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In her nonfiction book Is It Real? The Loch Ness Monster, award-winning author Candace Fleming encourages readers to don their detective hats and gather their investigative tools in order to reach a verdict on one of the natural world’s greatest mysteries, whether the Loch Ness Monster is real or legend. To take readers on this sleuthing journey, Fleming invents a member of the Black Swan Scientific Investigation (BSSI) team who receives the job to unravel the mystery of what lurks in Scotland’s Loch Ness. Just as the scientific method typically has six steps, so too does the investigative method follow a systematic process: Review theRead More →

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Alice Oseman’s recent novel, I Was Born for This centers around the phenomenon of fandom. Jimmy Kaga-Ricci, Allister Bird (Lister), and Rowan Omondi are part of the boy band, The Ark. They are a musically talented group whose fame has sky-rocketed. From the outside looking in, the group has it all: fame, wealth, notoriety, and adoring fans. Fereshteh (Angel) Rahimi and Juliet Schwartz are two of those fans who met online. Initially attracted to one another because of their love for The Ark, they agree to meet up IRL and attend a concert together in London. All does not go as planned, and the pairRead More →

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Sabina Khan writes her novel Meet Me in Mumbai in two parts. Part I focuses on the life of Ayesha Hameed, a Muslim teen from India who is finishing high school in the United States so as to maximize her future potential. Here, she meets Suresh Khanna, a Hindu teen also from Mubai who is an exotic stranger but who totally “gets her.” As fellow Mubaiites, the pair share common rituals, foods, and similar backstories. Eventually, they fall in love, and after a glorious weekend together over the Thanksgiving holiday, Ayesha discovers she is pregnant. All of Ayesha’s lies and subterfuge have turned her intoRead More →

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Mikki Daughtry explores a philosophical question in her novel Time After Time. As she weaves two stories: that of Elizabeth Post and Patricia Murphy from 1925 and that of Libby Monroe and Tish O’Connell in the present, she asks: Is every life a cycle with no real end, where “time after time,” we come back reincarnated to try again, “to grow, evolve, get new chances . . . to do things better. To do things right” (246)? Daughtry takes readers on her wondering spree, which begins in the past but threads into the present. A Victorian style house on Mulberry Lane is the lynch pinRead More →

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The Education of Kia Greer by Alanna Bennett is a story of agency and identity. Although some readers will not be able to relate to Kia’s privilege, fame, and socioeconomic status, they will still be able to relate to the issues of power, pressure, desire for belonging, and search for identity that Kia endures. Bennett’s novel is also a love story, but under the influence of Bennett’s pen, we realize that love isn’t always enough. Although the people we encounter throughout life can transform us, as well as encourage and support us, ultimately, we have to dive headfirst into the life that’s meant for usRead More →

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Pablo Cartaya’s recent novel targeted to middle grade readers, A Hero’s Guide to Summer Vacation features a family dealing with grief and loss. Gonzalo Garcia lost his father when he was twelve, and after being known as the kid with the dead dad, he lashes out. Now, a year later, he prefers to be alone in his thoughts and drawings. He converts photographs of landscapes that he takes with his iPad into terrifying drawings of monsters, “the most frequent being a creature with menacing green eyes emerging from the fog. Those green eyes follow him everywhere he goes. Grief knows no hiding place” (3). WhenRead More →

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Twelve-year-old Valeria Salomón loves fútbol, aka soccer. Because of her talent, her teammates have nicknamed her Magic. The protagonist in The Beautiful Game by Yamile Saied Méndez, Magic plays for a boys’ team, the Overlords until her period arrives and she gets kicked off the team. Dedicated to the sport she loves and not ready to give it up, Val approaches Coach Blume and asks for a place on her all-girls’ team, the Amazons. Although Val missed try-outs and the team roster is full, Coach Blume decides to “accommodate for exceptional circumstances” (144). As Val tries to find a place in her new sisterhood, sheRead More →

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With her book All Alone with You, Amelia Diane Coombs has written an honest account of a seventeen-year-old girl who copes with anxiety and depression because of imbalanced brain chemicals. Carrying around an unshakable sense of dread, Eloise Deane distracts herself by focusing on her dream to attend University of Southern California (USC). She can’t wait to graduate from Evanston High School in Seattle and make her escape. However, when her guidance counsellor tells her that USC will be expecting not just academic expertise but “investment and involvement” in her community, Eloise wavers.  That means that in order for her dream to come true, sheRead More →

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Given the past two years, with a war waging between Russia and Ukraine, Swimming with Spies by Chrystyna Lucyk-Berger is an especially relevant novel for middle grade readers. This historical fiction text tells the story of the annexation of Crimea in 2014—a time when “Russkyi mir, the violence and blood and criminality and corruption,” threatened Ukrainian’s language, culture, and tradition. The stars of this story are Sofiya, Ilya, Cedric, Anna, and Petro, twelve-year-old classmates who have to decide whether they will work together as well as determine the degree to which nationalism plays a role in identity. Additional characters serve as significant support staff inRead More →