Kate's Tales of Books and Bands

In Dragons in a Bag (link to my review), Zetta Elliott introduced a  young boy named Jaxon, who was given a job to do by a magical old woman, Ma.  He had to return three baby dragons to the world of magic.  It didn't go as planned, not that Jaxon knew enough about what was going on to really "plan" anything, but he did his best.  It wasn't enough.  One of the babies was stolen by Kavita, the little sister of his best friend, Vik. The Dragon Thief   (Random House, Oct 22 1019) picks up the story right where we left it.  Jaxon is worried about Ma, who has fallen into a strange sleep, and he's desperate to get the baby dragon to the magical world.  Kavita is worried about the baby dragon, which grows at an alarming rate when it gets fed.  When she realizes she can't keep it safe, her old aunty who lives with her family decides to help her get it home. So on the one hand we have Jaxon and Vik, racing to find Kavita while figuring out how they ca...

Here's what I found this week; please let me know if I missed your post (or a post about your book....) The Reviews The Book of Three, by Lloyd Alexander, at Say What? The Bookwanderers, by Anna James, at Ms. Yingling Reads and Book Nut Dead Voices, by Katherine Arden, at Geo Librarian and Books4YourKids The Dragon Warrior, by Katie Zhao, at Read Love Ember and the Ice Dragons, by Heather Fawcett, at Ms. Yingling Reads Iggy and Oz: the Plastic Dinos of Doom, by J.J. Johnson, at Reading, Writing, and Stitch Metric Knock Three Times (Wizards of Once #3), by Cressida Cowell, at Twirling Book Princess Lalani of the Distant Sea, by Erin Entrada Kelly, at Puss Reboots Lintang and the Pirate Queen, by Tamara Moss, at Read Love The Lost Girl, by Anne Ursu, at Not Acting My Age Malamander, by Thomas Taylor, at Milliebot Reads The Poison Jungle, by Tui T. Sutherland, at Hidden in Pages Rise of the Dragons, by Angie Sage, at Say What? The Rubicus Prophecy, by Alane Adams, at Always in the ...

blogging here has been slow (just as soon as I finish painting the outside of my house, which I hope to do tomorrow, because goodness knows if there will ever be any nice warm days this fall), but I have been reading lots, and have written several nice posts for the Barnes and Noble Kids Blog! My posts from the last month are: 10 Middle Grade Island Adventures to Thrill and Delight Young Readers  8 Great New Middle Grade Action and Adventure Stories!  Get On the Case with 5 Brand New Middle Grade Mysteries  From Slightly Spooky to Downright Frightening: 8 Haunting New Middle Grade Ghost Stories Two were assignments, for which I didn't pick the books myself, two were ideas I pitched to the blog editor.  At the moment I'm finishing off a list post of books with bullying....surprisingly not as depressing to read as I'd feared!

If you are in the mood for a real page turner of a YA time travel story (it only took me two and a bit hours to read 400 pages), with lots of twists, lots of great characters, and lots of action, look no further than Stolen Time, by Danielle Rollins (Febraury 2019, HarperTeen). It begins in Seattle, in 1913, when Dorothy runs away from the marriage her con-artist mother has inveigled her into.  Her flight leads her to a time traveler, from New Seattle, 2077.  Ash is on a mission to find his mentor, the professor who figured out time travel technology, and who disappeared. leaving his team of young people gathered from different times without guidance and purpose.  Dorothy stows away in his ship, and Ash inadvertently takes her back to his own time, to a city devastated by earthquakes and inundated by tidal waves. It's a city living in fear of a vicious gang, whose co-leader, Roman, was once one of the professor's brightest students.  But Roman wanted time travel to ...

