Active Voice

By Pseudonymous Bosch [LibraryThing – Goodreads]

Cassandra prides herself on being ready for anything, but she’s not ready for the Symphony of Smells – a strange chest full of vials that once belonged to a magician, and that appears one day at her grandfathers’ antique shop. With her new friend Max-Ernest, Cass investigates the magician’s disappearance – and finds herself battling an ancient society, the Midnight Sun, that is seeking the key to immortality. Soon Cass and Max-Ernest join the benevolent Terces Society along with their new friend Yo-Yoji, but the plots of the Midnight Sun grow ever more diabolical, and the mysteries surrounding our heroes grow ever more complex.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Cinda Williams Chima [LibraryThing - Goodreads]

In order to escape being forced into a politically and emotionally disastrous marriage, Princess Raisa flees her queendom and enrolls in Oden’s Ford, a school that caters neutrally to all of the Seven Realms, under an assumed name. Meanwhile, ex-thief Hanson Allister, having discovered that he is a wizard, also travels to Oden’s Ford to learn the magic he’ll need to protect the clans, the closest thing to a family he has left. When they meet, the attraction that sparked between them once before becomes a relationship, but conspiracy gathers around each of them, and they’ll be lucky to make it out of Oden’s Ford alive, let alone together.

Read the rest of this entry »

[Brian Jacques at LibraryThing - Brian Jacques at Goodreads]

One day in fifth grade when I’d exhausted all of the skinny, middle-grade books in our classroom library, my teacher handed me something much thicker, with a smaller font and harder words and a heavier subject matter. “Try this,” she said. It was Brian Jacques’s Mossflower.

I admit I struggled through the first half. There was a lot of plodding through deep snow, a lot of British dialects, a lot of long descriptive passages where not much happened – hard for a hyper kid to sit through. But the more I read, the more engaged I became, and the easier the reading went. It took me months to finish Mossflower. It took me days to finish the other four books in the series.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Edward Eager [LibraryThing - Goodreads]

It’s shaping up to be a perfectly boring summer for Jane, Mark, Katharine, and Martha, until they find a strange coin on the sidewalk that grants wishes…sort of. The coin grants half wishes, so you must wish for twice as much as you want, lest you end up with half a talking cat or half a safe journey home. Figuring out how to double most wishes is simple, but when it comes to finding a happy ending for themselves and their mother, the siblings need something more than just a little arithmetic.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Carolyn Q. Ebbitt [LibraryThing - Goodreads]

Amelia, princess of Gossling, is nothing like her three older sisters. While they are all beautiful, graceful, clever, and talented, she is awkward, stubborn, and a terrible student. But when the king and queen fall victim of a plague and the girls’ cruel uncle, Count Raven, attempts to seize power, Amelia is the only princess to escape the clutches of his magic. Now she must free her sisters from Count Raven’s spell and rally the people of Gossling to fight back before it’s too late.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Shannon Hale, Nathan Hale, and Dean Hale

[Rapunzel's Revenge: LibraryThing - Goodreads | Calamity Jack: LibraryThing - Goodreads]

Rapunzel has lived her whole life in the villa of Mother Gothel, never permitted to look over the surrounding wall. But when she finally catches a glimpse outside, she learns very quickly that Mother Gothel – who, it turns out, is not her mother at all – is a tyrant and the world outside is in need of a hero. Gothel imprisons Rapunzel in a tower – a tower that does something very weird to her hair – but she’s underestimated Rapunzel, who soon breaks out, teams up with a hapless thief named Jack, and sets off across the badlands of Gothel’s Reach, determined to rescue her real mother and bring Gothel down.

In Calamity Jack, Jack and Rapunzel returns to the city of Jack’s birth, from which he was forced to flee after a mishap involving a beanstalk and some giants. Now one of those giants has the city – and Jack’s mother – in an iron grip. With the help of an addlepated inventor and a cunning pixie, Jack must free the city from Blunderboar’s corruption, and prove to both Rapunzel and his mother that he’s more than just a common thief.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Dia Reeves [LibraryThing - Goodreads]

All Hanna wants is for her mom to love her. Never mind that she’s never met her mom, never mind that she’s got a slew of mental health problems and even more pills, never mind that she still hears her dead father’s voice. She forces herself into her mom’s small-town life — only to find that Portero, the town, is even crazier than she is. But somehow, a town full of missing persons signs, hidden doors, and killer monsters is exactly what Hanna needs to fit in, because Portero might be crazy, but Hanna is crazier.

(FYI: “crazy” is the book’s word, not mine. A lot of this review is about ableism and mental health, so I wanted to make that clear up front.)

Mild spoilers uncovered beneath the cut. Read the rest of this entry »

By Catherine Fisher [LibraryThing - Goodreads]

Now that Finn has Escaped, he thought everything would be different, but the Realm outside is no paradise. He’s supposed to be a long lost prince, but doesn’t remember anything about his past — and out of nowhere, another boy has appeared, claiming to be the very same prince. With no way to prove his claim, he, Claudia, and the scholar Jared can only hope to restore communication with Incarceron and find the missing Warden.

Things inside Incarceron aren’t stable, either. Attia and Keiro realize Finn either can’t or won’t get them out, and search for their own Escape. And even Incarceron itself is changing, seeking an Escape… but how can a prison escape itself? And exactly who, or what, is Sapphique?

This is the end of the series, and I can’t discuss it without spoilers, so beware! Uncut spoilers under the cut.
Read the rest of this entry »

[Behemoth: Librarything - Goodreads | Blue Fire: Librarything - Goodreads]

These two books don’t actually have much in common, but I’m killing two birds with one stone here because they’re both sequels to books I really enjoyed, and while I liked both books, I don’t have a heck of a lot to say about either one.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Joanne Dahme [LibraryThing - Goodreads]

[Sometimes we come across books that even we can’t finish. But how can we give them a rating if we haven’t finished them? Thus we have the Unfinished/Unrated category, for those times when we want to talk about a book we didn’t finish – and why.]

From the back cover copy: “In order to fit in at her new school, Jessie accepts a dare to spend one night in a local cemetery. Once inside the heavy iron entrance gate, she encounters a handsome young boy named Paul. He tells her that she is just in time to watch the rehearsal of Tombstone Tea, a memorial for those buried in the cemetery in which actors impersonate the deceased. But Jessie notices that there is something strange about these actors – something deadly.”

Read the rest of this entry »