so busy looking to the future that she forgets to enjoy the present, her good friend Micah Williams frequently has to remind Sophie to “playRead More →

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Those who have ever struggled with questions about family and tradition and what it means to respect the past while embracing the future will likely find themselves in the pages of We Walked the Sky by Lisa Fiedler.  This poignant and well-crafted novel engenders a range of emotions—from anger to exasperation and from sorrow to exhilaration!  It not only leads readers to their own popcorn-scented memories and emotional free-falls but reminds us of personal failures and triumphs, revealing that joy really can trump tragedy if we remember to absorb the losses and store them in our hearts, because when the sun comes up, the showRead More →

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All the Greys on Greene Street by Laura Tucker tells the colorful story of Olympia, a twelve-year-old artist who is named after a painting by French painter Manet.  Olympia’s (aka Ollie) dad Graham is an art restorer and her mom Doll is a sculptor.  The family lives in the Soho neighborhood in Manhattan, New York. Ollie’s best friends are Alex, an agile young man who Spiderman’s his way up a wall and who practices jumps like a stuntman in training; and Richard, a monster aficionado fascinated by science who is developing a scrapbook that he calls the Taxonomy.  Using her sketching talent, Ollie will occasionallyRead More →

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What does happily ever after really mean?  Perhaps fairy tales promise happy endings to distract people from how awful life can be.  Or perhaps they gift us with hope.  These are topics that Julie Buxbaum explores in her newest novel, “Hope and Other Punch Lines.”  She also considers the roles that humor and love play in our lives as we struggle with those moments that cleave our lives, and perhaps us, into befores and afters. Abbi Hope Goldstein calls herself a fern, nothing exotic or flashy, just a standard issue brunette with basic tastes and a natural inclination to blend in.  Her more audacious andRead More →

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Love and Other Curses by Michael Thomas Ford is a book filled with surprises, ironies, and truths—some dark, others lighter and more colorful.  Set in Midgeville, New York, Ford’s novel tells the story of sixteen-year-old Sam Weyward who is pretty sure he’s the only guy in his school “who can replace a faulty kick-down switch and also create the perfect smoky eye” (9).  Although readers might envy Sam’s 1965 Ford F100 cherry red stepside pickup that belonged to his great-grandfather, they will likely cringe at the family curse, loss, and death that Sam endures. According to the curse, if a Weyward falls in love beforeRead More →

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In 2008, Malcolm Gladwell published his New York Times bestseller, Outliers.  Based largely on the research of Anders Ericsson, Gladwell frequently refers to the 10,000-hour rule, citing it as the magic number that contributes to developing greatness.  Since the writing of that book, Gladwell has fallen under criticism for failing to adequately distinguish between the quantity of hours spent practicing, and the quality of that practice. The takeaway here is that practice may be important, but it’s not the whole story.  In authoring a personal story of success, a person needs to employ very specific, deliberate methods of practice. All of these details flooded back to me when I pickedRead More →

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Eleven-year-old Buddy Pennington is hexed with bad-luck blood so that everything he touches seems to end in disaster, it does.  (I found the author’s use of these parentheticals, along with his Huckleberry Finn-like river setting, a clever way of establishing local color). When Buddy accidentally sets his mother’s bakery on fire, he decides that he is tired of being a burden to his mother and would be better off with his father, so he leaves Collardsville, a boring but respectable town, and sets out for the swamplands in search of freedom and his pop, a true wild man. After five years absent from his father andRead More →

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Fans of Alice Hoffman’s Nightbird or Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events will likely enjoy Temre Beltz’s new tweens novel, The Tragical Tale of Birdie Bloom with its fractured fairy tale elements, its message that words matter, and its invitation to believe in magic. Set in Wanderly, a kingdom that lives “by the book,” Birdie Bloom is a Tragical, an orphan sentenced to live out her days at Foulweather’s Home for the Tragical, “a house full of bad endings” (16).  The children living here have been brainwashed by Mistress Octavia—who manages to put a damper on everything with her sinister plotting—to believe that they are nothing,Read More →

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After years of ecological abuse, Earth is being held together with solar paneling and wishful thinking.  As Earth undergoes a restoration project that includes filtering carbon out of the air, reforesting the Amazon, returning planetary temperatures to normal ranges, launching a filtration system for the oceans, and initiating breeding programs to reverse species extinctions, many humans will need a new home.  Because survival of the human species actually depends on a population reduction on Earth, an International Space Agency (ISA) ship leaves Earth to inhabit Tau Ceti e, a world similar to Earth. While those statements outline the basic plot arc of Bridget Tyler’s newRead More →