Grandma is coming over a play date!  And she always brings so many friends.  By simply hanging a bed sheet near a window, grandma uses body shadows to have her granddaughter guess as different animals in a parade, including an elephant, monkeys, an ostrich, kangaroo, rhinoceri, and for the finale, “Gramme and me”.  For a preschool aged audience, Hooray Parade will push kids to use their imaginations to figure out the creatures with the question “Can you guess what’s coming next?”. Repetition, alliteration and onomatopoeic language further it’s whimsical feel that are complimented with it’s pencil sketch and water color artwork.  This would be a great read aloud for public libraries and a gift for grandparents.

Every elementary teacher knows his or her tricks to keep the glue in check.  For Matty, his art teacher says “Glue drops, not puddles!”.  But Matty loves glue.  At home, his parents help him produce all sorts of zany creations with different varieties of glue.  So when he is given the opportunity to have glue bottles in his hands, he has to squeeze hard…and jump belly first into the glue.  Sure, he gets stuck to the table, and as his buddies, teacher and father try to free him, a masterpiece is born.  Jason Lefebvre has captured such a wonderfully simple concept as “too much glue” that most children have heard or experienced first hand and let it spread into a fabulous story that parents, teachers and kids will love.  Zac Retz’s illustrations are clever and bright, whimsical and yet spot on.  Too Much Glue is a thoroughly enjoyable book that will stick with you like glue.

True love that is life changing.  True love that is breath taking.  True love that is heart aching.  This is the love that Skye has hoped would magically show up during the summers of her teen years.  With school beginning in just days, it looked like this summer would be hopeless as well, until she made eye contact with Seth.  Seth is a year older and leaving for college soon.  One amazing evening alters their worlds.  When the plan to meet again the next morning is disrupted by Seth’s mother’s early arrival in town, the two are left without any good byes.  But they just can’t get each other out of their own minds.  With no contact information, their chance meeting again at the end of next summer was expected.  Luckily there are other parts to this novel that help it stand on it’s own, such as the alternating chapters in Skye and Seth’s voice, the side drama of Skye’s girlfriends’, and Seth’s art.  A teenage romance novel with honest voices amidst in an idealistic, narrow life, Skye and Seth will question if each other is really all they need.  If you’re a Colasanti fan, you’ll know the answer and still love reading the book to watch it unfold.   Recommended for high school audiences.

Blue’s world has exploded — literally.  She is on the run but she’s not sure what from.  Slivers of flashbacks haunt Blue but she just can’t put together the whole picture.  Lisa Jahn-Clough unfolds the mysterious back story of Blue’s before life in alternating chapters with her present tense scared, homeless self in her novel Nothing But Blue.  Now on the road east, Blue learns to eat out of garbage cans and avoid staying in one place for long.  But people recognize her.  They say her face has been on the television.  But why?  “All dead. No one survived. All dead.”  This is the chant that keeps Blue in the shadows.  In the shadows is where she befriends one magical dog that guides her through challenges again and again. Aptly named Shadow, the team continues east in search of a to a time where she was comfortable, even if a little insecure.  Jahn-Clough weaves familiar teen issues of self-image, sex, independence, and parental angst in a story about a girl that needs to learn to trust herself and to move on despite the horror she witnessed.  Recommended for grade 9 and up.

With her first novel, This is How I Find Her, Sara Polsky develops a rare theme for young readers exploring the territory of a mentally ill parent, a child left to cope alone with that parent from too young an age and without explanation, attempted suicide, teen guilt and things left unsaid as the relationship of mother, daughter, and the family unfolds.

Sophie Canon has been mother figure to her bi-polar mother for 5 years, until the day she finds her mom near death from an overdose of pills. During the subsequent hospitalization and slow recovery of her painter mother, Amy, who feels her medication interferes with her inspiration, Sophie stays with the family that seemingly deserted her years before, whom she now feels she hardly knows. Frozen in silences, both Sophie, her cousin Leila, and her Aunt Cynthia finally learn to speak their uncertainties, to open the curtain of misunderstandings and fear that has hung too long between them. Sophie, too, realizes she cannot live for her mother anymore at the expense of her own life.

As she makes her way through her own pain and silence, she finds there are people around her who care, who want to know her thoughts, and who have reasons of their own for the distances that have kept Sophie and Amy so alone over the years. The plot is well crafted, the characters identifiable and well drawn, and each grows into better understanding of themselves, each other, and their needs by the happy conclusion of this book.

