Sixteen strangers move into a brand-new apartment building next door to the estate of missing, eccentric millionaire, Sam Westing. When Westing turns up dead, the sixteen people are given clues and charged with finding out who killed him. I swear I read this when I was in fifth grade, but I didn’t remember a thing […]
Linda, an overweight girl in fifth grade, gives a report about whales one day. Someone passes around a note that “Blubber is a good name for her” and Linda has a new nickname. The other kids start to tease and harass her and just generally make her life miserable. Our narrator, Jill, watches all this […]
Anytime kids gather together in the dark, scary stories are inevitably told. Alvin Schwartz gathered a good selection of the most popular and published them in this anthology. I kind of think this scared me when I was little but I don’t actually remember ever checking it out from the library. My theory is that […]
Our young British protagonist and his Norwegian grandmother know something that we don’t: Witches are real and they live among us. They look like sweet neighbor ladies but they’re keeping a lot of secrets. Chief among them? They want to wipe out the children of the world. When Grandmamma and Grandson (do we ever learn […]
Percy Jackson finds himself entering a camp of Roman demigods near San Francisco with only the vaguest memory of who he is. The Romans accept him and he finds himself on a quest with Hazel and Frank, a couple of other demigods. They must make their way to Alaska, “The Land Beyond the Gods,” defeat […]
It’s very hard to summarize this book without giving anything away. Let’s see…. Jonah Skidmore was adopted when he was three months old. Just before his thirteenth birthday, he receives a cryptic message in the mail and he starts questioning the little that he knows about his past. Very, very bare bones there. After getting […]
4 Stars. I love this series. It’s just so innocently fun! The girls are funny but caring, as are their circle of friends. Girls in their “tween” years should love these books as well. This installment was just as much fun as all the others. I missed having Rosalind around but without her guidance, the three younger Penderwicks […]
**SPOILERS FOR THE 1ST IN THE SERIES, BLISS** Rosemary Bliss feels incredibly guilty; she lost her family’s magical cookbook to her evil Aunt Lily and now everything in their hometown of Calamity Falls just feels drab. To make matters worse, Aunt Lily is everywhere Rose turns–on the TV, on the radio, and now on the […]
Miri is a small teenage girl from the mountains. She feels inadequate in her village because she isn’t allowed to help in the quarry, the lifeblood of trade. She tries her best to help every way she can, but she just knows that everyone must think she’s a burden. One day, with the spring traders, […]
The Bliss family has a secret. A lot of bakeries say that their pastries are like magic but their pastries really are magic. Oldest daughter Rose loves helping out in the kitchen but she hasn’t been allowed to do much more than fetch ingredients and she’s never been entrusted with any magical recipes. But when […]
The seventh son of the seventh son, aptly named Septimus Heap, is stolen the night he is born by a midwife who pronounces him dead. That same night, the baby’s father, Silas Heap, comes across a bundle in the snow containing a new born girl with violet eyes. The Heaps take this helpless newborn into […]