★★★★★ In short? It is exhausting being me. Jenny Lawson (the Bloggess) has lit up the literary scene with her debut novel - Let's Pretend This Never Happened. Jenny lives the sort of life where... well... hmm... maybe you will just have to read this book yourself. I really don't think I have anything that can adequately sum… Continue reading Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir – Jenny Lawson

★★★★ ½ ...I'm paralyzed with disgust as I stand before the ugliest house I've ever seen. Monty, his dog (Watson), his older brother (Kyle) and his dad have moved...again. And Monty is absolutely sick of it. He has to make new friends, deal with a new school and live in a new house. And of course, Kyle… Continue reading Monty and the Monster – Rhonda Smiley

★★★★ Life is a constant struggle between being an individual and being a member of the community. Junior, a teenager on the Spokane Indian Reservation (the "rez"), spent his entire life trying to blend in. He was a smallish kid who used to have seizures. He was picked on and bullied almost constantly. And then...something snapped. There… Continue reading The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian – Sherman Alexie

★ The Plot - aka this is a good start!  Amber Wright manages several Amish artisan shops in Middlebury, Indiana. While she is not Amish herself, she knows and respects the locals customs. Everything is going perfectly perfect...that is until Ethan Gray (manager of A Simple Blend) shows up dead as a doornail.  It's up to Amber to figure… Continue reading Murder Simply Brewed – Vannetta Chapman

★★★ ½ Welcome to the first ever, Favorite Planet Competition... In this fun, short book, we see the planets as we've never seen them before. These planets have been around for billions of years ...and yet they have never been in a competition to figure out which of them is best.  We go through every planet… Continue reading Meet the Planets – John McGranaghan

★★★★★ As a graduate student.... this one got to me.  It was real. Painfully real.  The burnout. The depression. The loss of feeling towards something you once loved. And yet, it was funny.A down-to-earth humor brought out in the darkest of times. I was constantly blown away by the accuracy of Wang's novel. There's so many times where I… Continue reading Chemistry – Weike Wang

★★★★★ All aboard the Christmas train! Hold your ticket tight. We'll count our way from 1 to 20 all throughout the night. Grab your hot chocolates - we are going for a wild ride! This Christmas train is going all through the village, and we are along for the adventure - counting all the fun things… Continue reading Christmas Train (board book) – David Miles