Coraline (Neil Gaiman)

Coraline is a young girl bored with the quiet life in her family’s new house. Unable to spark any interaction with her mother and father (or three other adults in her building), she explores her surroundings until stumbling into a parallel world hidden behind a locked door down the hall. From Lewis Carroll’s Through the [...]

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Diary of a Wimpy Kid (Jeff Kinney)

QUICK TAKE: It’s not easy being a middle school kid. Just ask Gregory Heffley, the narrator in Jeff Kinney’s Diary of a Wimpy Kid: A Novel in Cartoons. The boy who figures he’s “somewhere around 52nd and 53rd most popular” in school relates an entire year of fun and mishaps in his journal. Using simple [...]

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Endymion Spring (Matthew Skelton)

Every now and then I glance at a list of fiction titles for kids and young adults hoping to pluck out something interesting. That’s how I ended up reading Matthew Skelton’s Endymion Spring [LibraryThing / WorldCat] during a few rainy evenings last week. The premise was intriguing. Skelton ran two stories in parallel: one in [...]

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