by Sarah Pennypacker
ages: 7-10
First sentence: “I have had not so good of a week.”

Since C has abandoned our nightly reading sessions in favor of her own reading time, I’ve been feeling a bit lonely. I like reading aloud. Then it occurred to me: A is 5, she’s starting kindergarten, I could read to her!

We conferred, she was willing, and we settled on a book: Clementine.

I’ve read the third in the series, which works well as a stand-alone, but hadn’t read any of the others. You don’t need to start at the beginning, but it doesn’t hurt. And that way you can fall in love with Clementine properly. Because she is an absolute dear. One of those characters that I want to wrap up and put in my pocket.

Clementine’s been having a bad week. She was sent to the principal’s office Monday for cutting her friend Margaret’s hair — and she was only trying to help! — and it only got worse. But, honestly, what I really loved were the little things like ideas sproinging into her head, or her myriad of names for her little brother (like Radish and Zucchini and Lima Bean — if she got stuck with a fruit name, why shouldn’t he have a vegetable name), or her desire to do things right but they always come out wrong. As I said, she’s an absolute dear.

And A loved her, too. She couldn’t wait until reading time, and didn’t want to stop once we started. She adored Clementine, she loved looking at the pictures, and while some of the humor went over her head, she found enough to enjoy.

Which is why we’re reading the next book now.

Buy it at Amazon, Powell’s, or your local independent bookstore.

by M.T. Anderson
ages: 10+
First sentence: “On Career Day Lily visited her dad’s work with him and discovered he worked for a mad scientist who wanted to rule the earth through destruction and desolation.”

First impressions are everything.

First sentences, first books by an author, first foray into an author’s work… it doesn’t matter: the first impression you take away from a book colors much of what you read by that author.

My first impression of M.T. Anderson is that he’s brilliant. Odd, sure. But brilliant. He’s another one that tickles my sense of humor just right and I find myself laughing out loud, often. Sure, the plot — Lily’s, our main heroine, dad is working in an abandoned warehouse for a “man”, Larry, who wears a bag on his head, helping him make stilts for whales, but it turns out that Larry is set on world domination, but only Lily and her friends Katie and Jasper can stop him — is really very weird. But, it wasn’t the plot that made the book so, well, great. It was the little asides, the footnotes, the fact that the book was littered with random ads for dime-store novels — the fact that this felt, looked, and read like a 1950s adventure novel or even bad B-movie you probably have seen on Mystery Science Theater 3000 (if you’re not old enough to have seen it in the theater) — that’s what made this book so brilliant.

One quote, and then I’ll tell you that you need to find this one and read it. The context really doesn’t matter, just so you know:

There is nothing better than friends working together against incredible odds. It is a great feeling. Some friends of mine and I, for example, once had to stop this jerk we knew from middle school who was trying to carve his face next to the presidents’ on Mount Rushmore. He was the richest kid in school, and he had won a bunch of Italian stonemasons in a game of Go Fish. He and the stonemasons were headed down to Mount Rushmore in a bus.

You guessed it — he had won the bus in a karaoke competition with his mom. He had won singing “You Trouble Me Bigly.”

I won’t go into the whole thing, because I’m just trying to make a point that when you work on a project together with friends, and you’re rushing around with climbing gear and scissors, and your friend Dana is explaining how to go up mountainsides, and your friend Lick is showing everyone how to disable a helicopter, and you’re doing your part by writing personalized haiku for each of them, you get this intense feeling of love for your friends, and you come to admire them even more than you did before.

You should read this book. As for me, I’m going to find one of Anderson’s other ones to enjoy.

Buy Whales on Stilts! at: Amazon, Powell’s, or your local independent bookstore.

by Erica Kirov
ages: 9-12
First sentence: “The mysterious man in the black wool cloak sat in the front row of the Princess Theatre, precisely in the center seat.”

At first glance, you would be tempted to brush this book off. It’s a Harry Potter knockoff you would say: a 13 year old boy with a dead (beloved) mother, was raised (for protection purposes) outside of his “world” is reintroduced to a magical life he never knew existed, and finds out that he is the Chosen One, the magician that everything pivots upon.

But don’t brush it off too quickly.

Nick is our main character, and he’s much more jaded than Harry was. Nick’s grown up in a third-rate hotel on the Las Vegas strip where his father, a third-rate magician, performs every night (and twice on the weekends). Nick’s not a particularly special (or brilliant) kid: he likes his cheeseburgers, video games, and skateboard. So, when he’s kidnapped and wakes up in the most famous magician’s — Damian — hotel, told that he’s related, and that he’s one of the Magickiseepers — an ancient breed, of which this Russian family is the strongest, tasked with keeping track of magic relics — its understandable that Nick might just resist a little. Especially when there’s caviar and blini for breakfast.

This book suffers from first-in-a-series syndrome: there’s much exposition and explanation and very little pay off. That said, Kirov’s use — and slight twisting — of the historical (from Houdini and Jues Verne to Rasputin — the perpetual bad guy — and Princess Anastasia) was definately a highlight. And, by the end, the book has us hooked enough in the world to find us eagerly anticipting the next book (the final teaser with Edgar Alan Poe also helped). It’s a creative mix of magic and historical fiction that gives it just enough of a unique spin to make it different Harry Potter, in spite of all the similarities.

And it’s those differences that make it worth reading.

Buy it at: Amazon, Powells, or your local independent bookstore.