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.

[.]

*

FINISHED:
Mull, Brandon. (2011). Beyonders: A world without heroes. New York: Simon & Schuster.

[Jason is transported, by way of the mouth of a hippo at the zoo he works at, to another world where he is set on a quest to find the syllables to a word which will vanquish the evil lord of the land forever.]

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

[.]

*

FINISHED:
Gantos, Jack. (1998). Joey Pigza swallowed the key. New York: HarperCollins.

[.]

STARTED:
Mull, Brandon. (2011). Beyonders: A world without heroes. New York: Simon & Schuster.

[.]

*

FINISHED:
Potter, Ellen. (2010). The kneebone boy. New York: Feiwel & Friends.

[Took me so long because I was on vacation for a week and didn't get a chance to read at all.]

STARTED:
Gantos, Jack. (1998). Joey Pigza swallowed the key. New York: HarperCollins.

[Have had this on my shelf for quite some time... and it's overdue...]

*

FINISHED:
Service, Pamela F. (2011). Alien envoy. Minneapolis, MN: Lerner.

[Zack is an alien from the planet Izbor who was physically altered and sent to Earth as an Alien Agent for the Galactic Patrol. On Halloween night, Zack, the Alien Envoy to Earth, is picked up by fellow agents and whisked away in their spacecraft to meet with the Galactic Council who are deciding whether or not to invite Earth to join the Galactic Union. Unfortunately, it’s not an easy trip as the Kiapa Kapa Syndicate, who seem to have uncovered Zack’s true identity and are bent on making sure that he doesn’t make it in front of the Council, seem to be hot on their heels. Service has crafted a brisk, rollicking adventure with just the right amount of action and a healthy dose of hilarious description (“Zythis cleared his several throats.”), and even manages to slip in social messages about race relations (“When our people learned how to change the face of living things, we made it so that everyone was born a different color. That way there could be no groups of one color hating people of another color. Everyone was different.”) and commentary on how we treat our planet (“These people of Earth have not only endangered their own world; they could threaten the peace of the entire galaxy! A study of their history shows them to be a hopelessly reckless, warlike people.”). Gorman’s modern-cartoon illustrations appear in just the right amount – not too often or too sparse – and add the right zing, giving face to some of the more bizarrely described alien beings. This sixth installment in the Alien Agent series (Carolrhoda, 2008) works perfectly well on its own as a brief outerspace adventure that reluctant readers should find particularly appealing.]

STARTED:Potter, Ellen. (2010). The kneebone boy. New York: Feiwel & Friends.

[.]

*

STARTED:
Service, Pamela F. (2011). Alien envoy. Minneapolis, MN: Lerner.

[Reviewing for ACL.]

*

FINISHED:
Wells, Rosemary. (2010). On the Blue Comet. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press.

[.]

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

[Reviewing for ACL.]

*

ABANDONED:
Donoghue, Emma. (2010). Room. New York: Little, Brown & Co.

[.]

STARTED:
Wells, Rosemary. (2010). On the Blue Comet. Somerville, MA: Candlewick Press.

[.]

*