When You Reach Me, by Rebecca Stead

One theory of time travel is that all moments are happening simultaneously, and we can shortcut from one to the other. In A Wrinkle in Time, Madeline L’Engle called it tessering.
In one of those moments, I have already finished writing this blog post, and I would appreciate it if my future self would tesser herself [...]

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The Outcasts of 19 Schuyler Place, by E. L. Konigsburg

I’ve literally grown up—grown older, anyway—with E.L. Konigsburg. We share a love of artists and beautiful things. Mine might have started, in fact, with From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, the Newbery award winner that made me, and a generation of readers, want to run away and live in the Metropolitan Museum [...]

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Al Capone Does My Shirts, by Gennifer Choldenko

You get to Alcatraz by being the worst of the worst. Unless you’re me. I came here because my mother said I had to.

The original setting is the first great thing about this book: it’s 1935, and Moose Flanagan’s family has just moved to Alcatraz. His father works as an electrician and part-time guard on [...]

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Going Bovine, by Libba Bray

First, a caveat. To those of you who know this author only from her Gemma Doyle historical fantasies: this is not the Libba Bray you’re looking for. This is her psycho alternate-universe twin.
Cameron Smith, the narrator of this young adult novel, is an unmotivated loner who sneers at his family, mocks his peers, and blows [...]

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Eyes Like Stars, by Lisa Mantchev

All the world’s a stage, literally, in this fun romp for stagestruck teens.
ENTER Beatrice (Bertie) Shakespeare Smith, a foundling and a born troublemaker. She has grown up in the Théâtre Illuminata, a fantastical, metafictional theater housing all the Players from all the works of the stage. Bertie gets her clothes from Wardrobe, and her bedroom [...]

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Wintergirls, by Laurie Halse Anderson

“The number doesn’t matter. If I got down to 070.00, I’d want 065.00. If I weighed 010.00, I wouldn’t be happy until I got down to 005.00. The only number that would ever be enough is 0. Zero pounds, zero life, size zero, double-zero, zero point. Zero in tennis is love. I finally get it.”

The [...]

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Ink and Steel, by Elizabeth Bear

It’s no secret that Francis Crawford is my favorite tortured, self-destructive, poetry-spouting, multilingual courtier and spy. But Kit Marlowe, as fictionalized in this Elizabethan historical fantasy, has lately been running a close second.
Stabbed through the eye in a barroom brawl, the infamous Marlowe is pleasantly surprised to wake up not in Hell, but in Rivendell [...]

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The Magicians, by Lev Grossman

The comparisons to Harry Potter are inevitable, but when Quentin Coldwater is recruited by Brakebills, a magical university hidden in upstate New York, he’s no wide-eyed eleven year old. Smart, anti-social, competitive, and melancholy, he’s designed his life to please Princeton’s admissions office. He took up performing magic tricks so that he could claim an [...]

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The Demon’s Lexicon, by Sarah Rees Brennan

Wisecracking brothers with swords and guns, on the run from the demons that killed their father. This could have been a run-of-the-mill teenage urban fantasy with demon hunting and chase scenes, but first-time author Brennan also gives us an intriguing, sardonic narrator who hooked me into a story I didn’t expect.
Sixteen-year-old Nick Ryves is a [...]

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My Life in France, by Julia Child

Library users placing holds on a cookbook first published in 1961, spiking sales of butter and cream… Julia Child must be in the news again. With Meryl Streep playing Julia in theatres everywhere, cooks are inspired to recreate that iconic joie-de-vivre in the kitchen, and those of us who don’t cook are inspired to read [...]

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