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Showing posts from June, 2020

New speculative middle grade fiction Summer 2020

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Boy, does it feel good to read some fantasy fiction.  I like realistic fiction, but things have been very real around here for awhile, so it was good to dig into some books where problem solving is based on magic rather than the hard work that requires here in the real world! The first one is a graphic novel.  I'm going to confess right now that graphic novels are not my favorite.  I think I create pretty good mental images and the images of a graphic novel sometimes slow me down.  But this one was SO GOOD. It's called Doodleville by Chad Sells.  You might have read Chad's earlier book called Cardboard Kingdom, which was really fun.  In my opinion, Doodleville is even better.  It's about a group of kids who are in an art club.  They typically draw super heroes and each of them has their own character that is their most well developed.  Drew, the main character, has a friendly group of characters that can escape their pages and end up in some pretty funny places.  They a

More terrific new middle school fiction

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These last few days have felt pretty realistic to me, so more realistic fiction may or may not have been what I was looking for.  Except that's what was in the TBR pile from Netgalley, so ok.  The good news is that they were really different from the kind of realism I've been living, so it was nice to get into someone else's head for change. The first one is called "The Brave" by James Bird.  The cover of the e-book I got had it spelled like this "Th3 Brav5", which should be an indicator that this character doesn't think like most people.  The main character is Collin, who has grown up with his dad.  He doesn't know his mother at all, expect that she's a Native American.  It says in the description of the book that Collin struggles with OCD.  His OCD manifests itself in counting, which doesn't seem that unusual to me.  Except that Collin counts letters.  He counts the letters as people speak to him and when he responds to them, the first