May 20, 2013

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Weekly Reviews: Literary Fiction

Weekly Reviews: Literary Fiction

Today’s reviewed novels are most likely to appeal to strong, mature teen readers looking for a challenge. Yet each includes a teen character, an authentic teen voice, that will keep the adventurous reading. The starred review belongs to A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. This novel is difficult to categorize. It begins [...]

Weekly Reviews: High Adrenaline

In The Reader’s Advisory Guide to Genre Fiction (ALA, 2009), Joyce Saricks divides genre fiction into four categories: Adrenaline Genres, Emotion Genres, Intellect Genres, and Landscape Genres (h/t to Jonathan Hunt for pointing me to this wonderful resource–and click through that link to read some fascinating commentary on the categories).  I find this categorization much more [...]

AB4T First Encounters: Reader’s Digest

AB4T First Encounters: Reader’s Digest

In our continuing series on first encounters with adult literature, here’s a guest post from reviewer Diane Colson: My mother’s collection of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books was my first library. By third or fourth grade (circa 1965,) I had pretty much read all of the chapter books in our tiny juvenile section at the public [...]

Weekly Reviews: Debut Novels

Weekly Reviews: Debut Novels

Today’s reviews are all notable debut novels by women. I spent part of my spring break tearing through Kimberly McCreight’s Reconstructing Amelia, and let me tell you — teens are going to eat this up. It came out just yesterday, so go order a couple copies now. There are several appeal elements here. First, the [...]

Adult Books 4 Teens | April 2013

Get read for summer reading with three mysteries by popular writers: Mary Jane Clark’s Footprints in the Sand: A Piper Donovan Mystery, Frances Brody’s A Medal for Murder: A Kate Shackleton Mystery, and Alan Bradley’s Speaking from Among the Bones: A Flavia de Luce Novel.

Book/Multimedia Review Stars List | April 2013

That Is Not a Good Idea! (Willems) ©2013 by Mo Willems.

This month’s star listings include That is Not a Good Idea by Mo Willems, among others.

Weekly Reviews: Graffiti

I fully admit that this may seem strange to many readers of this blog, but one of my favorite things to do after reading a historical novel is to read up about the facts of the history the novelist used.  Similarly, if a novel I’m reading revolves around some particular subject–anthropology, math, whatever–I tend to [...]

AB4T First Encounters: Stephen King

Over on my personal blog, my mom, co-blogger, and Adult Books 4 Teens reviewer, Sarah Flowers, has a post up about a workshop on YA servives she’s teaching.  As an icebreaker, she asked participants what books they were reading when they were 15.  My response is somewhat muddled, because I don’t remember my reading from that particular [...]

Contemplating Horror

Contemplating Horror

I’ve been thinking about horror fiction lately. What are the secrets of its appeal? Why are teens so drawn to it? How can we know which adult horror novels will appeal to teens and which won’t? One of the reasons I’ve been thinking about this lately is because I enjoyed The Demonologist by Andrew Pyper [...]

Weekly Reviews: Portraying the Famous (and Infamous)

Weekly Reviews: Portraying the Famous (and Infamous)

Today we review three novels with famous people as their subjects. The first is Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald. Teens continue to be fascinated by the Jazz Age and they read the novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald, not only in literature classes but also for fun. (So I learned in a recent discussion with [...]

Even More Weekly Reviews: Serial Killers

Even More Weekly Reviews: Serial Killers

We have a huge backlog of wonderful reviews right now, so this week we’re giving you even more weekly reviews.  The great film reviewer Jonathan Rosenbaum once commented that “it’s pretty safe to say that there are more serial killers in movies than there are in real life” and puzzled over why so many viewers [...]

Advanced Review: The Property

from Francisca Goldsmith, graphic novel guest blogger extraordinaire: Coding How We Speak Family Secrets Rutu Modan has proved to be an adept storyteller as well as creator of visually rich images of both characters and their settings. She’s been published to some acclaim in the US as the author and cartoonist of a collection of [...]

Weekly Reviews: Nonfiction

Weekly Reviews: Nonfiction

This is Sonia Sotomayor’s 8th week on the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction Best Seller list, up to #4 from #5 last week. (Sandra Day O’Connor’s book, Out of Order, debuts at #11.) I am particularly excited to write about My Beloved World this week because I recently had a chance to booktalk it to a [...]

Author Visit: Reyna Grande

AB4T reviewer Connie Williams has been an enthusiastic supporter of Reyna Grande’s The Distance Between Us ever since she reviewed it here on AB4T last year. Recently, Connie hosted the author at her high school for what was a transformative experience for many of the teens in her community. I thought it would be inspiring to [...]

Weekly Reviews: Sequels

Trilogies. How many of us shudder at the thought? How many of us miss those great standalone novels? A whole story arc in one book – imagine! On the other hand, many readers enjoy knowing that there is more to come. In a student bookgroup meeting last week, as we discussed what to read next, [...]

Making Contact With the Outside World

I don’t know about other librarians, but when it comes to book reviews, I find it easy to get bogged down in the world of the library journals and book blogs by fellow librarians.  So today I decided I wanted to take a look at what the rest of the world is saying about some [...]

Weekly Reviews: Postmodernism

Today we look at two examples of the postmodern novel. Postmodernism has gotten a bad rap–almost from the beginning–for being purposefully obscure, denying the existence of meaning, and encouraging moral relativism.  But, while I concede that many postmodern works of art can be infuriatingly vague, for me at least the best postmodern novels (like the [...]

Review: The House Girl

Sometimes a book resonates so strongly with its reviewer that the 250-work limit placed on an official review is simply too constricting. Thank you to AB4T reviewer Carla Riemer for her in-depth look at Tara Conklin’s debut novel, The House Girl. The House Girl is a story of deceptions and the people who benefit from [...]

The Morning News Tournament of Books

The Morning News Tournament of Books

Are you a fan of SLJ’s Battle of the Kids’ Books? Do you read adult books and wish there was such a contest for you? Look no further! March may find us still shivering & gloomy in the northeast, but it DOES bring The Morning News Tournament of Books. The TOB kicks off today — [...]

The National Book Critics Circle Award

Just a quick note of congratulations to Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain, which was announced as the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction on Thursday. This blog has been a huge supporter of Fountain’s novel, giving it a starred review and naming it one of the best Adult [...]