Here's what I found this week; please let me know if I missed your post! (I changed my post title from "around the blogs" to "around the web" but do cool kids these days actually say "the web"?  Would "on-line" be more au currant ?) Book Reviews Archimancy, by J.A. White, at Puss Reboots The Battle, by Karuna Riazi, at Randomly Reading The Beast (Darkdeep #2), by Ally Condie and Brendan Reichs, at Ms. Yingling Reads The Dark Lord Clementine, by Sarah Jean Horwitz, at Cracking the Cover and A Garden of Books The Dragon Warrior, by Katie Zhao, at Endless Chapters , For Ever and Everly , and The Quiet Pond Dual at Araluen (Royal Ranger #3), by John Flanagan, at Say What? The Evil Wizard Smallbone, by Delia Sherman, at Kid Lit Geek The Fire Keeper, by J.C. Cervantes, at Pamela Kramer Guardians of Magic, by Chris Riddell, at Book Craic The Jumbie God's Revenge, by Tracey Baptiste, at Sally's Bookshelf The Key of Lost Things (Hotel Bet...

I just read, and wrote about, Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky , by Kwame Mbalia, for a Barnes and Noble Kids Blog post, so I'm not going to do a full review here.  But I want to talk about it here a bit too, since this is my more personal record of book reading. Wow!  This is so powerful, and sad, and important, and funny (in places), and the sort of book one wants to give to kids Right Now. Tristan's grief over his best friend's death, and the way he blames himself for it, and his sense of failure for loosing his first boxing match (I was cross at his dad and grandfather for being so clearly disappointed in him) set the stage for his journey into a world of magic and mayhem.  He's carrying a lot of emotional weight with him when he punches the titular hole in the sky, and once he goes through, a whole heap more is piled on him. And it's not just personal weight, but the weight of sad and terrible history. There's the fact that the primary attacking mon...

Back in 2017 I wrote a post for the Barnes and Noble Kids Blog about dystopian middle grade books, and I've been asked to refresh it.  Problem is, there haven't been a whole lot of mg dystopian books published in the US since then, and it has to be something available at B and N! I think of dystopian primarily as a systemic loss of civil liberties, although environmental collapse with concomitant social collapse works for me too. Here's what I've found so far, with help from twitter.  It isn't much, though I have combed through Goodreads and Kirkus, and have myself read about 500 mg books in the past two years. I am wondering if the fact that we are actually living in an increasingly dystopian world is making US publishers less interested in dystopian mg..... I would love love love more suggestions of books available in the US, especially books by diverse authors!  and feel free to disagree with my classification of any of these as "dystopian." Suggested, ...

The Shores Beyond Time , by Kevin Emerson, is the third book in the Chronicle of the Dark Star series that began with Last Day on Mars , and continued in The Oceans Between Stars (links to my reviews).   Basically the premise is humanity, and an alien race with whom humanity is at war, are out among the stars after our sun went nova (and some other stars have too), both races looking for new homes (the aliens because humanity decided the Telphon's planet would be a great new home, and essentially nuked it, so there are only about three hundred of them left).  One human boy, Liam, and one Telphon girl, who goes by Phoebe, became friends on Mars and Liam met an ancient time travelling alien of a different species (as told in the first book) and were both separated from their people on a long lonely space flight, and Liam started travelling in time himself (the second book). In this third book, Liam and Phoebe find themselves at the heart of the mystery of the supernovas and the...

Here's what I found in my blog reading this week; please let me know if I missed your post! The Reviews The Bootlace Magician (Cicus Mirandus #2), by Cassie Beasley, at Randomly Reading The Boy Who Was Fire, by Marcus Kahle McCann, at The Children's Book Review City of Bones, by Victoria Schwab, at Pages Unbound The Dark Lord Clementine, by Sarah Jean Howitz, at Sally's Bookshelf Dead Voices, by Katherine Arden, at Charlotte's Library Dragon Pearl, by Yoon Ha Lee, at Imaginary Friends The Dragon Warrior, by Katie Zhao, at Log Cabin Library , Forever and Everly , and Lost In Storyland Ember: the Secret Book, by Jamie Smart, at Mr Ripleys Enchanted Books The Hippo at the End of the Hall, by Helen Cooper, at Charlotte's Library Homerooms and Hall Passes, by Tom O'Donnell, at Ms. Yingling Reads The International Yeti Collective, by Paul Mason, at Book Craic The Little Broomstick, by Mary Stewart, at Fantasy Literature Mightier than the Sword, by Drew Callander and ...

