The Book Search

 So if you like middle grade fiction, there are so many new books coming out this fall.  Two of my favorite authors have new books, YAY!!  And they are both wonderful (the authors AND their new books).   The first one is by Holly Goldberg Sloan, who wrote Counting by 7s, which is still on my top ten favorite books of all time.  She's written several others as well, including this new one, which is called "Finding Lost".  It's about Cordy, a middle schooler, who lives with her mom and her perpetually cheerful younger brother, Geno in coastal Oregon.  They are living in a small caretaker's house on the edge of a bigger property, for which her mother acts as a caretaker.  The owners are rarely there, which makes living in the caretaker's house seem all the more miserable.  The caretaker's house is a former boatshed and has a leaky roof, poor insulation and poor internet access.  They live there because since Cordy's dad died in a boating ac...

 I have SOOO many books to read.  My TBR pile is tragically large.  Thank goodness I'm retired so I can devote my time to reading!  Here are two of my newest favorites. The first one is a science fiction tale by Rebecca Stead called "The Experiment".  Nathan is a pretty regular sixth grader with a best friend named Victor, except for one teensy little thing-Nathan and his parents come from another planet.  For the most part, Nathan's life is like everyone else's-but there are a few eccentricities like how his mom weighs all of his food (and subtracts the things he doesn't eat), she keeps a log book with data about their life, they have Zoom meetings with other alien families and their kids, and then there's the pink toothpaste that Nathan has to brush with 5 times a day.  But some weird things have been happening.  Some of the kids have disappeared from the Zoom meeting without an explanation and now Nathan is growing a tail.  A furry, orange...