You have to love a kid that creates havoc by inventing a new word! When mischievous fifth-grader Nick Allen gets an explanation of how dynamic our language is, and how words make it into dictionaries through their use, he decides to put things to the test. Nick invents a new word for the common PEN, and starts a linguistic battle in the classroom and beyond the school's walls....
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Paige's review of Frindle |
Out of the Dust takes place on the Oklahoma prairies in the United States. On this side of the U.S., there are many very harsh dust storms. Billie-Jo’s house is small with cracks in the walls and that causes the dust to creep in so their house has a thin or thick coat of dust on everything.
The main characters are Billie-Jo, her Ma and Dad....
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Paige's review of Out of the Dust |
There are three settings in the novel The Root Cellar. The story opens in present day New York City where the main character, twelve year-old Rose, lives with her wealthy grandmother. Rose’s grandmother has been her guardian since she was three years old. The second setting is at Hawthorn Bay, Canada, where Rose goes to live with her aunt and uncle....
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Paige's review of The Root Cellar |
You can count on a good mystery to keep me, Paige Turner, turning pages!
My Brother's Keeper, by Marion Woodson, is the fascinating tale of an actual Canadian cult leader, Brother Twelve, who established a spiritual commune on Vancouver Island's east coast.
Fourteen year-old Sarah Prentiss goes to the island home of her uncle to babysit....
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Paige's review of My Brother's Keeper |
Little Princess Aasta is lonely and wants a bear to love. She puts an ad in the local paper and is inundated with letters and photos of bears from around the world. She chooses the one with the friendliest eyes. Despite the bear’s intimidating size, their meeting sparks an instant friendship that leads to a happily-ever-after relationship....
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Paige's review of Princess Aasta |
This book made me into a real page turner! The Mysterious Visitor is the third in the popular Lion and Bobbi Mystery Series. In this novel, Bobbi and Lion follow their father to the southern interior of British Columbia, Canada, to an ecologically-sensitive area that is home to 30% of Canada's endangered species....
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Paige's review of The Mysterious Visitor |
Winners Take All is a baseball story about a good kid named Kyle who makes a bad decision - in the heat of a really close game - to cheat. His cheating clinches a big win for his team and he's an instant hero. But his life starts to unravel when another kid discovers the cheating and threatens to tell....
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Paige's review of Winners Take All |
The Binkertons have come back for KNORR. Strange things happen if you stumble upon Julian T. Pettigrew's Good Times Travel Agency. In fact, only the letters Time Travel remain on the sign above his odd shop. Despite their best intentions, the Binkerton kids - Josh, Emma and Libby - find themselves in the travel shop....
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Paige's review of Adventures with the Vikings |
Wow, just imagine being on the brink of an amazing discovery! Working in the field searching for clues from the past is a tiresome job until you find something like this! A bone fragment sticking out of the ground is sometimes the only clue that your search has been worthwhile.
If you think the dinosaur days of carnivore w...
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Paige's review of Ornithomimus: Pursuing the Bird-Mimic Dinosaur |
Queenie, a sad little girl who’s old Tabby cat died, goes out each day, full of hope, to call for him. Ben, her brother, declares that he’s not coming back.
It’s then that she meets Tom Finger, a young, bold and mysterious Tabby with bright blue eyes. He wanders in from the snow and cold and warms Queenie’s heart and then disappears before their eyes....
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Paige's review of Tom Finger |
I still do not know what I want to be when I grow up. That is to say, I don't know what I want to DO to make a living. I DO know what I want to be; I want to be clever and kind and imaginative and spontaneous and thoughtful and optimistic.
Charise Harper's new book helps kids explore qualities and personality traits that are most admired in people....
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Paige's review of When I Grow Up |
Julie Burtinshaw's Adrift is a great book. David Garrett lives in Toronto in a family that is adrift due to his mother's clinical depression. David's sister, Laura, is overly dependent on David. David's father has abandoned the family, unable to cope with his wife's mental illness. David himself is lost, having to sort out the questions plagui...
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Paige's review of Adrift |
I had the pleasure of reading this book while staying in a beautiful region of New Brunswick on Canada's east coast. The forests of this region helped to evoke the setting of Kevin Crossley-Holland's Arthur: The Seeing Stone. The strength of this story is its vivid setting in place and time....
