Reviews of young adult (YA) and middle grade (MG) books.
Corporate trainer and amateur sleuth, Lysi Weston is on the road again with best friend Grace Wright. This time the duo are in Paris, France where they are assigned the task of presenting a model of their management training seminar to the American Chamber of Commerce in France in hopes of educating chauvinistic Francophiles on…
Like the pine trees lining the winding road, I’ve goat a name: I’ve got a name. His name was Jim Croce, an accomplished American folk singer and songwriter. Between 1966 and 1973 Croce released five albums and hit singles like “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” and “Time in a Bottle,” both of which reached number…
The Hunt for Xanadu recently received a 5 pops review from this blog. Elyse Salpeter’s second book in her Kelsey Porter Series, The Quest of the Empty Tomb, was also an exciting ride, but didn’t exactly live up to the high bar Salpeter’s first book established. In The Quest of the Empty Tomb, Salpeter brings back many…
We’ve all heard of the mythical city of Xanadu appearing in literature and movies. It’s an exotic utopia first described by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a nineteenth century English poet, in his 1816 poem, “Kubla Khan.” Author Elyse Salpeter has embraced the myth and expanded the concept of Xanadu to a higher plane in her first…
Set in England during the middle ages, author TF Gray begins Murdoch’s Tale: Book 1 of Corwin’s Chronicle.The novel introduces Corwin, a young child torn away from his family and home by war. Rescued by Tovan of the faer and dropped off to a human family for adoption, Corwin goes through life with the dream of…
Jessie’s Find It is late September when Jesse Mason, a Kansas cattle rancher, is riding his buckboard home after a long cattle drive. Suddenly, he hears a low moan. Could it be the wind? But when his horse, Bell, reacts to the noise, he investigates. To his horror, Jesse finds a dead horse. Close by…
Beautiful Monster: The Exchange (Book 1) His vampire brother turned Lev Baronovsky a hundred years ago. Since then, he’s waged an internal battle to retain his humanity by refusing to neither kill a human nor turn one into a creature of the night. It’s a tough battle, for his brother, Alexei is his polar opposite….
Chef Nana, the head cook at the New Harmonia, an exclusive New York City hotel, is dead. Her son, Michael Lawson, is tapped to replace her, and Chef Lawson needs to move from Chicago to New York with his son Stephen. Stephen Lawson is a pre-teen boy raised by a single parent….
Remember Rapunzel? She was a Grimm’s Brother’s princess locked in a tower and rescued by a prince willing to climb her long golden tresses to save her. Ever wonder what happened to the princess when released from her prison? Wonder no more. Leila Howland solved the dilemma in her creative fairy…
In 1783 Wendy Darling was a foundling placed at the door of a London almshouse. As a child, she read The Live and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,and ever after longed to sail the seven seas and experience all the magical wonders of the world. Mortimer Black, another orphan, knew the ways of the…