FINISHED:

Balliett, Blue. (2008). The Calder game. New York: Scholastic.

[REALLY pleased with this one. Will definitely push for it to be on this year's Distinguished List with ACL. Thought that Balliett did a FANTASTIC job of working the concept of Calder sculptures into the RELATIONSHIPS between characters and the TEXT itself. The three main kids, Calder, Petra, and Tommy, are jockeying for position amongst each other and their individual relationships with games, words, and found objects (respectively) all play as delicately balanced, always in flux, Calder mobiles. The language is much richer than Balliett's previous two works, and there's still a sense of magical realism here that Balliett does so well.

p.s. It took me SO long to read because I'm a real fan of this series and wanted to savor every word. It paid off.]

STARTED:
Baccalario, Pierdomenico. (2007). Ulysses Moore: The house of mirrors. New York: Scholastic.

[Clearly the publisher has given up much hope for this series. While the first two books in the series were little hardcovers (think: Series of Unfortunate Events) and filled with great illustrations, this one has gone straight to mass market paperback and there really aren't ANY illustrations at all. We'll see if the text holds up with the previous entries...]

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