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Paige's review of Arthur: The Seeing Stone |
Don Brestler has broken horses and wrangled horses and he knows the cowboy business from the inside. He is a proud Canadian, and he is clearly very interested and knowledgeable about the history of Canada's West. His book is an illustrated history of Canada's West and an important visual and textual 'museum' of our heritage....
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Paige's review of A Young Adult's Guide to the Canadian West |
Lucien is a high school boy living in modern-day England. He is bedridden and he is suffering through the side effects of chemotherapy treatments. Lucien's father gives him a notebook with a marbled cover, in which he is to write down questions when his throat is too sore to speak....
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Paige's review of Stravaganza: City of Masks |
Michael Chabon'sSummerland is a wide-ranging fantasy novel. At its heart is BASEBALL, and the travels of the Shadowtails, a motley crew of humans and assorted creatures who seek to stop the sinister Coyote from terminating life as we know it.
There are some very neat ideas to be found in this novel....
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Paige's review of Summerland |
Candy Quackenbush finds herself in the most boring of all places - her home town of Chickentown, U.S.A... She's physically abused by her beer-drinking, out-of-work lout of a Dad and she's largely ignored by her mom. Her teacher abuses her verbally and she just can't seem to get a foothold on her dismally bleak future....
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Paige's review of Abarat |
So you’re a diehard Star Wars fan. You watch the films so frequently that you’ve recently become convinced you can tell what Chewbacca is really saying, and you know what a rancor is and why you’d be best to avoid one. Heck, you could probably bullseye a wamp rat with your eyes closed or do the Kessel Run in 11 parsecs....
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Paige's review of The Star Wars Party Book: Recipes and Ideas for Galactic Occasions |
The Watcher by Margaret Buffie is a suspenseful, stomach turning story about a girl named Emma Sweeny. Emma is tall and pale and she never really fits in. She is nothing at all like her parents and her ill little sister, and for some time now she has the feeling that it is her job to watch over them, but she doesn't know why....
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Paige's review of The Watcher |
Let me begin by saying that if you can get beyond the fact that you are reading an epic 500 page novel about RABBITS, you will love this tale. Some people have difficulty with anthropomorphism. I was immersed into the world of the outskirter rabbits from page one.
Watership Down is a wonderful book....
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Paige's review of Watership Down |
Gulliver Mulligan is one BIG boy. It's HEADS UP whenever you want to look him in the eye! Because Gulliver is an unusually TALL grade three student, he is not well liked. He doesn't get invited to play with other kids. One day (a foggy one) wee Mortimer Goss joins Mrs. Covey's class....
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Paige's review of Goodness Gracious, Gulliver Mulligan |
The Bookstore Mouse is a witty book reminiscent of Norman Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth in its love of language, stories and reading and its manipulations of common phrases. Cervantes is a mouse ...
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Paige's review of The Bookstore Mouse |
Jackalope? What’s a Jackalope you ask? “Well put on your listening ears, zip your lips, and get ready”....
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Paige's review of Jackaloupe |
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Paige's review of The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants |
Matt Cruse is a young apprentice aboard the massive airship, Aurora. Matt has aspirations to one day be a Sailmaker as his father had been. The Aurora is 900-feet long, and the majestic flagship of the Lunardi line of airships. It weighs more...
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Paige's review of Airborn |
If you're an animal lover, or even think you may be, then the stories and accounts from scientists who study them in this book will thrill you to your core! Each of the ten chapters in this fascinating book is about a different animal and is divided into four sections....
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Paige's review of Wild Science |
“Tom had forgotten who he was.”
So opens Martine Leavitt’s latest novel, Read
Paige's review of Tom Finder |
Feed is a revelation, an insightful satire skewering our branded world. Titus and his friends are regular young adults. They travel to the moon for spring break. They buy the latest in fashions. They party and seek relationships. What makes them different, however, is the FEED. Their brains are hardwired for a steady feed of commercial broadcasts....
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Paige's review of Feed |
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is the sixth and penultimate book in the wildly imaginative Harry Potter series. The novel begins what must be for Rowling the daunting task of putting together all of the pieces in her fantasy series. The book features more inventive magical concepts, and twists and turns set against the exciting world of year six at Hogwarts....
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Paige's review of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince |
Kenneth Oppel is back with a riveting sequel to his award-winning Airborn. As Skybreaker opens, Matt Cruse is assistant navigator on the training vessel Flotsam over the Indian Ocean, as his captain is instructing his crew to punch the airship through a lethal typhoon called Devil's Fist....
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Paige's review of Skybreaker |
