Category: brief reviews

Two #OwnVoices Indigenous Novels [MG Review]

8 January 2020 / brief reviews / 2 Comments
Two #OwnVoices Indigenous Novels [MG Review]

Biref thoughts on two debut #ownvoices Indigenous middle grade novels – I Can Make This Promise (contemporary) and The Ghost Collector (speculative fiction).

Cybils 2018 Finalists: Sweep and Stone Girl [Review]

8 October 2019 / brief reviews / 4 Comments
Cybils 2018 Finalists: Sweep and Stone Girl [Review]

Yup, I’m finally clearing this post out of my drafts… Sweep by Jonathan Auxier For nearly a century, Victorian London relied on “climbing boys”–orphans owned by chimney sweeps–to clean flues and protect homes from fire. The work was hard, thankless […]

March 26 MG Releases: The Size of the Truth + The Rambling [Review]

25 March 2019 / brief reviews / 2 Comments
March 26 MG Releases: The Size of the Truth + The Rambling [Review]

The Size of the Truth by Andrew Smith When he was four years old, Sam Abernathy was trapped at the bottom of a well for three days, where he was teased by a smart-aleck armadillo named Bartleby. Since then, his […]

Divergent Dungeons in Two Middle Grade Novels [Review]

15 March 2019 / brief reviews / 4 Comments
Divergent Dungeons in Two Middle Grade Novels [Review]

Both of these books were shortlisted for the 2018 Cybils award in the category middle grade speculative fiction. Thisby Thestoop and the Black Mountain by Zac Gorman In the absurd land of Nth, Thisby Thestoop can be found within the […]

Spooky Sequels: The Island of Monsters + A Festival Of Ghosts [Review]

31 October 2018 / brief reviews / 0 Comments
Spooky Sequels: The Island of Monsters + A Festival Of Ghosts [Review]

The Island of Monsters by Ellen Oh The follow up to 2017’s Spirit Hunters, The Island of Monsters takes Harper and her multiracial family on a Halloween vacation to a tropical island with a gruesome past. Harper must use her […]