H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu for Beginning Readers looks like a children’s easy reader book, but it’s definitely not one! Written, illustrated, and bound in the style of Dr. Seuss, it tells the basics of the Cthulhu mythos. I wouldn’t use it as bedtime reading for your 5 year old, but my teenagers and […]
Goodbye Stranger
September 17, 2017 by Leave a Comment
Review written by Jonathan Lavallee My daughter Rowan, who was 10 when I started doing guest reviews and is now 15, tends to like books filled with melancholia. Those usually aren’t my thing, but because she reads them I’m trying to expand my reading habits. Goodbye Stranger is one of those books, and it’s such […]
Hour of the Bees
September 16, 2017 by Leave a Comment
Review written by Jonathan Lavallee How do you measure time? Hour of the Bees measures time in teardrops that fall as you read the book. Carol, nee Carolina, has discovered that she is going to spend her summer at her grandfather’s ranch. He has late stage dementia and they are getting things ready so they […]
The Sleeper and the Spindle
March 19, 2017 by Leave a Comment
The Sleeper and the Spindle, written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Chris Riddell, is a picture book inspired by Sleeping Beauty and some other fairy tales. But don’t let the picture book format make you think this isn’t a wonderful book for older readers. In fact, I think it’s probably best for older readers, including […]
When You Reach Me
September 9, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Review written by Jonathan Lavallee. “The trip is a difficult one, I will not be myself when I reach you.” In When You Reach Me, Miranda is the daughter of a single mom who got an invitation to be on the $20,000 Dollar Pyramid. She’s dealing with the strain of helping her mom train, as […]
The Door in the Hedge
January 14, 2016 by Leave a Comment
Review written by Jonathan Lavallee. The Door in the Hedge came on my radar as I was trolling through the Toronto Public Library ebook website. It was part of the Big Library Read program where the company that handles ebooks for the library, Overdrive, decided to let everyone borrow this book and even provided points […]
Summer’s Friendship Games
June 15, 2015 by Leave a Comment
Summer’s Friendship Games is the fourth book in the Jim Henson’s Enchanted Sisters series. I haven’t read the first three, and that wasn’t a problem as far as understanding the characters and plot—maybe some things would have had a little more meaning had I read the others, but it wasn’t really an issue. There are four […]
Gabby Duran and the Unsittables
May 11, 2015 by 2 Comments
Gabby Duran and the Unsittables is a funny story that pretty much lives up to its name. Gabby Duran is a babysitter so good that her clients are willing to fly her to her challenging babysitting gigs. The first job we see her on is the triplet daughters of an actor who needs someone to […]
brown girl dreaming
May 6, 2015 by Leave a Comment
Review written by Jonathan Lavallee. There is a distinct lack of poetry in the world. Part of that could be that we hold poetry on this weird dusty pedestal, surrounded by academics all nodding sagely and talking in hushed tones about the power of words. That or we’ve put it down among the toys for […]
Tangled Magick
April 28, 2015 by Leave a Comment
Hapenny Magick is a favorite of mine and my daughter’s, so we were excited to get a review copy of the sequel Tangled Magick! Reading the sequel made me wish I’d taken the time to reread the first one, but most things came back to me pretty quickly. Two years have passed since the events […]
