Booklist Online: More than 130,000 book reviews for librarians, book groups, and book lovers - from the trusted experts at the American Library Association

I don’t know about you, but when I’m in the mood to see perspiring torsos, seductively blowing manes of hair, and high-riding skirts, I head right on over to the website of Cara McKenna and gawk at the book jackets and synopses, which tease me with everything from the erotic promise of an “unheated subway [...]

Paolo Bacigalupi really knows how to draw the hostility out of a questioner. Winner of the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, Printz, and a National Book Award finalist, he’s got just the kind of medal-laden shelf that I live to upend. So it’s freaking killing me that I can’t quite do it. Y’all read The Drowned Cities? [...]

Maggie Stiefvater loves animals!!! Having put out a number of books on doggies (Shiver), horsies (The Scorpio Races), and birdies (The Raven Boys), she’s clearly in line for one of those hilarious guest spots on late-night TV where she brings out the funny orangutan and it climbs all over Jay Leno. Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! What fun! Well, [...]

Quarantine: The Loners by Lex Thomas was one of my favorite YA debuts of 2012: your basic we’re-all-stuck-inside-this-high-school-and-will-probably-all-kill-one-another-before-it’s-over thriller lifted to giddy heights by remorseless plot twists and a refusal to stop making the absolute worst thing ever happen over and over again. Its inglorious glories were enough to land it on our 2012 Editors’ [...]

James Greer has led a life ripe for the hostile questioning. He’s a former editor of Spin magazine. (Magazines? Ha! Look how those turned out!) He’s the screenwriter behind several films, including Max Keeble’s Big Move and Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector. (The jokes write themselves!) He’s the author of several books, including the [...]

Adam Selzer: Do you know that name? Well, you might. He has published over 10 books since 2007 and maintains blogs on everything from Chicago history to naughty playground songs to retro YA. In short, he’s the type of unstoppable word-producing machine who scares writers-block-plagued let-me-try-this-sentence-one-more-time hunt-and-peckers straight out of the room. But none of [...]

Hey, remember when you were reading Andrew Smith‘s The Marbury Lens and were like “Gosh, this is a nice story about two friends learning some important life lessons and OH CHRIST WHAT THE DAMN HELL NO WAY CHOKE PUKE SCREAM CRY”? Good times, huh? Well, that’s Smith in a nutshell: burning your brain out with [...]

When you think Ray Bradbury, what do you think of next? Well, yeah, Martians, but after that? Yeah, OK, futuristic book burnings, of course. But after that? Anyway, somewhere not too far down the list is Sam Weller, the world’s leading expert on the late legend. Weller’s indispensable biography, The Bradbury Chronicles, was followed up [...]

Laini Taylor is perhaps best known for Lips Touch: Three Times and the trilogy beginning with Daughter of Smoke and Bone and the newly released Days of Blood and Starlight. Well, that and the pink hair. Pink hair is hard to pull off. Just ask those authors who have tried and failed: R.L. Stine, Agatha [...]

For someone with such a fine pedigree–the Printz Honors for both Black Juice and Tender Morsels are just the beginning–Margo Lanagan sure has a way of making people squeamish. Oh, if I had but a nickle for every time I saw a literary judge hand Lanagan a plaque or statuette . . . and then [...]