FINISHED:

Schmidt, Gary D. (2007). The Wednesday wars. New York: Clarion.

[This one really did turn out to be pretty darn fun. It's set during the Vietnam War and is about a 7th grade kid named Holling Hoodhood who is Presbyterian, so, while on Wednesday afternoons half of his class goes to Temple and the other half go to Catechism, he's stuck alone with his teacher, Mrs. Baker. After initially punishing Holling for being Presbyterian (if he were Catholic or Jewish she'd have the afternoon off...) by making him clean chalkboards and erasers, she decides to have him start working his way through Shakespeare's plays. It's a fun series of wacky stuff occurring over the course of a school year, with Mrs. Baker's husband being lost in the War, Holling having to deal with his father whose only goals are to be Businessman of the Year and have Holling take over his architecture firm, a sister who wants to be a flowerchild, yellow tights with feathers on the butt, and cream puffs. Best YA book of the year? Well, it's great, but holding me back is a scene where Holling is literally chased across the schoolyard by a couple of rats. Most of this book made me laugh out loud, but that scene made me go, "Oh, come on!"]

STARTED:

Sanchez, Alex. (2004). So hard to say. New York: Simon & Schuster.

[Another one for gay youngsters from the guy who did the Rainbow series of books.]

*

FINISHED:
Schmidt, Gary D. (2011). Okay for now. New York: Clarion/Houghton Mifflin.

[After his abusive father is fired from his job, Doug Swieteck and his family are uprooted and replanted to a small, rural town in upstate New York. Doug gets a job making deliveries for a local market owned by the father of a cute girl from school, and follows the girl into the town library. Here, Doug discovers an old John James Audubon book of bird drawings which inspire him to refine his own drawing, and launch a search to recover some of the missing pages. (Each chapter title is that of a bird found in Audubon’s book, with the accompanying illustration included for reference.) In this companion novel to his own The Wednesday Wars (Clarion, 2007), Schmidt has made Doug a good, well-intentioned kid with whom the reader can immediately sympathize and root for. Doug’s library and drawing excursions show the transportative and transformative power of art and the written word/knowledge, and, most importantly, become a ticket of escape and a way to a better future for Doug. Loaded with humor, quirky characters and some sadness (the scenes involving Doug’s oldest brother returning from a tour in the Vietnam War are particularly striking), Okay For Now is a masterstroke for Schmidt in an already glowing body of work. [Reviewed from ARC.]]

STARTED:
Glass, Linzi. (2010). Finding Danny. New York: Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins.

[Reviewing for SFPL...]

*

FINISHED:

Sanderson, Brandon. (2007). Alcatraz versus the evil librarians. New York: Scholastic.

[Will post my review for ACL after I write it. Here it is:

After burning down the kitchen of his umpteenth foster family’s house, Alcatraz Smedry, prone to breaking things, is whisked away by an old man who shows up at the door claiming to be his grandfather. Grandfather Leavenworth (all Smedry males are named after prisons), after explaining that librarians are in control of all information and hope to keep “Hushlanders” in the dark about certain facts, leads Alcatraz on a mission to break into the downtown library (evil librarian headquarters). They’re on a mission to retrieve a box of sand that Alcatraz received for his 13th birthday – sand, that if melted into glass lenses, may hold the key to a long forgotten secret language. The first in a series, Alcatraz is packed with wise-cracking humor, brisk action, and introduces young readers to a new world of intriguing gadgets, heroes, and villains.
Each chapter begins with editorializing from our protagonist narrator – chatter, though often quite humorous, that tends to interrupt the flow of the action and, by the end, grows a bit tiresome (especially when it suggests that novels about the Great Depression “rot the brain”). A surprising highlight, however, is a moving, introspective passage in which Alcatraz comes the realization that maybe he has pushed people away all his life – that his talent for breaking things extends to not letting anyone get to close to him. This is a light, often quite funny, book – the first in a series – which teases and tickles from the first line to the last. Fans of light fantasy and humor will find this one quite satisfying.]

STARTED:

Schmidt, Gary D. (2007). The Wednesday wars. New York: Clarion.

[Getting a lot of pre-Newbery buzz, and I'm REALLY liking it so far. It's not super often that a novel can make me laugh out loud.]

*

FINISHED:
Holm, Jennifer L. (2010). Turtle in paradise. New York: Random House.

[.]

STARTED:
Schmidt, Gary D. (2011). Okay for now. New York: Clarion/Houghton Mifflin.

[REALLY enjoyed The Wednesday Wars so I'm excited to start this "companion novel".]

*