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Geeks and the Holy Grail (Camelot Code #2), by Mari Mancusi, for Timeslip Tuesday

The first book in the Camelot Code series, The Once and Future Geek , mixed time travel between the medieval world of King Arthur and our own, and it is a very entertaining book.  The second book in the series, Geeks and Holy Grail (Hyperion, October 2019), is also entertaining (though not quite as funny; King Arthur as a modern day high school student is hard to beat....). When Morgana, sworn enemy of King Arthur, attacks the druids of Avalon, Nimue, the youngest of them, takes the Holy Grail and runs with it.  King Arthur is dying, and only the Grail can save him.  Desperate to keep it from falling into Morgana's hands, she stumbles into Merlin's Crystal Cave.  But instead of Merlin there to help her (he's on vacation in Los Vegas, in our time), there's only his very inexperienced apprentice, Emrys.  His attempt to hide the grail works, in a sense--as a small, flatulent dragon, it sure doesn't look much like a grail.  But it isn't much use to Arthur as a...
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The Secret

The Secret

Under Shifting Glass

By: Nicky Singer

This book was like one scoop of vanilla ice cream.  It was simple, smooth, cold, and delicious.  The coolness of the ice cream penetrates more than the simple flavor which only adds to the experience.

Under Shifting Glass was about Jess.  Her mother is having babies that are conjoined, a word Jess prefers to Siamese twins.  However, the father is Jess's step father Si.  At about the same time her mother has these babies her Great Aunt Edie dies.  On top of that, Jess also feels like she is losing her best friend Zoe.  Jess always played piano at Aunt Edie's house and her grand piano is really the only thing that Jess want's of Edie's.  However, Jess receives a bureau instead.  In the bureau she finds a flask with something that creates light, a beautiful, natural, iridescent, breathing light that only Jess sees.  Jess is haunted by the statistics the Si gives her about the number of twins that die when they are being separated.  Jess starts seeing parallels all over her life.  The dying of her relationship with Zoe to the possibility of one of the twins dying is the most relevant in the book.  Jess feels that somehow she is connected to the twins and their survival depends on her acting with love and grace rather than the hatred and jealously she can't help but feel.

This book was very focused.  It didn't talk about much other than what Jess was thinking in just the small amount of time the book took place in.  However, this wasn't really a problem.  The book felt complete.  Jess's character was extremely thoughtful and she made the book meaningful.  One of my only problems with the book was figuring out how old Jess was supposed to be.  She could easily have been 6 or 7 or she could have easily been 14 or 15.  Her relationship with Zoe and other schoolmates made her seem young yet her family treated her like she was older.  However, that was really the only problem with the book.  Each word in the books has a meaning and purpose.  There isn't any superfluous description or meaningless characters.  This was refreshing because it made the book simple yet sincere.  This book is a 4.

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Dead Voices , by Katherine Arden (middle grade, G.P. Putnam's Sons, August 2019), is a delightfully spooky sequel to Small Spaces , perfect for a chilling read as winter draws closer! Ollie, Coco, and Brian became close friends under somewhat trying circumstances last fall--the evil Smiling Man trying to turn them into scarecrows--and now winter has come, they're on their way to a fun weekend at a new ski lodge with Ollie's dad and Coco's mom.  They almost don't make it through the intense snowstorm, and when they arrive, they find themselves the only visitors.  The snow keeps falling, trapping them inside, and the power goes out.  And there are ghosts. The day after they arrive another visiter makes it through the snow, a young reporter for a ghost hunting magazine.  The owners of the hotel aren't sure that publicity about the hotel's previous incarnation of an orphanage with a dark, sad, history is what they want, but the young man is keen to get ghost hun...
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Premeditated

I'm going to start with the blurb from the back cover of this book, because it does a remarkable job of introducing the story in very few words: A week ago, Dinah’s cousin Claire cut her wrists. Five days ago, Dinah found Claire’s diary and discovered why. Three days ago, Dinah stopped crying and came up with a plan. Two days ago, she ditched her piercings and bleached the black dye from her hair. Yesterday, knee socks and uniform plaid became a predator’s camouflage. Today, she’ll find the boy who broke Claire. By tomorrow, he’ll wish he were dead. Claire and Dinah are cousins who are incredibly close, close enough that when Claire ends up in a coma in the hospital from a failed suicide attempt, Dinah knows where to look to find Claire's diary (or the computerized version of one, anyway). Dinah figures out what drove Claire to the point of suicide--a boy from the private school that Claire was supposed to attend that fall. Dinah enrolls at the school herself, determined to get...
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The Hippo at the End of the Hall, by Helen Cooper

If you are a fantasy fan who loves quirky small museums with collections of oddities, you will love  The Hippo at the End of the Hall , by Helen Cooper (first published in the UK in 2017, now out in the US from Candlewick, Oct 2019). Ben's invitation to the Gee Museum was delivered by bees.  He'd never heard of the place before, but despite his mother's reservations about letting him go there on his own (reservations which seem, for reasons, to be a bit much, even taking into account the fact that Ben's only ten)  he went...There, in its rooms full of taxidermidied creatures, other natural history collections, a glass bee hive, and clocks and other treasures collected by the Gee family from around the world years ago, he found magic, and the truth about his father, who died many years ago while off on an expedition of his own. Ben also found danger, one of my personal least favorite types of danger--the unscrupulous developer, in this case paired with the unscrupulous d...
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