Booklist Online: Book Reviews from the American Library Association

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 [...]

As you might know from reading 10 inches below this post (or, if for some reason you gets infos from somewhere else other than our little Likely Stories, you already know from anywhere else), the National Book Award nominations were announced yesterday. And while the NBAs are no stranger to odd picks, especially in the [...]

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 [...]

Terry Pratchett’s Nation is so exciting and funny that’s it’s almost too easy to forget the tragedy at its center. Young Mau is paddling back to his tiny island nation after spending a month alone as part of his manhood ritual. When he gets there he finds that everyone has been wiped out by a [...]

It’s been so long since I’ve posted that I had to dust off the blog’s dashboard before I could start. And, somehow, my fingers got stuck inside the computer monitor, and it was hours before the IT department could come to my desk and set me free. Very embarrassing.
The real problem has been a combination of late-summer [...]

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 [...]

It’s possible you’ve never heard of mystery writer Jay Bennett. Hell, I never met him. But Bennett—who died on June 27 at the age of 96 (”Jay Bennett, 96; wrote crime novels, scripts,” by Dwight Ott, Philadelphia Inquirer)—had a profound effect on my life. And now that a little time has passed, I’m realizing that [...]