FINISHED:
Nielsen-Fernlund, Susin. (2010). Dear George Clooney: Please marry my mom. Toronto: Tundra.

[.]

STARTED:
Jenkins, Emily. (2011). Invisible Inkling. New York: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins.

[Reviewing for SFPL.]

*

FINISHED:
Kibuishi, Kazu. (2010). The cloud searchers [Amulet: Book 3]. New York: Graphix/Scholastic.

[.]

STARTED:
Nielsen-Fernlund, Susin. (2010). Dear George Clooney: Please marry my mom. Toronto: Tundra.

[Seeing if I deem it worthy of being on the ACL Distinguished list.]

*

FINISHED:
Soo, Kean. (2009). Jellaby: Monster in the city. New York: Disney/Hyperion.

[Looking just now, it seems that this is the SECOND Jellaby tale... I thought that it was the THIRD... so maybe I've actually read it before...]

STARTED:
Kibuishi, Kazu. (2010). The cloud searchers [Amulet: Book 3]. New York: Graphix/Scholastic.

[I don't really recall what happened in the first two, but...]

*

FINISHED:
Augarde, Steve. (2010). X Isle. New York: David Fickling Books.

[.]

STARTED:
Soo, Kean. (2009). Jellaby: Monster in the city. New York: Disney/Hyperion.

[Going to blast though a couple of graphic novels that have been sitting by the side of the bed for far too long...]

*

FINISHED:
Birdsall, Jeanne. (2011). The Penderwicks at Point Mouette. New York: Random House.

[.]

STARTED:
Augarde, Steve. (2010). X Isle. New York: David Fickling Books.

[.]

*

FINISHED:
Hunter, Erin. (2011). Spirits in the stars [Seekers #6]. New York: HarperCollins.

[.]

STARTED:
Birdsall, Jeanne. (2011). The Penderwicks at Point Mouette. New York: Random House.

[Yippeee!]

*

FINISHED:
Yee, Lisa. (2011). Warp speed. New York: Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic.

[Marley is a middle schooler who is definitely on the outs. He LOVES Star Trek, lives above the broken down old movie theatre his father runs, is an active member of the school AV club, feels completely invisible, and gets spit on and beat up and chased by bullies almost daily. Things begin to change slightly when Marley gets paired up with a cute new girl at school, his old friend Stanford who is now the star basketball player begins to talk to him again, and it turns out that Marley is the fastest runner his school has ever seen.]

STARTED:
Hunter, Erin. (2011). Spirits in the stars [Seekers #6]. New York: HarperCollins.

[She's got me hooked on these adventures of Kallik, Lusa, Toklo and Ujurak...]

*

FINISHED:
Archer, E. (2011). Geek fantasy novel. New York: Scholastic.

[[Reviewed from ARC.] Ralph is an American tech-geek hired by his aunt and uncle to come to their aging British castle to, ostensibly, help them set up a wireless network. Upon his arrival, Ralph meets his three cousins and another aunt, Aunt Chessie, whom the rest of the family has seemed to ostracize. Ralph eventually comes to understand that his mother and her sisters are fairy godmothers of a sort, imbued with the ability to grant each child one wish. However, after a mishap with Chessie’s son many years earlier, the women have sworn off that part of their nature. Naturally, each of Ralph’s cousins ends up making a wish which Aunt Chessie is only too happy to grant, and which ends up transporting each of them to an alternate reality. One cousin’s wish involves mobilizing a bunch of fairies to rebel against their oppressors, another is a riff off Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”, and in the last Ralph must travel to purgatory and the underworld. Archer (actually author Elliot Schrefer) has written a novel for which the title is perfectly apt: the author has thrown in every fantasy creature, setting, and convention imaginable and, thus, comes across as just too ambitious. By the time you get to Ralph finding a teddy bear with a mirror in its paw which he then wraps around his head in order to view a wintery “otherworld”, you know that Archer has gone overboard. A bit of redemption comes toward the end of the novel when the narrator begins to cross the line and starts to interact with the characters, setting up a plot twist that will likely surprise most readers, and turning the novel into a meta-fictional whirlwind with a rather unconventional denouement. Rather bloated, unfocused and confounding, though, Archer’s novel, even with its exploding bunny rabbits, is just overdone.]

STARTED:
Yee, Lisa. (2011). Warp speed. New York: Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic.

[.]

*

FINISHED:
O'Connor, Barbara. (2010). The fantastic secret of Owen Jester. New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux.

[Owen is out playing one evening with Tooley, the bullfrog he's captured from a nearby pond, when he hears something fall off of a train that is passing by. After a lengthy search, all the while trying to ditch the nosey neighbor girl, Viola, Owen discovers that what has fallen off the train is a two-person submarine. Now, Owen and his friends are on a mission to get the submarine into the local pond, and might just need the assistance of Viola after all...]

STARTED (FINISHING UP):
Archer, E. (2011). Geek fantasy novel. New York: Scholastic.

[.]

*