Courtney's Book Nook

Welcome to this round-up of what I found in my blog reading this week!  Please let me know of any posts I missed. First up-- the call for judges for the Cybils Awards has gone up !  Since 2006, the Cybils has recognized kids and YA books that combine both literary merit and kid appeal in a variety of categories, and one of these is Middle Grade Speculative Fiction (the category I organize)!  There are two rounds of judging, the first creating a shortlist, and the second picking the winner, and so there's room for lots of folks to join in and be part of the judging panels!  It is lots of fun.  So much so that many of the same folks want do Middle Grade Speculative Fiction every year, and although I love them dearly, it would be great to have some fresh volunteers! All you have to do to be eligible is to review books somewhere on line--podcasting, book tubbing, blogging, Goodreads reviews, Instagram, etc. Teens are eligible too (with parents permission if under 18...

Changeling (The Oddmire, Book 1) by William Ritter (middle grade, Algonquin Young Readers, July 2019), is a story about magic, identity, and family love that's a beautiful read.  That being said, with conviction, there was one bit toward the end that left me feeling cross (spoiler down toward the end). Annie Burton remembered giving birth to one baby boy.  But then a second baby boy, identical to the other, appeared in the cradle overnight.  A goblin, Kull, had brought a changling to her home, not from malice but in a last ditch effort to bring back the balance of magic to the world...but he got confused, and was forced to flee the house before he could figure out which was the human child he'd planned to take away to the magic half of the world, and which was the shapeshifting goblin baby.  Annie can't tell the difference either, and so she sets out to raise both boys, Cole and Tinn, like her own.  They are both her much loved children, getting into mischief a...

Waking in Time , by Angie Stanton (Capstone 2017), is a timeslip story set at college, combining two things I love in books! The start of Abbi's freshman year at UW Madison, where her grandmother and great-grandmother had both studied, is not as happy as she'd thought it would be. She is still grieving the recent death of her grandmother, and this casts a shadow over all the things she'd been looking forward to. But she doesn't get any time to feel at home. The second morning there, she wakes up to find herself in the same college dorm, but in 1983. And as the book progresses, she keeps moving quickly back in time. Then she wakes to find her own grandmother is her room-mate. She's thrilled to get the chance to be with her grandmother again, and wonders if she'll find a clue about her dying request to "find the baby." And then she meets her great-grandmother, and finds out a sad truth about her family. Meanwhile, Will who started at the universi...

Here's what I found this week; please let me know if I missed your post! The Reviews 11 Birthdays, by Wendy Mass, at The Secret Files of Fairday Morrow Are You Ready to Hatch and Unusual Chicken? by Kelly Jones, at Not Acting My Age Aru Sha and the Song of Death, by Roshani Chokshi, at proseandkahn (audiobook review) The Beasts of Grimheart (Longburrow #3), by Kieran Larwood, at BooksForKidsBlog The Boy From Tomorrow, by Camille DeAngelis, at Puss Reboots Caravan Holiday, by Hilda Boden, at Charlotte's Library Changling (The Wormling #3), by Jerry B. Jenkins and Chris Fabry, at Say What? The Curse of the Werepenguin, by Allan Woodrow, at Ms. Yingling Reads  Dragonfell, by Sarah Prineas, at alibrarymama Eventown, by Corey Ann Haydu, at Not Acting My Age The Gauntlet, by Karuna Riazi, at A Dance With Books The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman, at Rajv's Reviews The House With Chicken Legs, by Sophie Anderson, at Book Craic Inkling, by Kenneth Oppel, at Rajiv's Reviews Th...

Though I enjoy current fantasy lots and lots, my true comfort readers are mid-twentieth century UK fiction.  And so when I was given a copy of Caravan Holiday, by Hilda Boden (1953), I was very pleased, and when I found out it was an archaeological timeslip story, I should have been even more pleased, but the sad fact of the matter is that it wasn't great. Timothy and Susan are spending the summer holiday in a caravan on a farm by the seaside, while their archaeologist parents investigate a possible stone age site.  They find a secluded little valley with  stream, where Timothy decides to build his own house, and perhaps even camp there.   A strange boy, Noor, shows up, who seems to know everything about building small temporary structures, starting fires, hunting animals, and other useful things.  Gradually it becomes clear that he's slipping through time from Neolithic England.... Join Timothy as he gets his archaeologist father's ideas about gender roles of t...

Voyages in the Underworld of Orpheus Black , by Marcus Sedgwick and Julian Sedgewick, illustrated by Alexis Deacon (Walker Books US, August 13, 2019), is a strange, melancholy, moving fever-dream of a story.  It tells of young Henry Black, a conscientious objector battling the fires of the London blitz, who dreams of chronicling the war through his art and his journal writing (this journal constitutes the prose and pictures of the book).  His decision not to fight has created a rift between him and his father and brother, Ellis.  It's the loss of Ellis that hurts Henry most, and so he is glad that Ellis agrees to meet him at a London pub.  The two brothers don't exactly reconcile, but it is clear that their love is still alive at its roots.  And then, after Henry leaves the pub, it is bombed, as is the bus Henry was trying to take home. When he wakes with a severe head injury in the hospital, his journal turns into a feverish record of his desperate efforts to f...

