Reviews of young adult (YA) and middle grade (MG) books.
Lizzie St. Laurent has several low wage jobs to help pay for her “luxury basement apartment.” Now that grandma has died from a stroke, Lizzie needs jobs over a college education to pay for food, clothes and the gas bill for her Mini Cooper. Late for the family meeting deciding the fate of Grandma’s belongings,…
Rosetta Douglass was nine years old when her famous father enrolled her in a private school, Miss Tracy’s Female Seminary in Rochester, New York for the 1848-49 school year. The child had never attended a public school because the Rochester schools wouldn’t permit African Americans on their campuses. However two Quaker women from Albany had…
Alice the Player is the third novel in the Serenity House series by A.W. Exley. This series is a sequential one meaning the author has connected the plots of her novels chronologically so readers are best served beginning with book one. In this case that’s Ella the Slayer (read Pop’s review). Alice the Player picks…
Electrician Jim Thompson has nothing to live for. At 54 his wife has left him for another man after 25 years of marriage. She took the home and retirement savings. He got booted from his job due to the Great Recession. Now homeless and living out of his truck, Jim’s future seems very bleak. Then…
Sweethearts of Jubilee Springs is a series of books written by several different authors relating stories about the Arkansas Valley of central Colorado during the 19th century. The Christmas Outlaw by P.A. Estelle is one of the newest novellas to this series. Charlene arrives in Jubilee Springs Colorado on the same train as a batch…
Ella the Slayer isn’t your everyday fairytale adaptation of the Cinderella fantasy. Eleanor Cowie’s father is a knight and her deceased mother, who died when Ella turned ten, was a humble maid. Prior to fighting in the Great War (WWI), Eleanor’s father, Sir Jeffrey, married Elizabeth, the mother of two daughters, Louise and Charlotte. When…
During 2017 Pop read and reviewed 32 YA books. Here are his five favorites with the #1 posted last. #5 Collide The last day of spring break Anna (aka Annabelle) and younger brother Eric have the opportunity to go out for dinner with their parents. Eric wants Italian and Anna craves sushi. Mom tosses a…
Matthew (Matty) Jones lives on a central Pennsylvania farm adjacent to a field the locals said was visited by a spaceship. It was the morning of December 9, 1965, the day DJ (Matty’s father), was born. The event affected the man’s life. But DJ is no longer around because he ran off with his brother’s…
Pop applauds author Erin Fry for including lead characters with disabilities in her extraordinary middle grade novel, Secrets of the Book. Spencer Lemon, a pre-teen with a degenerative eye disease and his buddy Gregor, stricken with autism, manage with great effort to overcome their impairments to defeat the bad guy and save the world. Sixth…
Jennie Samuel’s Beyond the Pond takes readers to a Texas backyard pond where we are introduced to the pond’s animal life and an ancient Cedar tree named Thalia. In this first book, Olivia, a new fish to the pond, reaches the mythical springs and coerces the great Artesia, the spirit of all water covering the…