This was like Ursula Le Guin's Tales of Earthsea mixed with Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Stories. That's high praise coming from me. Really neat little story about a boy who is apprenticed to a bard/skald and goes on adventures into the land of the trolls.

I'd been looking for The Ear, The Eye, and The Arm by Nancy Farmer on ebook for a while now when I ran across this and decided to read instead. Glad I did!

I have mixed feelings about this book. I'm not a saucy book reader in general, so this was way out of my wheelhouse and all the naughty parts just...smacked of Twilight in their repetition. But it was about time travel, so I plugged along. I found parts of the book very intriguing, like the 'witch' Claire befriends. Frankly, I found her a bit more interesting than Claire.

Can't say if I'll pick up the sequels to this, they are doorstops and my to-read list is a mile long.

I love Scotland though, and it was a treat to read about highlanders and all the clan stuff. Loved it for that.

Very interesting look at the investigation of the union labor disputes and subsequent bombing of the LA Times building at the turn of the century.
Learned a lot about unions (knew next to nothing) and lots of cool tidbits about the birth of motion pictures tied in.

If you liked Devil in the White City, you'll probably like this.

This was very, very good. It was also gutwrenchingly sad. I imagine it would be completely traumatic for its intended audience. I'm traumatized and I'm an adult.

This was like...Dan Brown meets Greg Bear. Which is really insulting to Greg Bear.

It was also a total confused mess. There's the genius scientist who makes a lizard boy hybrid and she's got all kinds of daddy issues. Then you have the nebbish mountaineer who's coerced into being a New Testament era bodysnatcher. Oh but there's also a billionaire business tycoon who buys, catalogs, and sometimes eats black market religious relics and unwittingly unleashes a plague that turns people transparent and has a 100% mortality rate.

I don't even know. I finished it, I'm not sure why. Parts of it were cool.

Eldric is like the Augustus Waters of Edwardian England.
I read this because of the Chime / Shine snafu and I liked it. haven't read Shine yet.

It's a bizarre little book about witchery, self loathing, and the industrial revolution more or less.
It was also very sweet and quite funny in places.

This was really beautiful.

Tree Girl centers around a young girl about to celebrate her quinciniera (I'm sure I spelled that wrong) in Guatemala. The story takes place during the awful civil war that tore apart native Mayan villages. This is not a book with a riveting story or 3 dimensional characters. But it is sort of a no-holds-barred introduction for teen readers (it's a little grim for younger audiences) into that period in history and the fact that human beings have the potential to be really, really awful. Lots of talk about Mayan tradition, which is cool and informational.