I am writing this on the Sunday evening of a weekend during which the movie “Insidious: Chapter 2″ made $41 million dollars at the box office. Tomorrow evening “Sleepy Hollow” premieres on Fox and CBS airs the finale of the first season of “Under the Dome”. “The Walking Dead” is on the cover of this [...]
Poetry Roundup
By on September 11, 2013
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 [...]
Speculative Fiction
By on September 9, 2013
Baba Yaga is a witch of Russian folklore, and Toby Barlow bewitches with his new novel — our starred reviewof the day. His first, Sharp Teeth, was a 2009 Alex Award winner, a story of werewolves in L.A. told entirely in verse. Babayaga is (mostly) straight prose, and offers quite a combination of genres–spy thriller, [...]
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 [...]
Tattoos, a Funeral Home, and a Cat Named Bob
By on September 3, 2013
Three new memoirs make the most of teen-friendly subject matter. First, a celebrity memoir by Don Ed Hardy, the man who helped bring tattoo art into the mainstream. Hardy knew from the age of 10, when he was using colored pencils to give his friends “tattoos,” what he wanted to do with his life. He [...]
Book/Multimedia Review Stars | September 2013
By on August 30, 2013 Leave a Comment
About words and writing.
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 [...]
Hot title alert: The Bone Season
By on August 26, 2013
The Bone Season is the first in a projected seven-book fantasy series by 21-year-old Samanatha Shannon. Last week it was announced as the first TODAY book club selection. There is a great deal of buzz around this book, and I believe teens will be asking for it. Shannon wrote the book while a student at Oxford. I [...]
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 [...]
On the Come Up and Giveaway
By on August 21, 2013
Although the review of On the Come Up: A Novel Based on a True Story by Hannah Weyer was posted on AB4T several weeks ago, I am reposting today in conjunction with the publication of my interview with the author, which is available in the SLJ Teen Newsletter (and briefly on the SLJ homepage) today. Weyer [...]
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 [...]
Weekly Reviews: Literary Mysteries
By on August 12, 2013
Gavin Extence’s debut novel earns today’s starred review. This is a unique book, which will be especially popular with the many fans of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and with Kurt Vonnegut readers. Every year, when I booktalk to my students, they bring up Haddon’s novel. It is still a widespread [...]
Brewster
By on August 8, 2013
I have been anticipating sharing Brewster since May when, at BookExpo, it was one of my strongest recommendations on the Librarian Shout ‘n Share panel. Finally, publication week is here. It was the winter after the summer of love, and it went on for a long time. Brewster is told by an adult, Jon Mosher, who [...]
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 [...]
Weekly Reviews: Monster Thrillers
By on July 30, 2013
Benjamin Percy’s Red Moon is a political thriller as much as werewolf horror novel, in the same way that World War Z is about military strategy. Red Moon reflects the current state of our world, in particular terrorism, persecuted minorities, and the importance of energy sources in today’s political decision-making. In fact, Justin Cronin (author of The [...]
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: Murder in London
By on July 22, 2013
Two excellent murder mysteries set in 19th century London begin our week. Veteran action/thriller writer David Morrell mixes fact and fiction in his latest, Murder as a Fine Art. It has been so successful that he plans to write at least one more book featuring Thomas De Quincey and his daughter Emily. Morrell was awarded the International Thriller Writers’ [...]
