Reviews+

Project: Boy Next Door by L.K. Madigan. 2013. ARC provided for review. Available in ebook from ebook sellers. The Plot: Mel Pepper, sixteen, has worked up the courage to tell his dad, Dannie, two things: Mel has a part-time job at the local coffee place. Mel will be starting his junior year at the local [...]

A museum visit can be a great learning experience for students, but when the exhibit you want to take your students to see is halfway around the world, what's a teacher to do?

Li’l Jinx started out as a gag comic that ran in different Archie Comics publications; the one-page stories revolved around the rather strong-willed Jinx, her father, and a small coterie of friends. The comics were funny but not particularly deep. In writing the teen-age Jinx stories, J. Torres has kept the humor but given the [...]

More than a dozen New York City Council members, the presidents of New York’s three library systems, and several hundred librarians, library staff, supporters, advocates, and children from nearby schools rallied on the steps of city hall to protest $106 million in proposed funding cuts. Council members Jimmy Van Bramer and Vincent J. Gentile also pledged to introduce legislation that would create a baseline of stable funding for the city’s public library services.

So does this sound like something that could get the teen and tween comics fans you know into nonfiction? Sure it does.

Penny Warner's The Code Busters 2: The Haunted Lighthouse won the 2012 Agatha Award. Capstone is adding 60 more Presidential titles to the K–3 PebbleGo Biographies module in August 2013. ABDO’s will publish library editions of IDW’s "Jurassic Park" and "Star Trek" graphic novels this fall.

Writing about humor is a good way to suck all the fun out of it, so please—feel free to skip straight to the booklist.

What I was reviewing in May 2008: Supernatural Rubber Chicken: Fowl Language by D.L. Garfinkle, illustrated by Ethan Long. From my review: “The best thing about some books is the title says it all: Supernatural. Rubber. Chicken. I mean, c’mon, it doesn’t get better than that, does it? OK, twins Nate and Lisa, 10, are [...]

Last week, Angela talked about buzz books–those books that everyone seems to be talking about; this week, I want to talk about the other end of the spectrum–books that no one is talking about.  None of the three books reviewed below has been reviewed (yet) by a library journal, nor have I been able to [...]