Parenthetical.net

When Alton’s mother pushes him to play bridge with his blind, crotchety uncle in the hopes of scoring a big inheritance, he’s irritated — who wants to play a boring, mystifying game with old people? — but he goes along with it. Of course, he ends up loving bridge, and his uncle as well.
The [...]

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Russ and DJ have been best friends forever, and so have their “outrageous courageous” firefighter fathers. When both men die fighting a house fire, they’re town heroes — until the coroner finds drugs in their systems. All Russ wanted was to be just like his dad, but how can he accept the flawed man his [...]

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Scarlett’s family owns, and lives in, a stately old hotel in Manhattan, but both the hotel and the family have seen better days. They barely have enough money to make ends meet, Scarlett’s brother’s last chance at an acting career is crashing, her older sister is stuck in an Austenesque relationship with Wealthy Fratboy McYacht, [...]

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It’s an eventful year for Frankie: she starts a new school (the formerly all-boys St. Seb’s, at which girls are welcome officially if not in practice), her normally outgoing mother becomes so depressed she won’t get out of bed, and… y’know, boy stuff. It’s YA, after all.
I didn’t love it like I loved Jellicoe Road, [...]

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Callie Tate lives on a wealthy farm of pecan trees and too many brothers in turn-of-the-century Texas. One day she gathers the courage to ask her intimidating grandfather about the two different kinds of grasshoppers she sees in the fields, and he tells her to figure it out herself. From her eureka moment — they’re [...]

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Naomi and her little brother Owen are content living with their great-grandmother in a trailer park — Naomi carves soap into animal shapes, hangs out with the (clearly flaming, even though the text doesn’t say so explicitly) librarian at school, and watches Wheel of Fortune every night with Gram and her best friend Fabiola. But [...]

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Now that the Cybils winners are all official ‘n stuff, I can review the finalists from the Middle Grade Fantasy & Science Fiction category. Here they are, in one speedy blowout:

The Prince of Fenway Park, Julianna Baggott
Check this premise, people: the famous Curse on [...]

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Sixth grader Miranda walks home with her best friend every day, helps her mom study for her $20,000 Pyramid debut, and reads A Wrinkle in Time over and over again. But suddenly her life is full of odd characters: the crazy man under the mailbox on her street, and the kid who punches her [...]

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Oh, read it read it read it! If you liked The Hunger Games, you must absolutely read this book. And that means that you should skip everything past the “spoilers” cut, because you really don’t want to be spoiled.
Basically, Prentisstown is a human settlement on an alien planet. There was a war [...]

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Another conference speaker with whom I was unfamiliar. She’s also a jazz singer, and gave us a lovely impromptu a capella performance (just reinforcing the sense that I was at a folk festival).
I’ll admit, I found her book tiresome. The prose is lovely, I guess, but it was a Woman’s Sexual Awakening and [...]

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