Site Updates and News…including Twilight and yes, even Zombies

Hi everyone and sorry for my lack of postings the past month. A blog is only as good as its updates, and in this regard I have been sorely lacking. But I am back from vacation and starting my third (and final!) semester at library school and I am back at blogging. A few site [...]

Other Vamps on my Bookshelf (OR, what to read if Edward is not your soulmate)

The House of Night series , which is now 5 books long, follows the story of young vampire Zoey Redbird, an ordinary teenager in the first book, Marked, who suddenly finds herself going through growing pains beyond that of a normal teenager as she transforms into a vampire. The books are set in a alternate [...]

New on my Bookshelf…..

The Year We Disappeared: non-fiction father-daughter memoir from Cylin and John Busby that describes the year their family spent in hiding after a vicious attempted assassination on John, a police officer, by a suspect he was investigating. Filled with page-turning passages (“I could tell I was going to bleed to death before the EMTs arrived…”) [...]

Spirited Away to ‘Half World’: A Book Review

Half World Hiromi Goto Toronto: Puffin Canada, 2009 230 pgs, hardcover, $20.00 (CAD) ISBN: 978-0670069651 Once the three realms were united. The Flesh World, the Spirit World, and Half World. Through the realms, human beings cycled in an endless process of death, renewal and rebirth. But then, the realms splintered. Disconnected, apathy grew in the [...]

Funny, I know: A reading response to ‘Alice, I think’

Alice: 15 years old, home schooled for 10 of those, and heading back to school for the first time since her disastrous first day of grade 1, which she attended dressed as a hobbit – complete with a pointy felt cap. Funny, endearing, full of thrift store fashions and hippie parents and all set in [...]

On my bookshelf….

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: Vol. 1, The Pox Party: written by YA author M.T. Anderson (who previously wrote the YA vampire novel, Thirsty), Octavian Nothing is a story of historical fiction set around the time of the American Revolution and it is about science, intelligence, experimentation and racial prejudice — a book that [...]

Change, We Can Believe In: A Book Review of ‘Wide Awake’

Wide Awake David Levithan. Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2008. 240 pgs., pbk., $9.99 (CAD) ISBN: 978-0375834677 In the near future, candidate Abraham Stein wins twenty-six states, prevailing by a narrow margin to become the first gay, Jewish president in American history. To sixteen-year-old Duncan, who is both gay and Jewish himself, this news is [...]