Highly Recommended

With kids growing up watching more reality TV than other programming, it’s no wonder The Daughters series would be picked up by a publisher.  And with a name like Philbin attached to it, Poppy took a chance.  Does is matter that teens probably don’t know who Regis Philbin is?  A little, because as one reads The Daughters Break the Rules, Carina, who narrates this second installment of the series, finds is frustrating to be known as “the daughter of a billionaire” because of the assumptions that are constantly made.  But Philbin is realistic in her portrayal of these three teen starlet children living in NYC.  While Carina is at first crushed when her father cuts her off from her lavish spending habits, a reader can clearly see that she’ll rebound.  She can make it on $20 a week.  But I really like the fact that Carina is allowed to become part old self and part new self by the end.  Her vision of the world is much more broad, thanks to a love interest from a different “league”, but she clearly loves her high end lifestyle and embraces that again with new respect for others.  This can be read as a stand alone.  If the other books follow the same plot line but with different narrators, I can imagine the story might get uber predictable.  7th – 10th grade girls into fashion and drama will enjoy this flighty, fast paced read.

The Rites and Wrongs of Janice Wills captures the angst and insecurities of an American teenager through the observations of the main character.  Janice Wills is a smart, analytical young woman who aspires to be an anthropologist. She decides to catalog high school social behavior in anthropological terms as her entrance letter to college. Using the scientific approach to understanding human behavior, she identifies the rules and rituals of American teenagers.  She also participates in the local Miss Livermush Pageant and Scholarship competition, the local “must-do”, coming of age rite of passage for the young women in her small North Carolina town.  With her astute observations of social interaction of her peers, she comes to an understanding of her own behavior, especially that observing can inhibit participation and that honest insights can be hurtful.  Humorous, witty and occasionally painful, Janice Wills is a literary persona that is likeable, irritating and ultimately endearing.  This book is an enjoyable read for the high school  audience.

Prisoner B-3087 is the touching, heartbreaking journey of survival of a young Jewish boy during the Second World War. He becomes a man, celebrating his Bar Mitzvah, as the Germans restrict all Jews to the Warsaw Ghetto.  The subtle, tightening vice grip of Nazi control and determined hatred catch Yanek and his family off guard.  They all perish. He has only himself and his will to survive.  This true story of Jack Gruener, Yanek,  is written  as historical  fiction to emphasize the random, senseless cruelty that he endured for six long years.  The unimaginable horror of forced labor in ten concentration camps, two death marches, continual starvation, beatings and moments of almost certain death evoke empathy as well as disbelief that humans can do such things to each other.  This awareness of the past horrors is important to teach the terrible truths of genocide and the remarkable drive for survival in the human spirit.  This is not an easy book to read, but it is an important addition to the literary testaments of personal survival and endurance.

Anguished and angsted Greer Cannon is smart — smarter than she let herself take credit for.  Though she learned to use her body for the wrong purposes and found shoplifting to be addictive, which landed her at the McCracken Hill rehabilitation school for teens, Greer knows when to talk and when to just keep chill.  This is why Addison is so attracted to her.  Addison’s violent behavior topped with alcoholism are in the shadows behind his great looks and qwirky personality — a personality that is too often swayed by Joshua Stern, Addison’s Narcotics Anonymous sponsor. Thus the battle of the minds, and hearts, begins.  Readers may start to find frustration in how obvious the brainwashing is, how unlikely the trip to the Piconos and events during their stay is, how naive Greer tries to be in supporting Addison versus being true to her own spirit.  The book jacket really does make this seem like it will be a psychological thriller, but it certainly lacks any over the top drama.  In fact, the conclusion was lack luster at best.  This dark tale is going to be picked up, but it may not be finished by all.

The Indigo Spell is the third book in the Bloodlines series, following the very popular Bloodlines and The Golden Lily.  Fans of the series will find familiar characters as well as new ones in this suspenseful adventure.  As with the previous books, The Indigo Spell features the paranormal with witches, vampires and Alchemists. Themes of friendship, romance and betrayal will keep the reading rapidly flipping the pages.

Steamy romance and danger will thrill the reader and have her watching the calendar for the release of the fourth book, The Fiery Heart, due out in November, 2013.