Middle grade/YA. Contemporary fantasy, I suppose. Follows a teen Lipan Apache girl on not-quite-our-Earth and a cottonmouth snake animal person in the world of animal people that is a sort of reflection of Earth, an alternate dimension with which it was once wholly joined but which is now only connected through a small number of …
Middle grade contemporary fantasy. A young girl who lives with her grandparents above their bookshop in London, England, discovers that certain people, she among them, can literally enter books, have conversations with characters, and directly observe or even participate in the stories therein. Through the story, she and the reader learn more about the hidden …
Middle grade contemporary. The protagonist, Hazel, is a 13 year-old girl, an older sister, and a daughter of a single mom. Hazel is deeply traumatized from the kayaking accident two years before that killed her other mom but spared her. Since then, she and her mom and her sister have been moving a lot, living …
Middle grade. Translated from Japanese. A classic that has also been made into an animated film, though I’m not familiar with it. Kiki is a witch. When a witch turns 13, she and her cat must fly on her broom from the town where she grew up to find a new town to be her …
Middle-grade fantasy. Book three of the Nevermoor series. Features Morrigan Crow, a serious and sensible girl growing up in an absurd and fantastical realm, along with lots of strange creatures and magic and terrible villains and hijinks. As I’ve observed before, it is enough like that famous series by She Who Must Not Be Named …
Middle-grade. Contemporary. The book opens with the 12 year-old Sunny St. James about to enter surgery for a long-awaited heart transplant. With a penchant for gallows humour, rash decisions, and secret poetry, Sunny is committed to seizing the opportunity presented by her new heart – in the face of painful friend-drama, the sudden return of …
Second and latest book in what promises to be a lengthy series. In my review of book one, I desribed it as “sufficiently akin to *Harry Potter* in premise and story to bear the comparison, but not so similar that you feel like you’ve read it before,” and that assessment holds in book two. It’s …
Middle-grade contemporary. A 12 year-old girl – Ivy, younger sister of one, older sister of baby twins, gifted but shy and closed-off artist – whose family loses their home to a tornado at the beginning of the book navigating post-disaster stress, topsy-turvy family dynamics, and figuring out who she is. And, of course, trying to …