Booklist Online: Book Reviews from the American Library Association

Watching TV last night, I was flabbergasted to see a book trailer. A book trailer! On TV! It was a 30-second spot for Stephen King’s Under the Dome, and though it hints at elements of martial law and mass casualties, there’s not much to grab hold of. Notable for its placement on network TV, but [...]

I’m gonna go ahead and tell you. Nubs: The True Story of a Mutt, a Marine, & a Miracle holds the distinction of being the only book I’ve ever reviewed that made me cry. Now, I’m not talking the kind of cataclysmic sobbing that makes coworkers edge away, nor am I talking about the ever-disturbing [...]

In honor of Ian’s great interview with Maggie Stiefvater, I bring you a very special episode: A Tale of Two Trailers.
First up is the more-or-less “official” trailer for Stiefvater’s werewolf romance Shiver. The content portion of this video is barely 30 seconds and constrains itself to elements found on the book jacket. Not especially ambitious, [...]

Nothing new here. Just a proof of the old maxim “less is more.”
It takes only 36 seconds (22 if you don’t count the closing information!) for this video to perfectly encapsulate Liz Garton Scanlon’s All the World. It’s simple: if you like this trailer, you’ll like the book, and in that respect it’s hard to [...]

The first time I heard about Pride and Prejudice and  Zombies, I reacted just like any other red-blooded American: I giggled like a schoolgirl and geeked out for about 20 hours by incredulously emailing links back and forth with my friends. Is this for real? It is! This is going to be so bad-ass! I [...]

I’ve been wanting to blog about this for eons, and now that Jupiter and Neptune are in perfect alignment, I can at last discuss the trailer for Simone Elkeles’ Perfect Chemistry. It’s one of the best book trailers I’ve ever seen. It’s also one of the least successful.
I know, you’re all like o_O.  Let me [...]

When I started Book Trailer Thursday back in 1986, I was just a lad with an Apple IIe and a dream. Who could’ve guessed that 1,825 posts later, BTT would be the revered institution that it is today?
Okay, so I’ve only been doing BTT for a few months, but the response has still been darn [...]

From the book’s description:
In this no-holds-barred memoir, Levin shows how her tumultuous, inspiring, and passionate life led her on a quest for spiritual truth and authentic living. . . . Laurie relates ways to look into the reality of our present and future lives, and find lessons in our failures as well as our victories.
A [...]

When it came to making a book trailer for the series starter Leviathan, author Scott Westerfeld had more resources available to him than the usual $0.00 allotted by publishers. Or at least that’s the impression I get from this rather spectacular production, which is more exciting than the last 800 movie trailers I saw. The [...]

Picture-book trailers usually adhere to one formula: artwork  /  zooms   x  pans  +  music = trailer. There’s something soulless about this approach; by removing both the effort of reading as well as the interaction of parent and child, we’re left with a simulacrum of an experience, a readaloud as interpreted by a robot.
However! Occasionally elements [...]