It’s summertime, and that means It’s adventure time! Join Squirrel and a menagerie of characters (bees, mice, crows — oh my!) for a wild ride to solve a mysterious riddle that could be a blessing or a curse. Kids are going to love the fast-paced, action-packed story and the clues and riddles are going to …
Powerful! This is a middle grade novel so worthy of discussion and rereading. Annabelle struggles as she faces evil in the form of a 14-year-old bully– and prejudice that leads a community to follow fear instead of the truth. Poetic and thoughtful, it’s a story about justice and doing the right thing (To Kill a …
This beloved and highly requested British series first published in the 1940’s is back in print, and for those who love books from a timeless era of children’s writing this is for you. Children have fearless adventures in nature and spend entire summers outdoors. As my family is deeply in love with Arthur Ransome’s “Swallows …
Well, it’s begun. The first of the nominees for the 2016 PNBA Book Awards has arrived in my mailbox. Which means I am now in my last few weeks of being able to read books for any other reason. Which gets me all in a panic because I don’t know what to read first and …
I suspect that there’s almost no such thing as a book that isn’t personal to the author. I say that because I’d just been about to open this piece with something along the lines of this throwaway line: “The Honest Truth, my debut novel, is very personal to me.” Of course it is. I wrote …
The Wollstonecraft Detective Agency #1 “Imagine the future Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer, as an 11-year-old Sherlock Holmes, with the future Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, as her 14-year-old Watson (and the young Charles Dickens as a helpful sidekick). The new Wollstonecraft Detective Agency series plays merrily loose with historical details, but with a …
It occurred to me recently that the survival of independent bookstores in the US has a lot in common with the Stars Wars saga. Think of it like this: a ragtag band of quirky, talented and determined individuals is battling a massive, powerful opponent that wants to dominate and control the universe of book commerce. The …
Book #1 in The Mapmakers Trilogy. It is 1891 and the continents of the world have been flung far and wide by the Great Disruption. Not only that, but each continent has also landed itself in another time period! When Sophia’s renowned cartologist uncle Shadrack is kidnapped by strange men with grappling hooks and scars on …
Every summer, Queen Anne Book Company creates a large in-store display featuring the summer reading books for the middle school just blocks from the store. We love discussing the selections with the school’s fantastic librarian. We delight in helping the rising sixth, seventh, and eighth graders pick their books from the extensive list. It’s particularly …
Not long ago, I became frustrated with my inability to find fiction whose main character has a chronic illness or chronic condition. It seems there’s no lack of fiction about characters with terminal illnesses, but very little where the character has a chronic illness. Being afflicted with a chronic illness myself (chronic migraine) and being …
