My older brother read The Passage during an overseas business trip and liked it well enough to give a copy to me for my 40th birthday last November. He also got me a stellar Van Morrison record. Thanks, bro - you really nailed the gifts this time! Van’s the man and The The Passage was excellent. Basically, we are in the near future (can’t recall if a da...

Mockingbird takes place a few hundred years in the future where highly advanced, humanoid robots have all but eliminated the entire human population. They have done so using specially formulated, widely available drugs plus new rules for society which encourage extreme privacy and individualism. Out of nowhere, one man innocently learns to read, something th...

For me, Fuzzy Mud was a strange little book. It seems like a fantastic choice for teachers who are studying the environment, pollution, or the way any idea that is meant to help the world - can actually have a drastically negative impact. At the same time, the book also deals with relational themes like standing by your friends, doing the right thing even wh...

The illustrations in The Marvels are fabulous so the first 400 pages or so of artwork are absolutely mesmerizing. The "story in pictures" told during this section is brilliant. Characters come and go, time passes, events unfold, clues are dropped, and it's all cleverly revealed in these magnificent sketches. However, when the text part of the story began, I...

Solid book, not outstanding for me but I enjoyed the writing and the characters. The main plot develops from an experiment undertaken by Eli and Victor wherein they try to determine if a near death experience can give a person special powers - thus making them an EO or ExtraOrdinary. The answer is yes, this can happen. However, this quickly brings up a more ...

Circus Mirandus is an outstanding novel and is a completely safe, appropriate read for it's middle grade target audience. Miss Beasley has achieved what we fellow writers all strive for: a wonderfully written, creative, unique, inspiring, moving book that parents can trust and kids can love. The story centers on Micah Tuttle, a young boy who has grown up id...

This is an award-winning book that's hugely popular, written extremely well, and it tells a heartfelt and inspiring story. Basically, there is nothing to lose with this one, and plenty to gain. The style of the book is unique too since it reads sort of like a collection of journal entries rather than a series of short chapters. And when I say short, I mean s...

I decided I was reading too many fantasy/dragon/magic books and was in a bit of a rut. Luckily, I had just the guy loaded up on my Kindle app to get me out of that realm and into a place much more real...and dangerous. His name...Bond, James Bond! Casino Royale is the first ever Bond novel, published in 1953. Honestly, it was not at all what I expected. The...

Is it possible for a book to have too much realism? To try too hard to emulate real life? In The Thief, Miss Turner went to great lengths to paint a completely detailed picture of all the minutia in her plot. Unfortunately, this extreme focus on the small things often bogged it all down to a nearly unbearable point and I thought it tried too hard to be overl...

Here's the best thing I can say about this fabulous book - I read The Night Circus on the kindle app on my iPad, mostly on the treadmill at the gym and several times I caught myself smiling while reading. Just lost in the story, smiling...while exercising! That doesn't happen very many times, but it happened often with this one. I believe this is because T...

The Luck Uglies is excellent from cover to cover. First off, I dig books like this one that include a map of the imaginary world where the story takes place. This is such a nice extra touch that truly shows the writer's thoughtful creativity and that he wants to fully immerse us in the setting of his novel. And yes, I referred back to the map while readin...

I have to admit right here at the top that finishing reading this book, and then deciding what to write about it, was - unfortunately - quite a struggle for me.Seeker has many intriguing elements and it seemed like a story I would normally eat right up, but I never could connect with the characters or the plot. When I did finally finish it, I decided it wou...