🌟🌟🌟🌟 A sweet and endearing middle-grade story about love and longing, as seen from the POV of a sensitive bear, a motherly fox, and a competent but grumpy cat. Set in an imagined post-crisis New York City, the story teems with witches, and magic-competents - some good, and some as…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A truly magical (and incredibly original) middle-grade book that this reader found thoroughly enchanting. With humor, pathos, and a highly relatable heroine, this book also contains a potential triggering happening and its follow-on effects (portrayed very sensitively) that younger readers may need help in understanding. To that end, there…
🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟➕ An absolute delight, this middle-grade story is voiced for us by eleven-year old Tig herself, weaving a first person narrative that so rings with authenticity, poignancy and most of all, charm, it is impossible for the reader not to fall completely under her spell. Heartlessly abandoned by her alcoholic…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫 One of my very favorites when young, this middle-grade series deserves a re-read, and this reader is certainly up for the challenge. A twenty-six book series, begun in 1946 by author Walter R Brooks (and marvelously illustrated by Kurt Wiese), most of these books are currently out of print,…
🌟🌟🌟🌟💫A funny and touching middle-grade read about being twelve years old, struggling with the indelicate symptoms of a chronic and life-altering illness, and falling for your first crush, at precisely the age where “everything about being a human feels overwhelmingly embarrassing”. Our first person narrator, Alison (Al), lives with her…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟 Written by a former school-teacher, this lovely children’s book is a gentle look at the sometimes frightening, always expectant, world of the young, - a world where change-without-explanation can be as bewildering and it is distressing. Chloe is a smart, self-sufficient and curious eleven-year-old, living with a…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟 A pure delight from start to finish, this lovely children’s book cannot help but light up your day. Leo, our main protagonist, is a ten-year-old boy with puffy orange hair that has earned him the nickname of Lion (short for Dandelion). Leo, a solitary and troubled boy,…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟+ By Jove, this is one terrific book! Jacob Jollimore is thirteen years old, an adopted Vietnamese boy who is something of a science geek (self-proclaimed), at an awkward age and time in his life. As his parents, facing financial collapse, harness all their remaining resources to renovate…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ What child (or adult for that matter) hasn’t wished they could fly? This wonderful middle-grade book takes that delightful universal wish, and runs with it - turning out a somewhat dark and dangerous fable about a twelve year old girl, a sailor and a shipwreck, an eagle,…
[responsivevoice_button buttontext=”Listen”] ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2 What a charming book! Targeted for children aged seven and up; bursting with reproductions of classic art, captured with color and energy breathing life onto every page - this visually spectacular and lovely little book teaches children about the artist Cézanne, helping set the stage for…