Saturday, November 21st, 2009

Zoobreak by Gordon Korman

After she helped them successfully retrieve a priceless baseball card from the guy who swindled it from them, best friends Griffin Bing and Ben Slovak feel they have to help Savannah Drysdale track down her missing pet capuchin monkey.  However a class trip to a floating zoo docked at a nearby nature preserve solves one [...]

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart

ARE YOU A GIFTED CHILD LOOKING FOR SPECIAL OPPORTUNITIES?  The ad, which appears in the local newspaper, catches Reynard Muldoon’s eye.  The eleven-year old, who is constantly taunted and ridiculed by the other children because of his exceptional intelligence, has completed every class and read every book in the Stonetown Orphanage.  Even his kind tutor, [...]

Monday, May 18th, 2009

The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

Twelve-year old Percy Jackson seems to be plagued by bad luck.  Constantly in trouble at his upper New York state boarding school, hounded by a nasty classmate named Nancy Bobofit, and struggling with both dyslexia and ADHD, it’s like he’s an accident waiting for a place to happen.  And it happens inside one of the [...]

Tuesday, March 24th, 2009

Beware, Pirates! by Frieda Wishinsky

Emily Bing is happy to meet Matt Martinez, the boy who walks up her front walk to say hello soon after she and her family move into her Great-Aunt Miranda’s old house.  Matt wants to know if the house is haunted, which it isn’t, but it does contain an odd little room at the top [...]

Sunday, February 1st, 2009

Swindle by Gordon Korman

Eleven-year old Griffin Bing is the Man with the Plan, the kid who can figure out a solution to every problem.  But his parents are facing a financial disaster that seems to be beyond even his organizational cunning.  His inventor father has come up with the SmartPick, a device that is sure to be a [...]

Thursday, January 29th, 2009

Newton and the Time Machine by Michael McGowan

In his treetop scientific lab, eleven-year old Newton has finally completed his latest invention, a time machine.  Genius younger brother of a set of overbearing and sports-mad quadruplets, Newton has become accustomed to being picked on by his older brothers, who ridicule his scrawny frame, his geeky manner, and his complete lack of interest in [...]

Thursday, January 15th, 2009

Peril at Pier Nine by Penny Draper

For the boys who move at the end of the June from houses in the city to their cottages on the Toronto Islands’ Ward Island, that summer of 1949 promises to be magical.  Freed from the demands of school, the everyday world of city life, and the cautious fretting of their parents, Jack, Donnie, Dougie [...]

Tuesday, January 13th, 2009

Chocolate River Rescue by Jennifer McGrath Kent

Sent outside to enjoy the wintery weather, Shawn Mahoney and his younger brother, Craig, along with Shawn’s best friend, Tony, wander over to the new bridge built near their homes in Riverview.  The bridge, which spans the Petitcoudiac river, links their town with the city of Moncton, New Brunswick.
Standing on the bridge watching the river [...]

Sunday, January 11th, 2009

The Third Eye by Mahtab Narsimhan

While the other people in their village celebrate Diwali, the festival of lights, Tara and her seven-year old brother Suraj sit watching from the front step of the family hut, mourning the anniversary of their mother’s disappearance.  One year earlier, the kind and beautiful Parvati had crept to Tara before dawn and told her that [...]

Thursday, January 8th, 2009

The Castaways by Iain Lawrence

Tom Tin and his four teenaged companions find themselves in desperate straits; aboard a stripped down, lumbering hulk of a steamboat lost on the ocean in the southern hemisphere, half a world away from England, and rapidly running out of water, food and fuel to run the steam engine.  It seems they have escaped from [...]