Random Musings of a Bibliophile

As promised last week, here is the book buying guide for those who love to read Young Adult books. I hope this is useful to you as one more resource for finding the right book for a young adult in your life. Note: YA tends to refer to ages 13 up, but there is a lot of range in how mature the books are in the issues and situations they deal with. If you have specific questions about content, feel free to ask me. If you don't want to ask in the comments, you can always email me. (See the contact information tab for my email address.) Links are to my reviews. For Those Looking for Fun and Romantic (with excellent banter): From Twinkle, with Love  and   There's Something about Sweetie  by Sandhya Menon Speak Easy Speak Love by McKelle George Pride  by Ibi Zoboi Don't Date Rosa Santos  by Nna Moreno Things I Should Have Known  by Claire LaZebnik For Those Who Enjoy Realistic Tales of Family and Friendship (both easy and hard)...

It's been a couple of years since I've done a book gift guide. I enjoyed doing them, and wanted to again. I hope someone out there will find it useful. If you are looking for a book to buy a kid in your life, here is one place where you can get some recommendations. This is clearly not an exhaustive list and I hope others will add their own ideas, either by making their own posts or mentioning books in the comments. These are all book I have read, and I can't read everything. There's not enough time. NOTE: In publishing the term Middle Grade (MG) refers to books marketed toward the 9ish-12ish range. This is not a reading level recommendation. Some kids can read them much younger, others enjoy reading MG well into adulthood. They're just good books. (I will do the Young Adult books for the 13 and over crowd later this week.) These are mostly books published in the past three years or so, but I have added a "tried and true" option to every category. I...

I take the 2nd Friday of every month to highlight some upcoming releases I am looking forward to that I hope are Future Favorites. Feel free to do your own post, just please link back to my blog and tell me about your post in the comments. How I feel about "Beauty and the Beast" has been long established on this blog. At this point, it should also be pretty clear I'm quite the fan of Sandhya Menon. And now those two things are coming together. In one book. Will the princess save the beast? For Princess Jaya Rao, nothing is more important than family. When the loathsome Emerson clan steps up their centuries-old feud to target Jaya’s little sister, nothing will keep Jaya from exacting her revenge. Then Jaya finds out she’ll be attending the same elite boarding school as Grey Emerson, and it feels like the opportunity of a lifetime. She knows what she must do: Make Grey fall in love with her and break his heart. But much to Jaya’s annoyance, Grey’s brooding d...