Here's what I found this week; please let me know about anything I missed so I can add it! The Reviews Abby in Wonderland, by  Sarah Mlynowski, at Jill's Book Blog The Boy Who Cried Werewolf, by J.H. Reynolds, at YA Books Central Cape, by Kate Hannigan, at Ms. Yingling Reads and Books4YourKids The Crystal Ribbon, by Celeste Lim, at thelittlebookowl The Elephant Secret, by Eric Walters, at Of Maria Antonia Jagger Jones and the Mummy's Ankh, by Malayna Evans, at Charlotte's Library The Land of Roar, by Jenny McLachlan, at Book Craic Malamander, by Thomas Taylor, at Mom Read It Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow, by Jessica Townsend, at Mrs. Day's Summer Reading Blog Order of the Majestic, by Matt Myklusch, at GeoLibrarian The Peculiar Peggs of Ridling Woods, by Samuel J. Halpin, at Book Gannet Reviews Princess BMX, by Marie Basting, at Storgy Kids Rise of the Dragon Moon, by Gabrielle K. Byrne, at Charlotte's Library   Rise of the Dragons, by Angie Sage, ...

Rise of the Dragon Moon , by Gabrielle K. Byrne (Macmillan, August 6, 2019), is a delightfully chilly middle-grade fantasy that's perfect escapist reading for a hot summer day! Princess Toli is heir to the throne of a queendom of ice.  Her people live a hand to mouth existence, with starvation always a grim possibility, and the cyclical migrations of the dragons a grim certainty.  Toli hates the dragons.  Not only must her people offer a precious tithe of meat to them each year, but in an unprecedented fluke, dragons killed her father.  And Toli blames herself.. Toli's mother, the queen, wants Toli to set aside her dreams of being a great hunter like her father, though Toli has little interest in the minutia of keeping the queendom running smoothly.  But she gets little chance to obey her mother.  When this year's Dragon Moon rises, and the Queen must go out to meet the dragons, they seize her and carry her off.  Toli is convinced she must set out hers...

Young fans of ancient Egypt will find much to enjoy in Jagger Jones and the Mummy's Ankh , by Malayna Evans (Month9Books, May, 2019), although it didn't quite work for me. Jagger Jones is a biracial kid from Chicago who loves learning about the past, preferably from the comfort of his own home.  Unfortunately for Jagger, his mother and little sister, Aria, are both passionate about adventuring, and he's dragged around the world in their wake.  In Egypt, Jagger wakes one night to hear a voice calling out to him, and he follows it outside, followed in turn  by Aria, though she can't hear the voice.  Jagger digs into the ground to find its source, and the two kids find themselves in an undisturbed ancient Egyptian burial chamber, with a golden ankh, the source of the voice, resting on a mummy.  When Aria grabs hold of the ankh, they find themselves back in the time of Akhenaten, the pharaoh who rejected the Egyptian pantheon and set up his own religion. Akhenaten's...

Welcome to another week of my blog reading, hunting for mg speculative fiction reviews and news!  Please let me know if I missed your post. The Reviews Amelia Fang and the Barbaric Ball, by Laura Ellen Anderson, at Always in the Middle and Feed Your Fiction Addiction Aru Shan and the End of Time, by Roshani Chokshi, at Rajiv's Reviews The Bone Garden, by Heather Kassner, at Charlotte's Libary The Book of the King (The Wormling #1) by Jerry B. Jenkins and Chris Fabry, at Say What? Briar and Rose and Jack, by Katherine Coville, at Pages Unbound Fire Girl, Forest Boy, by Chloe Daykin, at Magic Fiction Since Potter The Girl Who Drank the Moon, by Kelly Barnhill, at Book Craic Lair of the Beast (Snared #2)., by Adam Jay Epstein, at Say What? The Lost Tide Warriors, by Catherine Doyle, at Magic Fiction Since Potter Love Sugar Magic series review, by Anna Meriano, at Falling Letters Moonlocket (Cogheart #2), by Peter Bunzl, at A Dance With Books A Small Zombie Problem, by K.G. Camp...

The Bone Garden , by Heather Kassner (middle grade, Henry Holt, August 6 2019), is a lovely, creepy story perfect for those who love children finding found families. Eleven-year-old Irréelle is used to spending her days hunting beneath the cemetery that is her home, making her way through dark tunnels of the bone garden to fetch the bone dust for her mistress, the demanding Miss Vesper.  She's never rewarded for her efforts; Miss Vesper constantly finds fault with her, criticizing her mismatched, crooked body.  It's Miss Vesper's fault that Irréelle is not a perfectly shaped girl, because she was the one who made her, something she's constantly reminding the girl about.  Irréelle is terrified that Miss Vesper, her creator, will un-create her some day, and also can't help but hope that if she is good enough, she can be remade into a "normal" girl. Her life is lonely, until she meets two other children in the graveyard, Guy and Lass, and befriends as well on...