Age: Preschol-Kindergarten
Toy: stuffed animal

Age: Kindergarten-2nd grade
Animal: pet dog

A dog's perspective of the world around him seeing only legs from under the dinner table. Very cute!

Age: K-2nd
Milestone: Learning how to ride a bike

I don't care how many medals he's won, this is a definite dud of Raschka. The text is more suitable for a 3-year-old so this would would not be good for an older child taking the training wheels off, even though this event is covered in half the book. The watercolor paintings that have little detail are not suitable for illustrating a sequential passage of time. For example, Raschka tries to fit nine pictures onto a spread and I cannot tell a single difference between any of them. If it was an attempt to show movement, then he failed in this arena, too.

I love Ring, Yo! and A Ball for Daisy but I did not feel any affection for this recent addition to Raschka's collection.

Age: Preschool-1st grade
Animal: Rat bandit

He is a sinister one, that Highway Rat. I really like the rhyme scheme and the repetition of "the highway-the highway-the highway" would be great to read aloud in a grandiose voice. The ending was a little weird because the animals of the highway were able to trick off the Rat. He ended up leaving and finding another village where he apparently sought employment in a sweets shop. I think it was because he could eat the crumbs from the floor but it seemed like a rather lack-luster ending for the bossy Rat.

Age: Preschool-1st grade
Grandma

A great book for Halloween time and Granny time, this little girl certainly has a different grandma. When she tries to encourage Granny to fit in, the girl notices how bored and sad granny becomes and how granny does not remind her anymore of, well, granny. A very attractive cover will keep this off the shelves. I enjoyed that the plot was succinct yet effective.

Age: 2 years - 2nd grade
Animal: pet dog

Sullivan's use of one word truly captures the one-track mind of a dog dedicated to his favorite play toy: ball. The pudgy mutt-looking dog is endearing and the plot is (remarkably) exciting. Great for exhibiting emotions when reading and talking through a nearly wordless picture book.

Age: High School
Time period: 1950s New Orleans

Very character driven, I loved how Sepetys used an intriguing mystery to hook readers into the story while focusing most of her attention on her characters. I would have given the book 5 stars had the ending not been so abrupt and slightly confusing. I also was guessing at an ending that was far from the real ending.

Spoiler

I thought that Patrick had something to do with the death of Hearne, and he was drugging his father because his father saw him do something. Also, Willie's death seemed unnecessary. Can someone explain to me why she needed to die?

All in all, a well written book that kept me interested until the very end. In her review, a friend of mine appreciated that the book "isn't too much about a mysterious death, it isn't too much about young love, and it isn't too much about a girl trying to shed her mother's legacy; it is a little bit of everything mixed together in a perfect way." Agreed!

P.S. I loved the part where Josie receives the letter from Smith College and Sepetys separated the sentences onto three separate pages. Sepetys must be like me and skips "padding" sentences and paragraphs in books in order to find the answer.

Age: Preschool-1st grade
Toys: Digger truck
Siblings: Older sister & new baby

I loved the story of this book. It begins by paralleling the arrival of a new baby with the arrival of a new toy, Digger, for Phoebe, the older sister. "Mama and the baby were always busy" seen watering plants. "So were Phoebe and Digger" seen eating said plants. With a look of exhaustion and a case of the cooped-ups, Mama decides to bring everyone to the park. While Phoebe is at the park, a bully arrives to crash her digging party.

The illustrations and facial expressions are spot-on aligned to the text and the narration is perfectly peppered with ironic contrasts between the words and pictures.

Age: Middle School-High School
Awards: YALSA 2011 Teens Top Ten

I always have a difficult time differentiating sci-fi and fantasy. My book club identified sci-fi as a plausible future with high-tech gadgets and outerspace travel. Fantasy takes place in the past with swords and romance. So how would you classify a book taking place in the present with aliens, superpowers, and romance? Although about.com is pretty useless and is drowning in ads, I found this insightful description:

Humanity can look forward to the kinds of achievements postulated in science fiction, while with another part of our brain we can dream of the impossibilities conjured by fantasy. Science fiction expands our world; fantasy transcends it.

That being said, the impossibility of superpowers fits into fantasy, yet alien life is very possible. The ambiguity is killing me! Aaanyways, I should start talking about this book. A mix between battles, training scenes, and darling romance, this is a perfect mix of "guy" and "girl" interests. James Frey and Jobie Hughes (the real authors) really has a handle on a series, giving a perfect amount of background information while allowing the plot to continue after the first book ends--hence why I will pick up the second book.

From the reviews, you can tell that the book is plot based vs. character based. It also leans heavily on the fantasy assumption that a reader shouldn't question every bit of the plot or setting. Just roll with it. From other reviews, I can see the faults in the Lorien race but I still enjoyed the book overall and will continue with the second (which I rarely do).

Age: Middle School-High School

An intriguing "who-done-it" plot line as Amy tries to unravel the secrets of a big ass ship. These mysteries definitely kept me glued to the plot line. The novel also tends to move fast because it is told from two different narrators: Amy and Elder. I really admired what Revis did with two juxtaposing leadership roles.

Spoiler

Eldest leads the ship based on control, subservience, and effectiveness that is easily accomplished by drugging the ship's population. He did this based on a mutiny that resulted from the ship's people knowing the truth about the ship's decreasing speed. Although it is effective and no one is physically harmed, Elder finally determines that an absolute control-based leadership hinders thought and ingenuity in fixing the problem. His role as leader should not be to stagnate progress with lies, but reassure the population that through hard work and unity they can fix the problem of the ship's engines.

The romance between Amy and Elder was a little blah. At first I thought Elder fell in love with Amy based solely on looks (ugh) but it turns out

Spoiler

that he wanted to unfreeze Amy in order to find out what it was like to live on Soul Earth. He didn't want to unfreeze her based solely on her beauty but on her past. An interesting twist but I felt like Elder was more interested in the mysteries of the ship, rather than the mysteries of Soul Earth.

"Seventeen-year-old Amy joins her parents as frozen cargo aboard the vast spaceship Godspeed and expects to awaken on a new planet, three hundred years in the future. Never could she have known that her frozen slumber would come to an end fifty years too soon and that she would be thrust into the brave new world of a spaceship that lives by its own rules.

Amy quickly realizes that her awakening was no mere computer malfunction. Someone-one of the few thousand inhabitants of the spaceship-tried to kill her. And if Amy doesn't do something soon, her parents will be next.

Now Amy must race to unlock Godspeed's hidden secrets. But out of her list of murder suspects, there's only one who matters: Elder, the future leader of the ship and the love she could never have seen coming" (Goodreads feature review).