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Tag: for young people

The Mysterious Benedict Society, Trenton Lee Stewart

Some smart kids take a test to see how they smart they are, and it turns out they’re smart enough and nice enough to win the prize of infiltrating an Ominous Institute and finding out what the super evil scary man is plotting!  That’ll teach you to be smart and nice, kids!  Anyway, they meet a nice, nice man with narcolepsy, and he tells them how there is an evil, evil man (who also has narcolepsy, as it turns out) trying to control everyone’s minds, and they have to go infiltrate his school and foil his plans.  They all agree…

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Starseeker, Tim Bowler

*wipes away tears* *throws tissue into trash can* *puts sad book back inside purse* So I won Starseeker in a giveaway from Bart’s Bookshelf (thank you, I really liked it!), and I got it in the mail the other day and I read it today in between being scared shitless by “Hush” (why are the Gentlemen so scary?  why do they do that with their hands and their faces?) and trying to figure out what the hell happens in “Doomed” (hell happens.  They have to go back to high school to fix the stupid Hellmouth; such a subpar episode, plus…

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The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins

So in case you’ve been living in a hole and not hearing about The Hunger Games – it’s a grim, grim dystopian future, and every year the government makes each of the twelve districts send one boy and one girl (ages 12-18) to participate in the Hunger Games where they all get placed in a specially designed Perilous Terrain and fight to the death on live TV.  Katniss, our dauntless protagonist, volunteers to take her little sister’s place, and the other tribute turns out to be the baker’s son Peeta (I know, right?), who once saved Katniss and her family…

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The Dragonfly Pool, Eva Ibbotson

Lovely Darla at Books and Other Thoughts reviewed this book a while ago, and I was thrilled to find Eva Ibbotson had written a new book – I love her, and actually, I like her non-fantasy books best.  Still I didn’t read it for ages, and then at Charing Cross Road the other day, I almost didn’t buy it.  I’m glad I bought it!  It was wonderful! Tally is a determined little girl who gets sent off to a boarding school called Delderton as Hitler’s growing power brings the threat of war to London, where she lives with her father. …

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The Tales of Beedle the Bard, J.K. Rowling

If you are about to ask, “Jenny, did you get this book for only two pounds at the Charing Cross Road Borders, along with a number of other kids’ books that were, at 3 for 2, absolutely irresistible?”, then the answer is yes.  Yes, I did.  And I was really pleased about it, I can tell you.  And I also couldn’t resist buying a great big heavy book all about writing Doctor Who, because I am interested in how people write TV shows.  I mean how the process works.  All very interesting. The Tales of Beedle the Bard is another…

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Life As We Knew It, Susan Beth Pfeffer

Fifteen-year-old Miranda has a pretty normal life, until a meteor hits the moon.  It shoves the moon closer to the earth (eek!), which as you might expect does not do good things for the earth.  Tsunamis take out New York and Florida and California; volcanoes begin erupting all over the place, filling the air with ash for miles around.  And Miranda’s family copes. I first heard about this book shortly after I read Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now, and I didn’t want to do another girl-copes-with-end-of-world-scenario book straight away, because of how grim How I Live Now was.  But…

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The Death Collector, Justin Richards

Recommended by Darla D from Books and Other Thoughts – I knew I had to read this when she said “dinosaurs” and “Victorian”, and then she carried right on and said “street urchin” and “vicar’s daughter” and “clock-maker”, which is not totally unlike Ella saying “Warning, it’s very Gothic” about Blackbriar.  I am leaving for a fantastic and glorious vacation in London (don’t go anywhere, London, I am coming back to you soon!), so I had collected all my books together to return to the library before I left (I know, right?).  And still I could not return them until…

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The Genie of Sutton Place, George Selden

Okay, okay, okay.  So I read A Cricket in Times Square (of course).  And then I read the one about Tucker the Rat.  But DID YOU KNOW that the same author also wrote a charming book about a boy whose father dies and he goes to live with his uptight aunt, and she tries to make him get rid of his dog, and he finds a genie called Abdullah? Well – yeah.  It’s true!  He finds a genie, and the genie falls in love with the maid-of-all-work, Rose, and the dog falls in love with the uptight aunt, and everything…

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The Savage, David Almond and Dave McKean

Another book recommendation from Nymeth – since I just read Skellig, imagine how pleased I was to find that that same author wrote a book that Dave McKean illustrated.  Dave McKean used to be my favorite living artist, before I bought my sculpture and discovered Cetin Ates and his genius, so now Dave McKean is my second favorite living artist. I do not love his work less than I used to love it, I just love Cetin Ates’s work even more than that. The Savage is about a young boy called Blue who recently lost his father.  A teacher at…

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Books from my childhood

Today I reread Edward Ormondroyd’s Time at the Top and Anne Lindbergh (daughter, not wife)’s Travel Far, Pay No Fare.  These were both favorites of mine when I was smaller, but in particular I liked Travel Far, Pay No Fare.  I loved it.  To me it was the most magical and amazing book of all time – twelve-year-old Owen moves to Vermont, where his nine-year-old cousin Parsley has a bookmark that allows them to go inside books.  They visit Little Women (nobody there is nice), Alice in Wonderland (ditto), The Fledgling, The Yearling, and even the volcano scene of The…

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