Happy New Year! It's been some time since I posted; it was a busy year at Casa Abbott for non-writing reasons. We've welcomed baby Fish into our family, joining his sister Bug, Three-stripe, cats Jack and Tollers, and I as members of our household. But while I'm behind on many things, I've continued to read a lot! Since I posted last year and the ( Read more... )

I wanted to post this on Monday, but, well, I had a deadline yesterday and had to finish reading a few series of review books at different grade levels before I could justify posting. So, just pretend this is my Valentine's Day post, ok ( Read more... )

A couple of links today. The first is to the new Slate online serial novel, My Darkling, which, along with its weekly posted prose, features characters with facebook and twitter accounts, where they will give readers extra clues to solving the mystery. The novel is apparently a send-up of the YA vampire craze, though whether it's kind to that genre ( Read more... )

When What I Saw and How I Lied won the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, I was a little surprised. I'd known when I started reading it that it was intended to be a young adult book, but I wasn't sure if teens would be as enraptured with the depiction of post-World War II United States as I was. The narrator exists so thoroughly in ( Read more... )