Well, it’s taken me four and a half months, but I’ve finally managed to get together another post on poetry. I’m very excited about all four of the books we have for you today. Mei-mei Berssengbrugge and Gregory Orr are the same age (born 1947) and are both seasoned hands, with many poetry collections and [...]
Experimental Fiction
By on September 4, 2013
Last week I asked how explicit is too sexually explicit for teens. This week I want to ask a similar question about form rather than content: how experimental is too experimental? This question, like last week’s, was keyed to a book I was reading, Book III, edited by Joshua S. Raab, and published by theNewerYork [...]
All in the Family
By on August 28, 2013
Today we look at three historical novels about very strange families. Taking things chronologically, first up is Sarah Dunant’s Blood & Beauty, about the very real, and very twisted Borgias of Renaissance Italy. Wikipedia lists among their crimes “adultery, simony, theft, bribery, and murder (especially by arsenic poisoning).” I quite like that parenthetical at the [...]
The Missing File
By on August 23, 2013
I’ve been meaning to post about D.A. Mishani’s The Missing File for several months now, but hadn’t quite figured out what to say. At first, I was looking around for another book to pair it with, in particular another mystery in translation because except for Sweden we don’t seem to get many mysteries from other [...]
Explicit Content
By on August 19, 2013
When is a book too sexually explicit to recommend to teens? That’s a question that comes up fairly frequently for our reviewers, and frankly, it’s one that I don’t know the answer to. For the most part it seems to be based on just our gut feelings–something like Justice Potter Stewart’s famous statement that “I [...]
Galatea
By on August 14, 2013
Readers of this blog might be interested to know about a new short story by Madeline Miller called “Galatea.” Miller wrote one of our favorite books of last year, The Song of Achilles. With this story she returns to the world of Greek myth, this time to the story of Pygmalion, which many of us know [...]
Fighting for Their Lives
By on August 7, 2013
Earlier this year, on my personal blog, I talked about how I had been reading a lot about crime, and specifically about wrongful convictions and the Innocence Project. So when I saw the subtitle of Susannah Sheffer’s book, I assumed that there would be quite a bit about defense attorneys fighting to prove their clients’ [...]
Someday, Someday Maybe
By on August 5, 2013
I got into The Gilmore Girls a little late, and only because my wife was a fan. I see from imdb that the show ran from 2000 – 2007, and I met my wife in late 2003, so the most I could have seen is a little more than half of the show’s episodes (I [...]
Tudor Trilogies
By on August 1, 2013
It’s tough to tell, because some titles are duplicated, but the Library of Congress seems to list somewhere on the order of 200 novels under the subject headings “Great Britain–History–Henry VIII, 1509-1547–Fiction” and “Henry VIII, King of England, 1491-1547–Fiction.” Hey, we even reviewed one of them earlier this year. And those 200 titles don’t include [...]
Damaged Young Women
By on July 25, 2013
I’m very excited to introduce today’s novels, all three centered on emotionally damaged young women, and two of which are debuts that earn starred reviews from us. I read the two debuts–Panopticon and Lotería–in short succession, about a month ago, and I’m hard pressed to say which I’m more excited about–both introduce readers to ferocious new talents [...]
Weekly Reviews: The Power of Words
By on July 17, 2013
Why do some words have more power than others? Today we look at two very different ways of looking at that crucial question. The first, Melissa Mohr’s Holy Shit, is an earnest, well-researched history of the most powerful words in the English language: curse words. Some people (for example, me) have tried to claim that [...]
Weekly Reviews: Alex Winners Redux
By on July 15, 2013
And speaking of Alex Award winners, today we have two more reviews of novels by previous winners. Neil Gaiman is one of those magical writers who seems to be able to write for any age level, with a Newbery Award under his belt, popular graphic novels for teens and adults, and two Alex Award winning [...]
Linguistics and Teens
By on July 10, 2013
In just two weeks, Manchester, UK will be hosting the 11th annual International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL), an international competition for high school students to show off their skills in linguistic puzzles. The puzzles require no knowledge of specific languages, and sometimes use invented languages. Instead, the teens use logic and their general linguistic knowledge. Here’s [...]
Alex Winners: Where Are They Now?
By on July 8, 2013
As I sat at home last weekend, not going to ALA and the Alex Awards Program, I started thinking about how many books by former Alex Award winners we’ve looked at this year. In my head, it seemed like a lot, but I thought I should actually crunch the numbers. So, here they are, for [...]
Based on a True Story
By on July 1, 2013
Before I began writing this post, I always believed that the famous retort to the question of why one would climb Mount Everest–”Because it’s there”–had been spoken by Edmund Hillary, the first Westerner to ascend to the peak. But in fact, they were the words of George Mallory, the first of three real life figures [...]
Nonfiction Graphic Novels – A Continuing Discussion
By on June 14, 2013
Back in January, we had a conversation (in reference to Derf Backderf’s Alex Award-winning My Friend Dahmer) about what makes a graphic novel “nonfiction” and the rigidity of categories like “fiction” and “nonfiction.” A couple of new comments have been added to that thread, so please head over to the above link to read the whole chain, but [...]
Weekly Reviews: Mid-year Graphic Novels
By on June 10, 2013
Today we have three very different graphic novels. Matt Kindt’s Red Handed, a gorgeous, full-color novel with an intricately structured plot has been the source of a bit of debate. Kimberly over on Stacked.com, while granting the novel’s interest, found its experimental structure ultimately frustrating. And when I gave the book to one of my [...]
More on the Law of Superheroes
By on June 7, 2013
For fans of James Daily and Ryan Davidson’s The Law of Superheroes (which we reviewed here), or for anyone who is interested in the idea but doesn’t want to invest in reading the whole book, Daily and Davidson have been guest-blogging on the very influential legal blog, The Volokh Conspiracy. They’ve been addressing such pressing [...]
Weekly Reviews: Strangerer Than Fiction
By on June 3, 2013
Last month, we looked at four stories too unbelievable not to be true, and I thought those would be the strangest stories I heard this year. That was before I heard about Marina Chapman, for whom being raised by monkeys is only the beginning of her troubles–and not even the most trying. She was also [...]
Weekly Reviews: Non-narrative Nonfiction
By on May 29, 2013
OK, I’ve talked about this before (and I’ll probably talk about it again!). Not all nonfiction is narrative, and narrative non-fiction isn’t the only kind of non-fiction that teens will read. When last we spoke, I offered some statistics to (possibly) back that claim up. Today, I’m here to offer something much more substantial: three [...]
