Revenge of the Girl With the Great Personality

Posted on June 11, 2013 by
Book cover image of The Girl With the Great Personality

Book cover image from goodreads.com

Eulberg, Elizabeth. Revenge of the Girl With the Great Personality. 265 p. Point/Scholastic. 2013. $17.99 ISBN 978-0-545-47699-7.

It’s no fun being known as the “girl with the great personality.”  But that’s what 16-year-old Lexi is known as.  To make matters worse, her seven-year-old sister spends every weekend competing in beauty pageant’s.  Lexi’s divorced mother is obsessed with the pageants and insists that Lexi attend each one to help out.  The bright side of attending the beauty pageants is that Lexi’s crush attends them since his girlfriend also is a competitor.  Starting with a bet from Bennie, her best friend, Lexi decides to stop throwing her hair in a messy ponytail and wearing old ragged clothes.

She begins wearing makeup, styling her hair, and dressing nicely.  Sure enough, she gets asked out for the first time in her life.  The new attention is nice, but there are still many unresolved issues with her family that need to be worked out.  Her “statement” at a pageant was over-the-top and may make readers cringe, but it does not detract from this age-appropriate, clean romance that a lot of tweens and younger teens will really enjoy.

Tags: friends, beauty, family, relationships, divorce

Series: This book is not part of a series.

Interest level: Grades 7-10

Rating:  4/5 stars

Link to Harvest Park Library catalog:  This book will be added to the HP Library.

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Catch Rider by Jennifer H. Lyne

Posted on May 21, 2013 by
Book cover image of Catch Rider

book cover image from goodreads.com

Lyne, Jennifer H. Catch Rider. 288 p. Clarion/Houghton Mifflin.  2013.  $16.99, ISBN 978-0-547-86871-4.

 Tags: horses, family, animals, book review

Series: This book is not part of a series.

Interest level: Grades 5-8

Rating:  4/5 stars

Link to Harvest Park Library catalog:  This book will be published June 4, 2013 and will be added to HP’s catalog then.

Sidney Criser, almost 15, comes from a poor, troubled, and broken family that lives in a Virginia mill town.  But she knows horses.  Her dream is to become a catch rider, a person who is such a talented rider that they can ride any horse in a competition, even if the horse and rider have never seen each other before.  Sidney has a short temper and rightfully so.  Her sweet dad Jimmy died in a car accident, and she lives with her emotionally unavailable mom and her Mom’s jerk-of-a-boyfriend.  If it wasn’t for her time spent with her Uncle Wayne and horses, she might end up just like her mother.  The horse part of the story is very authentic as is Sidney’s character.  This is the author’s debut novel, and the transitions between some sentences are not as smooth as they could be and there are some developmental gaps in the story.  For example, Sidney goes to visit a person in the woods, but it’s not clear what his role is in the plot and why she’s visiting him. These flaws aside, it is a fast, interesting, and inspiring story.  Review based on an ARC (Advance Reader Copy).

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Just a Dog

Posted on May 14, 2013 by
Just a Dog book cover image

book cover image from goodreads.com

Bauer, Michael Gerard. Just A Dog. 135 p. Henry Holt Publishers. 2010. (First American edition 12-2012). $16.99 ISBN 978-0-8050-9516-6.

Tags: dogs, family, animals, death, book review

Series: This book is not part of a series.

Interest level: Grades 4-7

Rating:  5/5 stars

Link to Harvest Park Library catalog:  Just a Dog

Nine-year-old Corey, the narrator, lives in Australia with his family and dog.  In Just a Dog, Corey shares many stories about the family dog, Mister Mosely, a mix between a Great Dane and a Dalmation.  Often really funny, sometimes really sad, this book is not “just a dog book.” It’s a book about a family struggling to hold their life together during stressful financial times, and how the dog is the one family member that everyone turns to for comfort.  Mister Mosely is very loyal and perceptive, adding to the already beautiful story.  Originally published in Australia in 2010.  Highly recommend.

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Pulse

Posted on May 10, 2013 by
Book cover image of Pulse by Patrick Carman

Book cover image from goodreads.com

Carman, Patrick. Pulse
Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins, 2013. 371 p. $17.99, 978-0-06-208576-4
Grades 7-10, 4/5 stars

Harvest Park Library will buy this book.

Faith Daniels is a mysterious and beautiful  teenager living in the year 2051.  She lives in an area between the recently formed Eastern and Western States, an area that barely has any people left.  Each school that she attends closes because the population keeps dwindling, until she is left in a school with only a handful of students.  Most families end up choosing to go to one of the two states because life is supposedly better there.  One night, Faith chooses a date with a not-so-nice boy over her best friend, and she soon regrets that.  Faith discovers that she has the “pulse,” the ability to move objects with her mind.  This comes in really handy as things get heated up when good is forced to confront evil.  Fans of Patrick Carman won’t be disappointed, and he’ll probably even gain more fans after this suspenseful first book in a planned trilogy.

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The 13-Story Treehouse

Posted on May 9, 2013 by

Book cover image for The 13-Story Treehouse

Book cover image for The 13-Story Treehouse

Terry Denton, illus.
The Treehouse Books series
Feiwel/Macmillan 2013. 239 p. $13.99, ISBN 978-1-250-02690-3, Grades 3-7

Harvest Park Library:  The 13-Story Treehouse

Terry and Andy are friends who live in a child’s dream home, a 13-story treehouse complete with a bowling alley, movie theatre and library, see-through swimming pool, lemonade fountain, marshmallow machine, a vegetable vaporizer, games room, a man-eating shark tank, an observation deck, pillow room, swinging vines, and a secret underground laboratory. With all these distractions, it’s really hard to stay on task and write the next book that is due to their publisher, Mr. Big Nose. In fact, they are very far behind. Black and white wacky drawings are an integral part of the story and add to the appeal of this zany book, the first in a series. First published in Australia in 2011 as The 13-Storey Treehouse. The sequel, The 26-Story Treehouse, was published last year in Australia and will be published here in winter, 2014. Review based on ARC (Advance Reader Copy).

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Tim Tebow: Quarterback With Conviction

Posted on March 19, 2013 by

Tim Tebow: Quarterback with ConvictionTim Tebow: Quarterback with Conviction by Stephen G. Gordon
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Tim Tebow: Quarterback with Conviction, is part of the impressive USA Today Lifeline Biographies series. Boys and girls in middle school and high school will pick up this book because Tim Tebow is a well-liked NFL football player. The books pleasing design, including lots of interesting color photos, newspaper articles, and sidebars will engage readers, adding extra clarity to the easy-to-understand and informative text. Unfortunately, this biography has the same problem that most biographies have of living subjects-it’s quickly outdated. The book ends with Tebow getting traded to the New York Jets and doesn’t include anything about his first season with them. No matter though, because readers wanting to know more about the very religious and extremely talented Tim Tebow will be richly rewarded. Backmatter including statistics, a timeline, a glossary, source notes, selected biography, further reading and websites, an index, and photography credits wraps everything up nicely.

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The HP Library will get this book when it is published.

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Merging my two blogs!

Posted on March 14, 2013 by

Hi,

I am merging the two blogs that I write.  The new website will be this one, http://www.jamiethelibrarian.com.  Please bookmark this website to stay in touch with the book reviews that I do and also Harvest Park Library and other book-related news.

Thank you for your support,

Jamie Renton

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