I don’t know how I hadn’t heard about this series before now. It seems exactly the kind of thing that someone would have recommended to me, or I would have picked up in the library if I had seen it growing up, but I didn’t come across it until browsing my online library in my 40s. Fortunately, that wasn’t too late to enjoy it. Over Sea, Under Stone is the first book in a series of five called The Dark is Rising Sequence. Simon, Jane […]
A beginning without much substance, but some promise
3.5 stars Agatha Clay (although I’m going to assume that this is an assumed name, since she has another one in the TITLE of the book) is one of those diligent students, who no matter how much she wants to suceed just can’t seem to. She’s almost constantly late, she can’t really seem to make her inventions work and she’s a laughing stock at the Transylvania Polygnostic University. To make matters work, during a weird electrical incident in town, she’s robbed and her precious locket, […]
An engaging young adult mystery
When I went to my conference in November, I attended a young adult literature panel in which two of my brother’s friends presented papers. His friend D talked about bi-erasure in YA lit and standards by which we should measure literature. It was a fascinating conference paper. In the question-and-answer time, I asked him if there was a book in which a bi character was depicted most positively. He suggested Tess Sharpe’s Far from You, and I was happy to give it a try. Sophie […]
More Betsy. All the better.
So, the best thing about the Betsy books is that they are funny and honest without being overly moralizing or sentimental. The second book is even better than the first one, and it speaks to the pressures of being a young woman in a society that places so much importance on a certain “feminine” ideal. Betsy is now a sophomore in high school. Her relationship to school has definitely improved, though she (still) has yet to learn the importance of academic writing over purple prose […]