Fluttering Butterflies

In Dragons in a Bag (link to my review), Zetta Elliott introduced a  young boy named Jaxon, who was given a job to do by a magical old woman, Ma.  He had to return three baby dragons to the world of magic.  It didn't go as planned, not that Jaxon knew enough about what was going on to really "plan" anything, but he did his best.  It wasn't enough.  One of the babies was stolen by Kavita, the little sister of his best friend, Vik. The Dragon Thief   (Random House, Oct 22 1019) picks up the story right where we left it.  Jaxon is worried about Ma, who has fallen into a strange sleep, and he's desperate to get the baby dragon to the magical world.  Kavita is worried about the baby dragon, which grows at an alarming rate when it gets fed.  When she realizes she can't keep it safe, her old aunty who lives with her family decides to help her get it home. So on the one hand we have Jaxon and Vik, racing to find Kavita while figuring out how they ca...

Here's what I found this week; please let me know if I missed your post (or a post about your book....) The Reviews The Book of Three, by Lloyd Alexander, at Say What? The Bookwanderers, by Anna James, at Ms. Yingling Reads and Book Nut Dead Voices, by Katherine Arden, at Geo Librarian and Books4YourKids The Dragon Warrior, by Katie Zhao, at Read Love Ember and the Ice Dragons, by Heather Fawcett, at Ms. Yingling Reads Iggy and Oz: the Plastic Dinos of Doom, by J.J. Johnson, at Reading, Writing, and Stitch Metric Knock Three Times (Wizards of Once #3), by Cressida Cowell, at Twirling Book Princess Lalani of the Distant Sea, by Erin Entrada Kelly, at Puss Reboots Lintang and the Pirate Queen, by Tamara Moss, at Read Love The Lost Girl, by Anne Ursu, at Not Acting My Age Malamander, by Thomas Taylor, at Milliebot Reads The Poison Jungle, by Tui T. Sutherland, at Hidden in Pages Rise of the Dragons, by Angie Sage, at Say What? The Rubicus Prophecy, by Alane Adams, at Always in the ...

blogging here has been slow (just as soon as I finish painting the outside of my house, which I hope to do tomorrow, because goodness knows if there will ever be any nice warm days this fall), but I have been reading lots, and have written several nice posts for the Barnes and Noble Kids Blog! My posts from the last month are: 10 Middle Grade Island Adventures to Thrill and Delight Young Readers  8 Great New Middle Grade Action and Adventure Stories!  Get On the Case with 5 Brand New Middle Grade Mysteries  From Slightly Spooky to Downright Frightening: 8 Haunting New Middle Grade Ghost Stories Two were assignments, for which I didn't pick the books myself, two were ideas I pitched to the blog editor.  At the moment I'm finishing off a list post of books with bullying....surprisingly not as depressing to read as I'd feared!

If you are in the mood for a real page turner of a YA time travel story (it only took me two and a bit hours to read 400 pages), with lots of twists, lots of great characters, and lots of action, look no further than Stolen Time, by Danielle Rollins (Febraury 2019, HarperTeen). It begins in Seattle, in 1913, when Dorothy runs away from the marriage her con-artist mother has inveigled her into.  Her flight leads her to a time traveler, from New Seattle, 2077.  Ash is on a mission to find his mentor, the professor who figured out time travel technology, and who disappeared. leaving his team of young people gathered from different times without guidance and purpose.  Dorothy stows away in his ship, and Ash inadvertently takes her back to his own time, to a city devastated by earthquakes and inundated by tidal waves. It's a city living in fear of a vicious gang, whose co-leader, Roman, was once one of the professor's brightest students.  But Roman wanted time travel to ...

Here's what I found this week; please let me know if I missed your post! (I changed my post title from "around the blogs" to "around the web" but do cool kids these days actually say "the web"?  Would "on-line" be more au currant ?) Book Reviews Archimancy, by J.A. White, at Puss Reboots The Battle, by Karuna Riazi, at Randomly Reading The Beast (Darkdeep #2), by Ally Condie and Brendan Reichs, at Ms. Yingling Reads The Dark Lord Clementine, by Sarah Jean Horwitz, at Cracking the Cover and A Garden of Books The Dragon Warrior, by Katie Zhao, at Endless Chapters , For Ever and Everly , and The Quiet Pond Dual at Araluen (Royal Ranger #3), by John Flanagan, at Say What? The Evil Wizard Smallbone, by Delia Sherman, at Kid Lit Geek The Fire Keeper, by J.C. Cervantes, at Pamela Kramer Guardians of Magic, by Chris Riddell, at Book Craic The Jumbie God's Revenge, by Tracey Baptiste, at Sally's Bookshelf The Key of Lost Things (Hotel Bet...

I just read, and wrote about, Tristan Strong Punches a Hole in the Sky , by Kwame Mbalia, for a Barnes and Noble Kids Blog post, so I'm not going to do a full review here.  But I want to talk about it here a bit too, since this is my more personal record of book reading. Wow!  This is so powerful, and sad, and important, and funny (in places), and the sort of book one wants to give to kids Right Now. Tristan's grief over his best friend's death, and the way he blames himself for it, and his sense of failure for loosing his first boxing match (I was cross at his dad and grandfather for being so clearly disappointed in him) set the stage for his journey into a world of magic and mayhem.  He's carrying a lot of emotional weight with him when he punches the titular hole in the sky, and once he goes through, a whole heap more is piled on him. And it's not just personal weight, but the weight of sad and terrible history. There's the fact that the primary attacking mon...

Back in 2017 I wrote a post for the Barnes and Noble Kids Blog about dystopian middle grade books, and I've been asked to refresh it.  Problem is, there haven't been a whole lot of mg dystopian books published in the US since then, and it has to be something available at B and N! I think of dystopian primarily as a systemic loss of civil liberties, although environmental collapse with concomitant social collapse works for me too. Here's what I've found so far, with help from twitter.  It isn't much, though I have combed through Goodreads and Kirkus, and have myself read about 500 mg books in the past two years. I am wondering if the fact that we are actually living in an increasingly dystopian world is making US publishers less interested in dystopian mg..... I would love love love more suggestions of books available in the US, especially books by diverse authors!  and feel free to disagree with my classification of any of these as "dystopian." Suggested, ...