This book is told in three different narrative voices, two girls, one boy. It's full of teen talk, which I normally don't mind, but which seemed to me a bit overdone in this book. Although it is, I'm sure, quite realistic and just got to my grown up sensibilities a bit too much.
Shout it out to the world by showing off one of these cool "I Read Banned Books" buttons. To get one, just come to the library and have a conversation with Mrs. FB about banned books. there's a display all set up to help get the conversation started.
I read this book last night before and after the Ken Burns National Park special on OPB. Great show - tune in the rest of this week if you have a chance. Anyway, I digress. Back to the book.
Loved this fun little mystery about Adam Canfield, a reporter on the Harris Elementary/Middle School paper, The Slash. It's a 2010 Battle of the Books title.
You know I can never resist a pink book, and look at that beautiful dress (although that would NOT have been worn in 1815 in Enland by an unmarried young woman, that's for sure!)I had to pick it up. It turned out to be a nice little mystery about four girls set in England in the early 1800s. Lady Emily Southwell is 16 years old and is just about to have her debutante year...but the plans of her father and her betrothed are quite different.Lady Emily knows there's something suspicious about Lord Robert, the young man to whom she's engaged, but she cannot get her father to listen to her. 
I read this book this week and while I enjoyed it, I also felt it was missing a little something that would have put it up in the top of its genre. 
Death of a Poison Pen and Death of a Bore I listened to these two Hamish Macbeth mysteries on my iPod. I've listened to some others, too. I love listening to them because they're read by a Scottish actor and I love his accent. But I enjoy the stories, too. They're sort of like Miss Marple mysteries if you've ever read those. Not too easy to figure out, but kind of slow moving and not terribly complex. I walk listening to these, and it really makes time pass quickly. If you like a mystery story, you might want to give them a go, but they'll probably appeal to grown ups more than middle schoolers. A little too slow moving and all adult characters.
I read these two grown-up books right in a row - one was old and one was very recently published, but they're about the same two characters. I had read another book by this author last spring, and I belong to a Facebook group that recommended Table Manners, so I took look. I enjoyed the second book much more than the first, and I think it's because Mia King has matured over the course of her career, and it was really nice to see. The first book of the two was comparatively simplistic, slow and underdeveloped for my taste. The second one was much better. Both were fine, but I enjoyed the second one more. I'll look forward to watching Mia King continue to develop as a writer!
This was a perfect murder mystery for reading when I wasn't feeling great - I have that bug that's going around :( It wasn't too long or too complicated, and it's a book in a series, the Lindsay Gordon series, so I was already somewhat familiar with some of the characters. It also wasn't too scary, so I could read it in bed. One of my fave mystery writers, Chelsea Cain (for grown-ups only and way too scary to read in bed!) recommended this author to me, and I quite enjoy her writing. I'm going to try a different series by her next. Grown ups looking for a fairly uncomplicated mystery might give Scottish author Val McDermid's Common Murder a try.
AAARRRRGHH mateys, it's Talk Like a Pirate Day this Saturday, and to celebrate, we're having a library special. There's a fabulous display of our pirate books, and if you check one out and talk like a pirate to us, we'll give you a cool prize! The special's running this week and next or until we run out of pirate books. 
I listened to this very wild futuristic sci-fi book on my iPod, and it was a really weird book. It was good, but it was weird.
This is an Oregon Battle of the Books title that I read over the weekend. LOVED this book. It's so much fun. The wild girls are really just two lonely girls who've found each other and discovered writing and all it can teach them. They do act a little wild sometimes, especially Fox. Fox (her real name is Sarah) lives with her dad because her mother left their family many years ago, and she spends a lot of time alone with her imagination building up her defenses around herself. She and her father don't have much money, so their house is a bit run down, as are her clothes. 
I actually listened to this book on my iPod, but the picture of the CD cover was fuzzy. LOVED this, and I'm glad to say it, because I really like Joan Bauer and I'm glad I can recommend yet another of her books, but also because this was a sequel, and sequels sometimes don't live up to the first book, but this one does! This book is a sequel to Rules of the Road which features a young woman named Jenna who takes a job in a shoe store and is mentored by the much older owner of the store, Mrs. Gladstone. In that book, Jenna is Mrs. Gladstone's driver and drives her all around the country.
Really enjoyed this cute book written by the friend of a friend. It's set in current time and features a young woman whose boyfriend is in the service and has to go overseas to serve. It's the story of how she struggles to deal with all the emotions and situations that arise in this scenario. It's quite a light-hearted look, but it's thoughtfully done. IT was a perfect vacation book. Just a bit of thinking, but not too much. It's our next book club choice, and I'm eager to discuss it with my friends next week.
I read the first one of these books, but I have to admit, I totally skimmed the second one, and afterward, I decided I'd have preferred if they were actually one book that flipped back and forth between the characters. 
All Hail the Elf, the Shelf Elf, that is. It was from her blog that I won a copy of this book. Yeah!
I thought this Oregon Battle of the Books title was a very good page turner. It's a somewhat plausible premise at first, but it requires a little more suspension of disbelief as it goes on. Still, it's a very suspenseful storyline, and fans of Haddix will enjoy it. Not sure if I will read the sequel or not.
I was trying to read a little more non-fiction this summer, so I picked up this book about the 1916 shark attacks on the New Jersey shore. I'm kind of addicted to shark stuff. Shark Week on cable? I'm sucked in - and I hardly EVER watch TV. I don't know why I'm so fascinated with sharks, because these bad boys are trouble, but I really am.
Once again, not my favorite writing ever, and I really thought this had too much "catch-up" for those who hadn't read the first book so would need some cluing in, but still, the story drew me in and I was driven to find out what happened. 
Loved this retelling of the Persephone story from her point of view. Since we did the whole mythology unit in 6th grade last year (we're doing it again, 6th graders - yeah!) when we read the Persephone myth and then the 6th graders read The Lightning Thief, I have been looking for more novels with a mythology bent. This one is great, but it's really for a little bit older audience than middle school, so I'll leave it to the high school to order.
I listened to this story on my iPod, and I have to admit I had to start over three times because I just couldn't get hooked, and then I wouldn't know what was going on. But once I did get going on it, I really liked it. It's a time travel book. Martin Conway, a 7th grade boy, has an old time radio from his grandmother, and it turns out that the radio is a time travel device. It transports him back to London in 1940 during the World War II bombings. There's also a good amount of historical fiction mixed in with the storyline in addition to it being a time travel book, which is not completely unusual in time travel books and makes them appeal to a wider audience I think.
This book was fun to read because it was written in emails back and forth between "distantstudybuddies" - kids who were attending school online as opposed to regular classroom work for different reasons. Kaleigh, the main character, is attending because she has cancer, but she doesn't tell any of her online friends the reason.
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