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Zuno and I love word games and I’m betting author Peggy Parish does too. In Good Work, Amelia Bedelia, Parish takes her loveable character, Amelia Bedelia, through another day of work and play, word play, that is. Rising dough, potted plants, and chicken dinners challenge our heroine, but it’s Amelia’s baking skills rather than her…

Across the street from my daughter’s dance studio, a small shop named Cross your Heart Cupcakes creates the best cupcakes ever. When it’s my birthday, their cupcakes are what I’m craving. Now, we also make cupcakes at home. With a box mix and a store-bought tub of frosting, semi-homemade cupcakes work in a pinch. But for special…

Padraic Colum’s The Children’s Homer brings the classic tales of the battle of Troy and the adventures of Odysseus to a young adult audience. My hard-to-please youngest son enjoyed this classic as well as Greek  mythology long before Rick Riordan’s Percy and the Olympians series made them popular. His familiarity with the mythological characters contributed greatly to…

Dav Pilkey is just doggone funny. Zuno loves his Big Dog, Little Dog series and Pilkey’s Hallo-wiener is a treat. The long and short of it is that Oscar doesn’t fit in. “Half a dog tall and one-and-a-half dogs long” doesn’t cut the mustard with the gang at obedience school. On Halloween night, Oscar is…

Hold On Turnovers are deadly. Whether the game is soccer, basketball, or football, when you give up possession, you lose the advantage. Let’s look at the prophet, Samuel, as we seek to “maintain possession” of spiritual truth. “Now Samuel did not yet know the LORD: The word of the LORD had not yet been revealed…

In Brandon Mull’s Fablehaven, Mom and Dad dump siblings Kendra and Seth at their grandparents’ house and head for their cruise. Locks, keys, and hidden compartments fill their attic room. When a mysterious journal instructs them to “Drink the milk.”, secrets begin to unfold. Reminiscient of The Spiderwick Chronicles, Fablehaven whisks the reader to a…

Knots on a Counting Rope tells a story of courage and hope in the face of darkness, in this case, a young boy’s blindness. Bill Martin, Jr. and John Archambault craft a Native American tale of facing challenges and overcoming them with faith and family.  Ted Rand’s illustrations make me long for Arizona. You can…

Can You Carry My Stuff? When my son attended elementary school, he always tried to get me to carry his backpack home. Nothing doing. Now, he travels light and rarely brings his backpack home at all. His sister, however, regularly hauls her French horn, lunch, and a two-ton backpack.  But what about all of the…

Fourteen year old Peak Marcello has just climbed his sixth skyscraper (illegally) and is busted for criminal trespass, vandalism, and reckless endangerment. To avoid serving time in the Juvenile Detention Center, Peak agrees to leave his New York home and live with his biological father in Thailand. His father, Joshua Woods, a famous climber in…

America a Patriotic Primer by Lynne Cheney inspires younger generations to stand with Americans of the past and to continue their tradition of greatness. America explores American ideals and the men and women who put them into action. Mrs. Cheney packs her primer with a wide range of historical data. Young readers will be hungry for…