You’ll Be Sorry by author/illustrator Josh Schneider is a cute tale about why you’ll be sorry if you do something naughty to your little brother or sister. Let’s be honest, parents, how often have you said “You’ll be sorry if you …”? But why exactly will the child be sorry? My parents always said that I’d be sorry because my brother would grow up to be bigger than me. I was four years older, so that wasn’t an immediate incentive.

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Staked is the debut novel from author J. F. Lewis, and it’s a very different vampire novel than what I have been reading. The story centers around Eric, a relatively young yet incredibly powerful vampire, who has some major problems with memory loss and anger management; blackouts are never a good thing! Eric isn’t a dark, brooding, sexy, romantic hero, this is a guy’s guy vampire; a vampire who owns a strip club. While I love the romantic hero vampires, it’s refreshing to see a vampire with an attitude problem.

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If you check out James Patterson’s website, you’ll see an intro of him talking about his Maximum Ride series. It’s a great little clip, with a great message about once kids get started reading, it gets harder for them to stop. I recently reviewed book 4 (coming out in 4 days!) and previously reviewed the first 3 books, and I have to agree with him that it is an awesome series. Incredibly engrossing, and it includes compelling characters and plots, along with short chapters, so it’s easy for kids to read, and easy for adults to read to kids.

We have just finished reading book 2, Maximum Ride: School’s Out Forever, and are about to start book 3, Maximum Ride #3: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports. My kids have passed on their fascination to some of their friends, who have gobbled up series. The large scale imaginative play that I saw last year centered around Harry Potter. This year, it’s Maximum Ride. I’m (currently) preferring the Maximum Ride obsession because of the 6 characters, 3 are boys and 3 are girls; it was hard for my 3 girls to have active characters in Harry Potter without inventing characters. Plus, Max, Nudge, and Angel are either just as awesome as the boys (Fang, Iggy, Gazzy), or possibly more awesome. There’s nothing a mom of 3 girls likes more than a strong female character than 3 strong female characters!

Meanwhile, I have gone over the edge into “softie mom” world, buying Barbies off eBay so the girls will have 6 dolls with the right skin/hair colors for all 6 characters. I’m also brainstorming how to make wings that fold back, because the Flock has raptor wings, not fairy or butterfly wings.

This is a 4 paragraph way of recommending that if your kids are looking for the “next Harry Potter”, I can say that my kids have found it with Maximum Ride.

We’re also loving the Artemis Fowl audio books, but that isn’t being pulled into imaginative play as much. We’ve only heard 3/5 of those novels, though. I’m sure excitement will increase when the new Artemis Fowl book comes out, though!

Carpool Diem is a new book by Nancy Star. Star has taken the theme of soccer moms and the actual sport of soccer and taken it to another level, creating characters that will make you laugh, because it’s all just so true. If you’ve spent any time around youth soccer, you must take a look at this book, it was written for you!

Our main character in Carpool Diem is Annie, a high powered executive who travels for work, as does her husband Tim, who is also very busy and traveling a lot for work. Their nanny Hildy takes care of their 12 year old daughter Charlotte, and Annie is starting to realize that Hildy knows far more about what Charlotte is doing and more about everything in general. It’s right around the time that this realization is setting in that Annie is fired, and turns into a stay-at-home-mom slash consultant. Once she’s home, Annie realizes even more how out of it she’s been, when she meets her “new” neighbor, a woman who has lived in the house next door for two years.

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If you’ve been a regular reader here, you might remember that BG had, um, a huge tantrum negative reaction when Pluto was demoted to dwarf planet status. The “worst thing in the world happened” on their friend G’s 6th birthday, the day before LG’s 3rd birthday, on August 24, 2006; the astronomers clarified the rules about planets, and Pluto was no longer considered a planet.

It’s been a year and a half since that decision. You might think, if you didn’t live here, that BG might have gotten over her disappointment in that span of time. You would, of course, be wrong. BG doesn’t forget anything. Ever. Part of our “decor” here is a map of the solar system, with another poster on the wall with information on all the planets (pre-Pluto demotion). While it isn’t a daily subject, it isn’t one that has been forgotten, either.

When we recently received a package of books for review from Clarion, it included a book that looked as if it had been tailor-made for BG: a picture book stuffed with scientific information called When is a Planet Not a Planet?: The Story of Pluto. As soon as I opened the package, BG was entranced by the book.

I know that a year and a half ago, when I was mourning Pluto’s status; my friend since childhood, F, had agreed with me, bemoaning the loss of her “Pies”. Our childhood planetary mnemonic was “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizza-pies” or just “Pies”. (For the unfamiliar, each letter stands for a planet, and the words follow the order away from the sun). In The Story of Pluto, they use a slightly different mnemonic, “My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas”. Instantly, BG latched onto bemoaning “they took away our pizza!” Yeesh.

