This was long. It's funny, the same characters I love in Les Miz are the ones that I tended to like more here. It was fun to see what was the same, and what was different. It's also scary to see how easily the written word can disappear, and what happens when it does.

It's going to end up being way longer than the original, isn't it?

French does a really good job of racheting up the tension in this one. I was on the edge of my seat many, many times. It felt like Maine, and even if I had a few guesses about which town it was, nothing about the setting was so unusual that it felt like a made up place. The kids seemed pretty realistic, but maybe a little more laissez-faire than I would have thought (but then, they aren't necessarily a group I would have been hanging out with.) The girl-fighting though (cold shoulder)--that felt real. I thought the ending wrapped up very quickly, and not necessarily in a way that felt like it went with all the build-up.

Gorgeous illustrations accompanied by short poems about the tree depicted.

Gorgeous, gorgeous illustrations

Beautiful, haunting prose about some dark stuff. Beth Teller is a dead 15 year old who narrates half the book, trying to help her father move on and solve this mystery about a fire. When they meet Isabel Catching, what seems like a simple fire suddenly becomes something different. Catching also narrates some of the book. You won't forget this one.

This one was okay. Paul is very short, and has gone through the world in a certain way because of it. Try to be invisible, and you'll minimize the bullying. Soon, though, he makes friends that make it impossible for him to stay invisible. It's awkward that Robb makes the one black person in his story also one of the people that Paul is most afraid of. I also thought that Big, as Hawaiian and also zen, was a little stereotypical. This book also spelled fundraiser with a hyphen in the middle, which drove me nuts. I feel like I sound harsher than I am. I did enjoy reading the book, I just had some issues with the middle parts.

Beautiful writing, an complicated weaving back and forth in time, and it goes a lot of places I thought it wouldn't. It definitely goes to a lot of tough topics, and I agree with Maria that it's for a mature reader.

Excellent narrator. Jack meets Kate at a party one night, and falls hard. Unfortunately, Kate has a life-threatening illness, which is not revealed until halfway through the book. Somehow, after Kate's death, Jack gets thrown back in time to the same moment, which he lives over and over again. Can he make the right choices to end the loop? I didn't necessarily understand why Jack was so into Kate, but if I accept that premise, it's a good story. It's just hard for adult me to see myself doing what Jack does. Maybe I'm just not romantic enough. I do think this story is important as a normal story with people of color in the lead roles and it's not an issue book.

This is a book about the aftermath of a school shooting. One boy is accidentally the poster child, due to a photo taken of him being carried out by a police officer. The other was home sick that day and missed the whole thing. The shooting itself is never depicted. You only see the trauma the two boys have years later, the way it shapes their lives. Not an easy book, but one to read to think about trauma.

This one was so so so good. I loved it. Mickey herself is a hard character to love sometimes, since she makes bad choices and excuses, but you also get to see why she makes those choices and how she justifies them to herself. It's very powerful.