The Book Search

 If I haven't said it often enough, reading for the CYBILS award is so much fun.  It's a lot of work (well, if you call reading LOTS of middle grade chapter books work) but then there are THESE treasures you can uncover.   The first one is called Juniper Harvey and the Vanishing Kingdom.  It's written by Nina Varela.  I hadn't read anything by her before but this one was so good!  It's about Juniper, or June who has recently moved from Dallas, Texas to a small town in southern Florida.  She isn't so good at making friends but she's pretty good at disappearing into a crowd.  She likes to draw and has been busy drawing a graphic novel, but she's been having these REALLY weird and realistic dreams.  She doesn't want to worry her parents, who already worry about her not having friends and fitting in and her friends in Dallas seem to have forgotten about her.  But one night, she has to deal with her dream, because one of the people from her dream shows up

 It may seem like this post is a little late, being two days PAST Halloween, but these magical titles are so great, you're not going to want to miss them!   The first one is the latest offering from two of my favorite authors-Rebecca Stead and Wendy Mass.  They co-wrote another book called "Bob" that remains one of my favorites, even though it was published five years ago.  They are both masters at plot twists so I was super excited to read this one.  It's told from a few different points of view, which at first is a little confusing.  The first character's voice is Mortimer, a cat that lives in a library and rescues mice that have moved in there.  He feels very guilty about something that happened (but readers don't find out what actually happened until almost the end of the story).  The second storyteller is Evan, a boy who is just finishing fifth grade.  He lives with his loving parents, his dad who is an exterminator that relocates mice rather than killing