Thanks everyone who nominated books during the public nomination period!  Now we give publishers and authors a chance to fill in the gaps (from today through October 25th).  So I'll leave this list up for now to show them I was thinking about their books..... So here, in no particular order, is a list of some books that need nominators (and it's not all the eligible books, and I'm sure I'm missing some great ones...for which I apologize.  I haven't read all of these, so this isn't a list of personal endorsements (though I did love all the ones I did read!). And here is where you go to start the nomination process. Tin, by Padraig Kenny Cogheart, by Peter Bunzl Ghost and Bone, by Andrew Prentice The Haunting of Henry Davis, by Kathryn Siebel Legends of the Sky, by Liz Flannagan The Twelve, by Cindy Lin The Flight of the Bluebird, by Kara LaReau The Fire Keeper, by J.C. Cervantes The Bookwanderers (Pages and Co. #1) by Anna James Nikki Tesla and the Ferret-Proof ...

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...

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...

Bloglovin utterly failed me this week, so I doubtless missed many posts.  So let me know if I missed yours, and I'll add it! The Reviews Cog, by Greg Van Eekhout, at Charlotte's Library Creep, by Eireann Corrigan, at Not Acting My Age The Double Helix (Explorer Academy #3), by Trudi Truit, at Mom Read It The Fairfield Curse, by Kaleb Nation, at Say What? The Last Dragon (The Revenge of Magic #2), by James Riley, at The Write Path Lexi Magill and the Teleportation Tournament, by Kim Long, at A Garden of Books The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Riddle of Ages, by Trenton Lee Stewart, at Puss Reboots A Royal Guide to Monster Slaying, by Kelley Armstrong, at Geo Librarian Scourge: A Grim Doyle Adeventure, by David H. Burton, at Say What? Small Spaces, by Katherine Arden, at A Dance with Books The Storm Runner, by J. C. Cervantes, at A Backwards Story A Tale of Magic, by Chris Colfer, at Ms. Yingling Reads A Time Traveller's Theory of Relativity, by Nicole Valentine, at C...

Cog , by Greg Van Eekhout (HarperCollins, Oct 1 2019), is a charming, funny, smart middle grade sci fi story with tons of appeal for both kids and grown-ups! Cog looks like an average 12-year-old boy.  He reminds me of one of my own boys at that age--driven to accumulate information and eager to share tidbits of learning to others, without stopping to gauge the recipient's interest in facts about the platypus, for instance (who I am I kidding--it's reminding me of me).  Still with a lot of practical life-lessons to learn, and with a loving adult on hand to help steer him toward independent thinking.  Cog, however, isn't an ordinary boy.  He is a robot, and the loving adult is Gina, his programmer.  She works for uniMIND, a big corporation of robot designers, but she's gone slightly rogue, and added programing to Cog that gives him control over his own choices (and more, but that's a spoiler).  She and Cog live alone, and the corporation doesn't know what sh...

Sometimes time gets slippy, and even with the best intentions in the world, Tuesdays come to an end before one's post is written.  So here's the (very good) time travel book that was supposed to be up yesterday! A Time Traveler's Theory of Relativity , by Nicole Valentine (Carolrhoda, middle grade, Oct 1 2019) is indeed about time travel, but mostly it's about a boy, Finn.   Finn's twin sister drowned when they were three, and the hole in his family is still there, though Finn only remembers fragments of her.  Now Finn's mother has left home, with no message or explanation, leaving him with his absent-minded historian dad, who won't talk about it, and who then heads off on a research trip, leaving Finn with his grandmother.  Happily, his best friend Gabi lives nearby, and she has his back, and his grandma is loving, warm, and caring.  She also knows where his mother is, although she doesn't come out and tell him immediately...and when she does, it's ...