Book #165 of 2020: Fever 1793 by Laurie Halse Anderson I remember liking this historical fiction title when I first encountered it as assigned reading back in middle school, so when my library acquired the digital audiobook in the midst of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, I figured it might be worth revisiting. And overall, I’d …
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Book #157 of 2020: The Dragon Egg Princess by Ellen Oh I appreciate the #ownvoices Korean mythology that informs this fantasy setting, but even for a middle-grade novel, it all feels disappointingly underdeveloped. The humor is broad, the characters are flat, and the plot never really settles down into any specific stakes threatening the heroes. …
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Book #153 of 2020: Ghost Squad by Claribel A. Ortega I simply adore the Dominican-American family at the heart of this fantasy novel, most of whom are spirits of the dead that only twelve-year-old Lucely can see. To everyone else they appear as fireflies, as per the #ownvoices folklore that author Claribel A. Ortega is …
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Book #133 of 2020: Bounce by Megan Shull This middle-grade body-swap / time loop novel really doesn’t work for me, unfortunately. I don’t necessarily need to know the mechanism behind why our tween heroine keeps waking back up on Christmas morning as a different girl — it can be a Yuletide miracle, or even just …
Book #130 of 2020: Click Here to Start by Denis Markell I like how this middle-grade adventure novel manages to educate readers about America’s Japanese internment camps while maintaining its lightweight tone, but the characters make a few too many lucky guesses that happen to pan out, especially for a treasure hunt that’s supposed to …
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Book #77 of 2020: Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights? by Lemony Snicket (All the Wrong Questions #4) I’ve been somewhat lukewarm on this prequel series, but it goes out on a suitably climactic high note, with most of the action confined to the tight spaces of a speeding train. Lemony Snicket …
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Book #59 of 2020: Charlie Thorne and the Last Equation by Stuart Gibbs (Charlie Thorne #1) There’s a certain ludicrous National Treasure energy to the basic concept of this middle-grade spy novel — in which the CIA recruits a twelve-year-old girl genius to help them track down a secret formula that Albert Einstein revealed on …
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Book #45 of 2020: Race to the Sun by Rebecca Roanhorse A delightful middle-grade fantasy novel that incorporates elements of traditional Navajo folklore while avoiding the paint-by-numbers plot that such modernizations often entail. (I hesitate to call the work #ownvoices, since author Rebecca Roanhorse is not Navajo herself and she makes clear in an afterword …
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Book #36 of 2020: When Did You See Her Last? by Lemony Snicket (All the Wrong Questions #2) Technically an improvement over the first Unfortunate Events prequel, in part because this volume leans more into the clever wordplay and less into the vague allusions to larger plots (although those are definitely still present). I also …
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Book #30 of 2020: Throwback by Peter Lerangis (Throwback #1) I love the character interactions and the depiction of historical New York City in this middle-grade time-travel adventure, but it’s maybe a bit overstuffed with plot. (The hero is nominally trying to save his grandmother from dying on September 11th, but he spends most of …
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