Booklist Online: Book Reviews from the American Library Association

Mysterious, complicated, and running on at least two parallel narrative tracks, Jellicoe Road, to say the least, is not for everyone. That’s the main reason why the announcement of the book as the winner of the 2009 Michael L. Printz Award (administered by ALA Young Adult Library Services Association and sponsored by Booklist) was such [...]

 
Given some of the more intense scenes and themes in Margo Lanagan’s dark, boundary-pushing, and extravagantly written Tender Morsels, it wasn’t outrageous to expect something a little scandalous in her acceptance speech at the 2009 Michael L. Printz Awards (administered by ALA Young Adult Services Association and sponsored by Booklist). Instead, Lanagan went for the reverse shocker and offered [...]

You may recall that, way back in the middle of last summer (or thereabouts), Time Out Chicago hosted a book launch party for Bill Ott’s new book, The Back Page. Well, Daniel Kraus, whose fingers must be smoking from all the videos he’s been editing of late, put together a nice overview of the event. Unfortunately [...]

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, [...]

Author E. Lockhart isn’t afraid of a good argument, as she made clear in her acceptance speech for The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks at the 2009 Michael L. Printz Awards (administered by ALA’s Young Adult Library Services Association and sponsored by Booklist).  Readers have had wildly different responses to the book’s title character, a prep-school sophomore [...]

This past summer I was lucky enough to get a chance to talk to fantasist-turned-romancer Maggie Stiefvater, whose recent book, Shiver, is providing vampire-addicted teens a welcome dose of literary lycanthropic methadone. But just how did the author of seriously ass-kicking faerie tales (Lament, Ballad) turn up the heat and find herself writing books with actual [...]

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 [...]

There’s no question that the Printz Honor–winning Octavian Nothing duet presents readers with an intellectual challenge. In his National Book Award acceptance speech for The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation; Volume One: The Pox Party, Anderson himself described the books as “a 900-page two volume historical epic for teens, written in [...]