LG started whining that the “baby brother planet” wasn’t there any more. MG ignored her sisters for the most part, listening but not chanting, and yet she brought Pluto right into her imaginative play. Now their imaginative play is a mix of the solar system, fairies from Artemis Fowl, and the bird kids from Maximum Ride. Phew!

If anyone’s kid has learned a new mnemonic for the 8 planets, I’d love to know what it is! Meanwhile, we’re conducting further tests & research before posting some cool new children’s book reviews.

Where the Heart Leads: From the Casebook of Barnaby Adair is the newest historical mystery/romance from bestselling author Stephanie Laurens. If you love a good Regency romance, you’ll adore this novel. If you have never read a romance, but like a good historical fiction novel, or a good historical mystery, you will be surprised by how much you like this book.

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Kristin Harmel’s newest release is an engrossing young adult novel called When You Wish. This is a delightful story of a girl pushed to be a star by her mother, but Star herself doesn’t feel comfortable with her “star” persona, and tries to discover who she really is. Readers might remember my earlier reviews of Kristin Harmel’s wonderful chick lit books How to Sleep with a Movie Star and The Art of French Kissing, and this book is right up there with the others - if you’ve read her other books, you will definitely want to pick this one up! If you’re not already a fan, When You Wish will quickly convince you to pick up her other novels.

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The Girl Who Stopped Swimming is the newest novel by bestselling author Joshilyn Jackson. A mix of mystery, parenting, paranormal, and the drama of family dysfunction, The Girl Who Stopped Swimming will quickly pull you under its spell. Jackson pulls on her own southern heritage to create a realistic-feeling impoverished rural Alabama town, and then she pulls on her life in the suburbs of Atlanta to create the contrasting perfect suburban neighborhood. The characters that spring from those contrasting towns are also drawn from people the author has observed, and they have an authentic feel.

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My longtime friend Ms. Pope commented recently, “What do you think of the recent memoirs that were found to be fabricated?” I had been thinking and reading columns about the bogus memoirs, and her question spurred on me to write more. My brain was percolating last night as I listened to On Point discuss the topic as I drove home alone. On Point is an NPR show recorded in Boston; they were hoaxed on Friday by the most recent false memoirist (Margaret B. Jones, aka Margaret Seltzer), and they focused Wednesday’s show on the repercussions.

As a book reviewer, I’m on the fringes of the publishing world, but I see the sheer quantity of memoirs and novels published; the information in Wednesday’s On Point helped me understand how a bogus memoir could make its way into print, as most publishers don’t do in-depth fact checks, they trust the author. Copy-editing is performed to ensure accuracy enough to avoid libel, but one would think the publisher could double check that the author’s basic identity and story is accurate as well. I wish Margaret Seltzer/Jones had written her “memoir” as fiction, as it sounds like an engrossing book that would fit beside the wonderful novels of fictionalized reality, True to the Game I & II. But because she lied and cheated, we won’t have the opportunity to read the book as a novel. As I was looking into falsified memoirs, nothing has explained my burning question: why would someone write fiction and publish it as if it was a factual memoir?

I am disappointed and appalled that an author would do this, and it boggles my mind that anyone would try to sell a false memoir as fact. I can completely understand why someone would want to be published, and that if the memoir market is hot, authors aim for publication in the hot market. However, I can’t understand why someone would risk everything by lying so profoundly about their lives, with the hubris of believing they wouldn’t get caught, when in truth it was relatively easy to disprove their story. Read the rest of this entry »

No Humans Involved is the newly released paperback by New York Times Bestselling author Kelley Armstrong. No Humans Involved is the 7th book in Armstrong’s “Women of the Otherworld” series, and as such it continues a theme of strong, sexy, magical women and otherworldly mysteries. While I am sure that if you have read the first 6 books you will pick up on the characters and background quickly, this book is a fabulous read as a stand-alone book, too (though it will encourage you to read the first 6 books!).

Jaime Vargas is a spiritualist who has been performing on TV and on stage her whole life, but unlike most spiritualists, she really does “see dead people”, and is an accomplished necromancer. Jaime walks the line between the otherworld and the mundane - she is on the Interracial Council, helping to regulate the actions of the members of the otherworld, and yet she is also hoping to boost her career with a new TV show. In No Humans Involved, Jaime has agreed to be a part of a reality TV show in which 3 spiritualists attempt to contact deceased celebrities, culminating in a séance attempting to reach the ghost of Marilyn Monroe. Read the rest of the review