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The wicked Cinderella

I’ve read quite a few fairy tale revisions and watched their counterpart movies and TV shows, but none were as creative and entertaining as Anita Valle’s Sinful Cinderella. Valle’s premise strikes a logical chord. “How could she [Cinderella] stay so sweet and cheerful when she gets nothing but abuse from her family?” With that in…

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Humorous Cat/Dog YA Novel

Are you aware of “The Animal Code?” I didn’t think so. It’s a set of ethics all animals live by and includes never speaking to humans. Yes, we’ve all read about acts of courage animals have demonstrated over the years that reveal their inner fortitude, but never have any of them come forth to acknowledge…

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Fascinating Mystical YA Novel

Gnosticism is the belief that the material world should be shunned in favor of the spiritual world. With that theme in mind, Michael Sussman created a brilliant YA novel, Crashing Eden. Joss, a self-described “seventeen-year-old punk” bullied his brother unmercifully until a neighbor took over the chore. Not surprisingly, Eli, a middle school student, hung…

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The Time Travel Journals

Three years ago I had the pleasure of reviewing both of Marlene Dotterer’s Time Travel Journal novels, Shipbuilder and Bridgebuilders for Big Al’s Books and Pals. I enjoyed those time travel YA books so much, I want to resurrect the reviews for your reading pleasure. Enjoy. -Pop Shipbuilder Casey Wilson, a coed at Queen’s University in Belfast, Ireland,…

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Pop’s Rating System

Pop evaluates a lot of books on his blog, so readers are starting to demand that he rate the books. On Amazon or Goodreads books are rated with one to five stars depending on the quality of the novel. Keeping that rating system in mind, Pop has decided on this following system for his blog. …

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Koolura and the Mayans

In celebration of Koren Thal’s 28th birthday, Solstice Publishing will release for publication Koolura and the Mayans on March 19, 2016. This novel is author Michael Thal’s third installment to the Koolura Series and his fifth published YA novel. In The Legend of Koolura, Koolura Akopyan received extraordinary psychic powers at birth from an alien…

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The Empty World Series

The Empty World Series are four YA science fiction adventure books where characters from our world are transported to a planet light years from Earth through a portal built by an ancient alien technology developed before humans walked the Earth. If Portal Through the Pond (Empty World Series Book 1) holds the theme key to…

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An Interview with author Sarah Hill

Today we’ll be meeting Sarah Hill, a small animal Vet and the children’s author and creator of ‘The Whimsy Wood Series’. She gained her Veterinary Medicine degree at Bristol University in 1999 and worked in practice for 10 years. At that point she had her second daughter and soon after, she decided to take a…

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A Brief History of YA Literature

As a teacher fresh out of grad school and subbing for the Los Angeles Unified School District, I began reading YA fiction to uncover gems to motivate my students. I initially discovered Seventeenth Summer by Maureen Daly. Published in 1942 and considered the first book explicitly written for teens, Daly’s novel for girls had a…